by Dr. Rick Kirschner on July 1, 2009
Riddle me this.
What pattern works as well with a negative person at work as it does with a two year old at home? The Polarity Pattern!
Riddle me another one. What do you get when you tell a two-year-old to go to bed when the older kids are still up? A polarity response!
The conversation descends along these lines. You ask a person to do something. You ask nicely. You are reasonable. And then they say, “I don’t want to (do something that you want me to do) To which you reply, “But you have to do it.” And it’s straight downhill from there.
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by Dr. Rick Kirschner on June 29, 2009
So what to do about negative energy, particularly when it’s directed at you? Well, I agree with those who say that if you find your energy is drained around certain people, it makes no sense to be around them unless you absolutely have to. And in the case of my passive agressive letter writer, I considered that letter in the context of all the feedback I had gotten, instead of giving it more credit for accuracy than it deserved.
And there’s the rub. In life, we are sometimes required to hang out around people that are very different than ourselves. And the reality, to me, is that if I find someone ‘draining’ on my energy, that’s not about that person, that’s about my response to that person. I’d rather solve the problem where it is instead of where it isn’t. That means cutting out the middle man and changing my response.
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by Dr. Rick Kirschner on June 26, 2009
We’re talking about what to do with negative people. I’m saying maybe it’s not them that’s draining you, maybe it’s you draining you by trying so hard to be upbeat when they’re around. All that focus on your mood takes you away from what is going on in the real world, all around you, all the time.
I had enough of the ‘me-me-me’ stuff in the 80s. There is more to life than being positive all the time, more possibility than what’s available when you surround yourself with people who walk like, talk like, act like you do, or like you want them to do.
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by Dr. Rick Kirschner on June 24, 2009
We’re talking about negative people and what to do about them. Should you shun them, the way a Klingon warrior shuns a Klingon who has been disgraced? Or avoid them? Or try to talk them into being positive?
There’s a popular thought among the positive thinking crowd that you should only surround yourself with positive people in life. I have to say that, at the core of my being, I disagree with that idea.
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