Contents:
This article is intended to arm you with methods to abstain from having your positive perception hindered by pessimistic individuals.
They Are Not Right
To begin, realize that when dealing with humans, you are dealing with irrational, emotion-driven, biological beings. Humans are hard to predict because they are driven by forces often unseen, unmeasured, and difficult to predict. These forces arm people to be villainous toward others of their kind in an effort to win trivial battles day-to-day.
One main realization to make when you decide not to let your mental well-being be affected by others, is that others are often incorrect. They are not right in their judgments of you, they are not right in the conclusions they make, and they are not right to attack anything that you do.
They have not measured every variable which comprises you and the life you live. Thereby they can only work off opinion rather than honest fact. They are not right to try to ruin your mood. Realize how wrong negative / pessimistic people often really are. As someone who’s dug deeper to discover what’s true, you likely know that truth is always further than we anticipate it to be.
Label and Analyze Every Facet of Their Pessimism
An important step to not being influenced to act negatively in the face of someone’s pessimism is to thoroughly understand it as it comes your way. Study the anatomy of the pessimism which you hear coming from others in detail. What about their dialogue makes it negative? What pessimistic assumptions are they making when they come to a negative conclusion?
Label each and every reason for why someone is being more negative than they should be. The goal in this regard would be to familiarize yourself with what processes are at play in their mind. By understanding the pitfalls that others fall into when they’re being negative, you’ll be less likely to fall into those same pitfalls yourself. You’ll serve to learn from others’ negativity and objectively observe them, rather than being a participant or victim.
The mental state in which you place yourself when you objectively analyze someone else’s negativity does well to remove your perception from the situation which you’re in. You’ll begin viewing this specific individual from an empathetic perspective rather than a contentious one. It’ll become evident that these people are often going through pain, or have past experiences which affect their current positive outlook on life.
Forgive Their Negativity
As you grow to understand the processes of the negativity which comes your way, it’ll come time to decide how you feel about that pessimism. Since you’d now likely understand why someone’s being negative, you’d be able to avoid the same pitfalls which they’ve fallen into. A thing you’ll have to deal with, are any personal attacks coming from the individuals being negative. Though you’d be able to see and analyze them being negative, your feelings may still be hurt by the individuals in question.
The only path to not being influenced by the negativity of others, is to not allow them to change your emotion’s course. You would now understand them to be negative, so the next step will be to forgive their personal attacks. View these people as operating from a state of being infected. The negativity they speak with was not born within them; they are not patient zero in this case.
The pessimism you hear was transferred over to them like a virus. That virus was powerful enough to change their positive outlook into a negative one in large part because they couldn’t forgive. They didn’t analyze and label past people being negative toward them in order to stop themselves from acquiring that bug. If they did, they forgot to forgive.
Forgiveness plays an important role in protecting you from being infected with the same pessimistic bug. It does so because forgiveness calms you, and muffles the attacks which come your way. Forgiveness implicitly labels the person attempting to hurt you as not being a threat of any sort.
Cut the Fat
Be simple in what you seek in life and whose opinion matters on your journey to achieve those goals. Analyze the goals in your life and the people who matter. Toward those who do not, be open, welcoming, and kind. They do not matter, and all the actions that you exhibit toward them is a direct representation of your state of mind. Do not let anyone who does not matter in your life have an effect on your emotions and thereby actions. Realize that you are a human being just as they are. Humans are complicated, and their negativity towards you may very well be another mistake they make within their lifetime.
Focus on the next steps that you need to take to achieve your goals. Be fully engulfed in your goals, and make sure that being well-liked by those who do not like you is not one of those goals. Love is, and always has been, non-negotiable. The people who do not like you, will not like you until they decide to like you. You can’t do much to change this aspect, thereby your mood should not suffer due to their uncontrollable negativity.
Your act of dealing with negativity around you should include an analysis of how others help you achieve the goals you have set for your lifetime. If your goals are not at all dependent on a specific person, nothing they do or say should be able to ruin your mood or change your outlook. Your emotions are solely reserved for people who matter in your life. Those who have no stake in your success and well-being have no say in the mood that you occupy.
Idolize Who You’re Trying to Become
Conduct yourself in ways that are respectable in your opinion. Conduct yourself like the heroes that you look up to, and do not for one second focus on another human being when it has been determined that they do not matter in the world you live. We live in a world where people desire to be liked. It is a goal which is driven by external positive reinforcement which you have no control over.
If you are focusing on the opinions of others, then you are not focusing on your own mission in life enough. Your mission in life should leave you unable to stand at the end of the day. Work toward your goals with as much ferocity as you try to change the opinions of those who hate you. Look out for your family, and your closest friends. Keep your circle small, and be a good person inside and out.