Earlier in the year I attended Jamie Smart’s Language Of Influence workshop. A 1-day course designed to open up the uninitiated to the power of influential language, embedded commands and NLP etc.
We were talking about different types of people and how to manage them, when I asked about really negative, depressing people. You know the type - when they walk in to a room you can feel energy being sucked out, an emotional black hole of sorts. So I asked how to deal with them. Jamie’s response? “Avoid them”.
It got a laugh, but it bugged me. He is right, insofar as it is good practice to minimise time spent with people that bring you down, but what if you have to deal with them to get on? There are lots of them about, and often they seem to be the fund holders - after all if you want to watch spending, give the budget to the grumpy bloke, he is immune to all of that enthusiastic sales talk.
And so I have been searching for a more satisfactory answer and I have found some of it in an interesting post over at mindchanginghypnosis. The suggestion here is to find some common ground - perhaps sport or their family, mindful that even these topics might be depressing for them (ie perhaps they too support Arsenal, and we can be depressed together). Another useful approach is just to ask them for some good news - something that is going well in their lives. Firstly this is probably a neat interrupt for an energy leech - they probably never hear this question. Secondly it’s hard to maintain negative feelings when talking about or being asked to think about, something good.
Ultimately I think that Jamie’s advice is the right intent, but it’s a case of minimising the time you spend with those sorts of people, reducing exposure to it.
