The Power of Negative Thinking!

What you should know about “The Law of Emotional Gravity” – and how to keep negative people from destroying you and your organization.

It’s a frustrating and difficult situation. It can leave you feeling vulnerable and exposed. It can feel like someone just kicked you in the stomach. It can make you feel like you want to vomit.

Here’s the situation.

You can be in a training session. You can be in a committee or board meeting.

You can be discussing and discovering ways to improve your organization. You can be talking about how to make it a better place to do business. How to make it a better place to work.

Everyone can be excited about it. It seems like you have complete and total synergy between the members of your team. Everyone is “On the same page.”

Until this happens!

One person makes a negative comment and drains the energy from the entire room. That one comment can completely destroy and undermine everything you have done up until that point.

It can cause people who have so far been on the positive side of things to suddenly change their views and begin questioning everything.

You know what it’s like.

I’m not talking about people hashing out new ideas or disagreeing professionally. I’m talking about negative people – usually one or two people – who disagree with everything.

People who always criticize, but never have anything constructive to offer. The ones who challenge your leadership, your authority, your ideas. Even you personally.

You’ve just become a victim of “The Law of Emotional Gravity.” Let me explain.

The law of emotional gravity states:

“One negative person can pull down five positive people, but five positive people cannot pull one negative person up.”

People don’t want to admit it, but it’s true. One person can negatively impact an entire group. One person can wield that kind of power.

Think about people gathered together in a crowd. Maybe they’re waiting to be rescued. Like the victims in the tragic New Orleans flooding. The entire group can be under control. Orderly. Even a bit optimistic about their rescue.

Then, one person changes everything. One person shifts the emotional tide. One person begins complaining. Getting louder. And louder. Even shouting.

This one person whips the crowd into a frenzy. And before you know it, a mass of people lose control. They forget to be orderly. They forget to be patient. It’s all over. Mayhem. Then, perhaps even a riot.

It all begins with one person – a person with a negative attitude. Most all of us have been around people like that at least once or twice in our life.

But… What is an attitude?

Take a moment and think back to when you were growing up… How many times were you told to change your attitude?

Twenty- five times? Fifty-times? Possibly a hundred times? There were probably many, many times.

And yet…

Did anyone ever explain to you what an attitude was, or did they just say, “You need to change your attitude? Sound familiar?

According to Webster’s dictionary attitude is a point of view, your feelings or opinions about something, your reaction to events or circumstances…your outlook or perspective.

Simply stated…an attitude is an outer expression of an inner feeling communicated to other people – with and even without words.

That outer expression can communicate to other people whether you care or not, whether you’re happy or not, whether you feel good about yourself…or not.

Attitudes can be expressed in your posture, your appearance, your expressions or manner of behavior. In fact, within just a few moments, you can and do communicate your attitude to other people.

Think back to when you were a child and your parents came home from work. When they pulled up in the driveway, climbed out of the car, and shut the car door, you would run over to the window and peek out.

You could tell immediately what kind of mood they were in, right? You tell a lot about their attitude.

You quickly assessed what the conversations were going to be like around the dinner table. And, couldn’t you tell rather quickly whether you should run to them…or from them?

Of course, you could.

In the workplace, our customers can quickly recognize our attitude. So can our co-workers, and our managers!

In only a moment, people can quickly tell what it’s going to be like to interact with us. They quickly know whether to run to us or from us. All of this…determined by our attitude.

You wear your attitude like a badge…for everyone to see. That includes negative people. Worse, their negative attitude infects and affects everyone with whom they come in contact.

Here’s what I believe… Negative People SUCK!

That may sound harsh, but the fact is that negative people do suck. They suck the energy out of positive people like you and me. They suck the energy and life out of a good company, a good team, a good relationship.

Negative people are walking around with their umbilical cord in their hand looking for someone to plug it into. If you’re not careful they’ll plug into you and begin draining your energy and emotions.

Avoid them at all costs. If you have to cut ties with people you’ve known for a long time because they’re actually a negative drain on you, then so be it. Trust me, you’re better off without them.

By the way, one of the benefits of reading this book is that I’ll help you shorten your Christmas card list and save you on postage. How? By getting all of the negative people out of your life.

“I just feel bad!”

Have you ever been around someone that makes you feel bad? The way they talk, the way they act just drains the life out of you? And, when you go home to your spouse you tell them, “Every time I’m around so and so I just feel bad.”

Get those people out of your life!

These are the kinds of people who steal your time. They steal your energy. They steal your resources. They steal your dreams.

If you’re a manager, these are the people who hog all your time and energy that you should be investing in other people. In fact, many times managers spend way too much time with poor performers and negative whiners thinking they’re doing the right thing – trying to fix these people.

Actually, that’s backward.

Instead of spending so much time with poor performers – many who are never going to change or improve anyway – managers and leaders should invest more time with those who are actually doing well in order to tweak and improve their performance even more.

Rather fight against something than fight for it!

Negative people would rather fight against something than fight for it. Just try coming up with new ideas for improving your organization and see how these people react.

They go into campaign mode. They’ll attack you and your plan publicly. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll invest all their time and energy running around behind your back trying to get other people on their side.

I have a client who employed one of these people. She was upset because his former manager was coming back to work for him. That meant this particular employee’s low productivity and shenanigans were about to come to light.

She started running like a cockroach when the lights come on.

First, she tried recruiting other employees to her way of thinking. We found out about this later. She went to each of the other employees and tried to persuade them to join her in “Making the returning manager’s life pure hell so that she wouldn’t stay.”

Those were her exact words shared with us by the other employees.

I suggested – very strongly – to my client that he get rid of this person. I urged him repeatedly. In our one-on-one consulting sessions, I would gently revisit the topic.

His personality would not let him do it. Instead, he shied away from the idea. He wanted to give her another chance. Then another.

Each time one of her incidences came up, I would again encourage him to get rid of her. I would remind him of the damage she was causing in the company.

Finally, he did it…

I was in an airport terminal preparing to return to Texas from a vacation in Florida when I received his call. He said, “Well, I finally did it.”

“What?” I asked.

“I finally fired her!” he said.

I said, “Great. Now we can get on with growing your company.”

For the next few weeks, his other employees kept coming to him and sharing more stories about the destructive conversations and actions this employee had displayed on the job.

It was amazing. And, far worse than we originally suspected.

His employees also told him the same thing I’ve heard dozens of other people say in other companies that finally begin to weed out negative people.

They said, “You should have done it a long time ago.”

Negative people are like a virus.

It’s a fact that negative people have a damaging impact on the positive people in your organization. They infect and affect everything they touch. Everyone they contact.

They destroy morale. They destroy teamwork. They destroy performance and productivity. They run off good customers. And they run off your best employees.

It takes a strong leader to stand up and say, “Enough! We’re not going to let this continue. I’m taking a stand.”

You can do it…

When you begin to take action, you’ll gain a new sense of confidence. You’ll suddenly feel much more in control of the situation. You must act confident to be confident.

You’ll gain new respect from your employees, associates, family, friends, peers, and any superiors. You will be a changed and better human being.

And you’ll never have to worry about negative people having a destructive impact on your life personally or professionally – or on your organization.