How to Handle Negativity and Toxic People In Your World In 4 Steps
5 min readHow to Handle Negativity and Toxic People In Your World In 4 Steps
I love when motivational speakers say “get the negative people away from you and you will will succeed”. That statement is such nonsense, yes you want positive people and supportive people to help you use positive momentum to help you succeed, but you cannot avoid negativity. Its all around you all the time, just when you are feeling good someone has to try and knock you down. It can be your parents, your friends, a colleague, a co-worker, a sibling, an internet troll, or whoever. Here are some real practical ways to handle negativity and more on to achieve great things.
- Get crappy people out of your inner circle
I am all for being grounded, but get people that don’t get it, are manipulative (in a negative way), and are debbie downers out of your circle. They stymie progress, they waster your time and they will bring you down. In the workplace; they are not worth their skills, in your personal life; they are not worth your time and in your social life ; they create bad vibes and negative behavior. As a coach, I have always worked those people out of the system, by making it a place that they dont want to be. I want people that want to be successful and move forward on the inside and those people out. So if i made the mistake of hiring them in the first place, I make it so they do not want to be there. How do i do that? By setting standards, negative people hate having standards to live up to, they want to do only what they want to do and want to naysay the rest. So I make it so they have to be at everything more than they would normally want to be, and eventually they decide that this environment is not for them. In business, I have have had many instances of this, but many times you have an A player who becomes a B player from complacency or boredom or just pure laziness and its time for the them to move on. So I help them along by setting standards again, staying on them when they don’t meet the standards and creating an environment where they feel that they can’t succeed. The kicker is, I give them every opportunity to succeed, but because they are negative, they sabotage themselves and over time they usually move on. If they do not, I document the lack of performance and let them go.
2. Block people out of your circle
This really goes for social media, but because social media is such a big part of our lives, i feel it is important to address. Instead of debating the negative person or detractor and feeding their misplaced ego, block the…should I say BLOCK THEM. Do not debate them, (they love a debate over nonsense- see my statement about time wasting), do not engage them. Block them and ignore them, I have found Blocking someone pisses them off because they can’t event get the satisfaction of debate. Plus blocking someone hurts their ego, it hurts mine when someone does it to me and it definitely bothers them. More importantly once you block, you very quickly forget all about it. Twitter is the land of haters, so just block them, don’t give someone who has 35 followers the satisfaction of engaging my following to boost up their nonsense.
3. Use it as motivation
This is my biggest thing, usually what I do is get mad for about 10 seconds in my head. This allows me the human emotion of anger and feeling you were done wrong, and then i figure out more ways to be successful, more ways to be the best and more ways to WIN. By doing this i create a successful environment for myself, I turn a negative into a positive and there is no sweeter revenge then absolute success. When I took over the head job at Palisades Park Leonia all i heard was, “ they will never win”, “they should cancel the program” all kinds of nonsense. I never let it deter me and I focused on building, step by step brick by brick. I actually kept some of the negative people close to me in the beginning so i could use it as motivation until I worked them out of the system. Want to see kids get excited, watch how they practice and play when you get the negative players or negative coaches out of your program. Kids know its, other coaches know it and once that negativity is gone, you will see them thrive. Now that I am at Indian Hills as Head Football Coach, I also hear the naysayers, but that doesn’t stop our daily focus on getting better a little bit each day. We will have success because of that focus. In business, I have always used it as motivation, my reward with my NUC camps and college programs is when I see players go onto the NFL I work with, when I get letters from parents who told me how it helped them and when I see the over 300 current NFL players. That’s satisfaction that money cant even buy!
4. Be more passionate
This will be a short one. Negative people have not passion in their lives, so if your passionate they cannot handle that energy and they move on to attack someone else who has less passion and energy. Its exhausting to be negative, it destroys your own psyche, so negative people can not handle the amazing energy that positive people have. They will eventually fizzle to positive people and go somewhere else to ruin some one else’s day. If you love what you do, are passionate about it and stick to your knitting, you will succeed beyond your wildest dreams and get the negative people or things out of your daily life and never let it destroy your mindset.
by David Schuman @nucfootball on twitter @nuc_football on instagram @daveschuman on instagram.
David has been the CEO of NUC Sports since 2004 and is an accomplished football coach, business man, and athlete. He was a former D1 football player at the University of Connecticut, his company was named to Inc 5000 fastest growing companies several years ago, he represents NFL players through his NFL agency Inspired Athletes, and has helped over 200,000 alumnae of the NUC sports programs for football and built his company with zero investment into a multi million dollar company. He has helped turn around a couple of HS programs as Head Coach and is currently the head coach of a high school in New Jersey. He has a well received podcast called “Success For Life” available from Itunes. He worked to grow his company to gigantic heights and also saved it in 2015 when market dynamics shifted. Contact David Schuman on twitter or at dschuman36@gmail.com to discuss business, football, or success.
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