Mean People Suck! (How To Not Let Toxic People Beat You Down)

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Mean People Suck!

If you want to write your own ticket, run your own show, you’re gonna have encounters with people who want to stop you.  On the surface they may believe they love you and are trying to save you from humiliation and failure.  The slap sometimes comes in a velvet glove.

Almost everybody tries to project their own values onto other people.  That’s how insecurity manifests, usually.  The person doing the projecting (onto you) is feeling ,”I can’t value what you do because I’m scared and don’t understand,”  and so they say and do things to discourage you.

My first tip is not to enter into direct confrontation with the naysayers until and unless it is necessary.  However, if the negative person’s influence on you is especially toxic or over-bearing, there may be no way to stop their energetic encroachment except a confrontation.  The problem with making a confrontation with such a person is they’ll probably unleash a lot of bad feelings towards you and if you’re not strong, you’ll feel it and it will hurt and affect your resolve.

Energetically, the person abusing you may be saying ,”I need you,” – as in “I need you to validate the way I feel about the world,”.  Usually you’re not allowed to disagree with such a person without offending them or hurting their feelings.  Such people are common, and the hooks they get into you are emotional in nature.

Thus, in order to set limits on toxic people who drag you down, you’re going to need some psychological tools to set limits with them.

The most useful tool, in my experience, is emotional detachment.  Don’t let the conflict rile you up, or at least try to keep your  energy as quiet and centered in the moment as you can.  When you detach and set limits with a toxic person, they may heap abuse on you and it will be hard for you to just take it without fighting back.  Unless there is a physical assault happening, don’t fight back verbally.  As long as the attack is verbal only, don’t try to defend yourself and don’t try to hurt the mean person who attacks you verbally – because when you do you just meet their energy and feed into it.

This brings me to another useful tool:  silence.

There is power in silence.  It works on many levels.  Only when you shut up can you truly hear what’s going on around you.

A toxic person who has his or her hooks in you and won’t make an effort to understand what you’re doing or try to see things from your point of view will resent you anyway.  Don’t give them too much information.  Remember, they are looking for vulnerabilities in you in order to draw you into their own insecurity.  If you know a person who will eventually use everything you reveal to him or her against you – and we’ve all known them -  learn to keep your thoughts to yourself.

If you live in a household, for example, where another person criticizes your entrepreneurial plans but makes no sincere effort to understand those plans well enough to be constructive, learn to keep your plans to yourself.  Silence is power.  You have no idea how powerful silence is until you start to use it as a tool to build and preserve your own strength.

Of course the other person may accuse you of witholding to hurt them, but just turn the conversation away from you and towards what the other person is interested in.  For example, if the toxic person is needling you to get information about your entrepreneurial plans in order to criticize you (you’ve seen it before so you know the signs), turn that person’s attention elsewhere – towards food for example.  Say “I wonder if there’s any ice cream in the freezer” or something.

Napoleon Hill in his classic book “Think and Grow Rich” writes about the importance of keeping the details of your plans to yourself until and unless you find somebody who supports and encourages you in a totally positive way.  You should seek such people out, but don’t try to reform a toxic person into a supportive person; it won’t work.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.