5 tips on how to protect yourself from malicious, toxic or negative people
In this article on how to deal with negative people, I share with you some useful tips that will help you find a better balance in your professional and personal circles.
If you are suffering because of the negative attitudes of people in your professional or personal life and you are looking for solutions to improve the quality of your life, I recommend you read my suggestions now.
1 – Learn to be assertive
Assertiveness is the ability to express what you feel in a calm and confident manner while avoiding entering into a conflictual relationship with others.
It’s not always easy to change the way you communicate with others, but if you are interested in creating healthier relationships, you can succeed in improving your communication.
To begin changing your behavior, you can become aware of how you communicate with your colleagues, supervisors, family, and friends.
After each conversation, focus on the emotions you are experiencing.
If these emotions are pleasant, you have probably been able to make your point easily.
If you are feeling unpleasant emotions, frustration, fatigue, or stress, you may have had difficulty expressing your thoughts.
Identify what you were unable to say and also what bothered you about the other person’s behavior.
Then write down on paper what you would like to tell and how you would like to behave if you could go back in time.
Now close your eyes and observe yourself acting as you would like to act. Repeat this visualization several times a day and you will begin to feel more confident in your ability to easily express what you think.
To learn how to better manage your emotions, I suggest you read my article on managing emotions.
2 – Define what is acceptable and what is not
Creating healthier professional and personal relationships requires taking the time to understand what your boundaries are.
If some people are behaving in a toxic way towards you and you don’t tell them, you become somewhat corresponsible for their actions.
I am not saying that you are uniquely responsible for their behavior.
But, you cannot change your relationships if you consciously or automatically take a victim position.
To change the course of events, it is necessary to take back your part of the responsibility.
It is not about feeling guilty or criticizing yourself. What matters is to understand that you have an important role to play in changing your life for the better.
Then, give yourself time to think about the unpleasant behaviors of others and write a list of them.
Now group the behaviors that come up most often and focus on those.
Alternatively, you can rank the unpleasant behaviors in order of importance.
Then, for each of these behaviors, prepare a behavioral alternative to your usual behavior.
Review this list every day and start testing these different behaviors.
You will find that with time and practice, you will begin to modify your response to unpleasant actions in the workplace or in your personal life.
3 – Understand that they have a problem
Negative or toxic people who have a malicious attitude towards you are people with problems.
If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be acting this way towards you and others.
Recognizing this, however, is not the same as justifying or passively accepting their behavior.
Rather, it is an opportunity to train yourself to empathize with these people.
Some of these people are truly malicious by conscious and deliberate choice.
Others are victims of learned behavior over the course of their lives.
You can feel compassion for these people because unlike you, they have not been able to choose to make progress in their lives.
They act unconsciously by repeating a worn-out repertoire of old, unproductive habits with harmful consequences.
If you want to help them, try asking them questions so that they realize the damaging impact of their actions on others.
By creating and growing this caring space between you and these people, you will reduce stress and be able to better manage your emotions.
As a result, your actions will be more reasoned and more effective in starting to implement more balanced relationships.
4 – Forgive yourself
Be careful not to confuse taking responsibility with feeling guilty.
You are not guilty of what happens to you on a daily basis.
Stop judging yourself and telling yourself that it is your fault.
You probably encouraged the behavior of your naysayers, but you did not initiate it.
To change the guilt you feel, you need to change the meaning you have given to the events.
You can change your perception of their harmful behavior and think of alternative meanings to those you have found.
It is possible that your difficulty in putting forth your opinions and defending them is not related to your abilities but just to a behavioral pattern that you have automatically picked up from those around you.
Choose the meaning you give to these bad behaviors that will allow you to free yourself from guilt. Then test it in your life and see if it helps you move forward.
In this way, your actions will be guided by more balanced choices and you will have a greater chance of creating more satisfying professional and personal relationships.
5 – Protect and strengthen your self-esteem
Self-esteem is an evaluation of our own value in different situations.
It is therefore not static but varies according to the context in which we are operating.
Most often, it is not an objective and thoughtful evaluation of our abilities.
It is more often a subjective perception of our abilities.
This perception depends on what we focus on.
When we think about our failures or flaws, self-esteem decreases.
On the contrary, it increases when we focus on our successes, on our progress, on our talents and more generally on everything positive we can create and accomplish in our lives.
So you understand that to strengthen your self-esteem, it is essential to focus your attention, your thoughts and your actions on your strengths and more generally on everything that is positive in you.
If you want to protect your self-esteem, you can limit the time you spend with people who have a negative attitude and increase the amount of pleasant time you spend with people who appreciate you and see qualities in you that you cannot see on your own.
Another way to protect and strengthen your self-esteem and self-confidence is to keep your commitments and take actions that allow you to get out of your comfort zone without putting yourself under undue stress.
Conclusion on how to protect yourself from bad people
In this article, I have shared with you 5 tips on how to protect yourself from negative people. To take advantage of the support of a life coach, write to us now using our contact form, or call us by phone or on WhatsApp at +33 6 69 46 03 79.
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Read this article in other languages
Français : Comment se protéger des personnes malveillantes
Italiano: Come difendersi dalle persone cattive o negative: 5 consigli efficaci