May be someone is always finding fault about you, may be someone always talks to you in harsh tone and angry words, violent hand movements and gestures, may be someone is always passing sarcastic comments at you.
How do we usually deal with them? Most of the time we try to move away from these people, making sure our interaction with them is minimal and making sure we don’t do acts that trigger their behavior. This strategy works best for people who are not close to us, with people we meet on the road or one time clients.
However, this is not the best policy, especially if this is your life partner, a close colleague. You might not ask for an increment or a promotion from a boss. You would start drifting away from the life partner, you would not be able to get a help from a colleague or reach out and help them.
Are there better ways to deal with them?
Well, there are many ways, and the path you would select depends on the outcome you desire. Some of the possible outcomes are,
How do we usually deal with them? Most of the time we try to move away from these people, making sure our interaction with them is minimal and making sure we don’t do acts that trigger their behavior. This strategy works best for people who are not close to us, with people we meet on the road or one time clients.
However, this is not the best policy, especially if this is your life partner, a close colleague. You might not ask for an increment or a promotion from a boss. You would start drifting away from the life partner, you would not be able to get a help from a colleague or reach out and help them.
Are there better ways to deal with them?
Well, there are many ways, and the path you would select depends on the outcome you desire. Some of the possible outcomes are,
- Building an effective relationship
- Helping them to change their behaviors
Building an effective relationship
One major obstacle we would face dealing people we have already labelled angry is our behaviour towards them. When we have had enough experiences of getting beaten down we would adopt a defensive or aggressive stance against a person depending on our personality and the life situation. Fear, anger, disgust seems to be common responses. And these behaviours would eventually become habitual. We would start facing a person being ready to fight or flight.
We all know “What goes around comes around”. When we approach a person with anger or fear, we definitely receive anger or fear in return, eventually making a dysfunctional relationship. In NLP terms this is Outcome Expectancy. If we want to achieve the functional relationship, we need to approach it with the emotions and attitudes that would help build a functional relationship. Have you ever successfully build a long term relationship based on anger or fear towards each other? Successful long term relationships are based on love, kindness and respect to each other.
Changing negativity towards someone
1. Check how you feel about that person
A good start would be to check how you feel about the person. Thing about the person and check what are the emotion you are feeling. Think about meeting the person and check your emotions again. Knowing how we feel about someone gives a good opportunity for us to change the way we respond.
2. Empathize
Empathy would be the best way to change your negativity towards a person. There may be a situation that you got angry or passed sarcastic comment. What drove you to behave like that? Now think what would be causing them to behave negatively.
3. Everyone does good
Realizing other person has a good side help greatly reducing negativity towards a person. List the good deeds of the other person.
If you feel you don’t behave negatively ask your good friends, they would give you a long list. If you cannot find a good deed of the other person, ask others, specially their friend, you would be ashamed of your ignorance.
Above exercises would help you steer away the negativity. If you still find there are beliefs that you would like to let go, or the issues runs deep, you would be able to get help from a NLP Practitioner or a Life Coach to resolve them.
Having positive outlook in an instance
People around us respond to our emotional state. If anger lingers in back of our head, then others respond to us with either anger or fear. Same goes for other emotional states, if we are in loving and kind state, then others also respond to you with the same. You can easily try this. When you are at a place where there are many strangers, start genuinely smiling with people. You would notice that other start to reciprocate, even the ones deeply engaged in other activities will put an effort to respond.
Memories are a very powerful way to shift to an emotional state quickly. Say you want to feel happy. Just remember an occasion that you were happy, and relive that experience fully, see things you saw, hear what you heard and feel what you felt at that time. You would start feeling happiness building inside you.
Let’s use this to help us face a tough situation. Just think of the emotional states that you would like to have. For example when dealing with someone tends to get angry, useful emotional states are Friendly love and Kindness. Depending on your specific scenario, you might want to use more emotional states. Then find memories where you had these emotions and relive them. Now you are good get benefits from encounters where you had disastrous results before.
Memories are a very powerful way to shift to an emotional state quickly. Say you want to feel happy. Just remember an occasion that you were happy, and relive that experience fully, see things you saw, hear what you heard and feel what you felt at that time. You would start feeling happiness building inside you.
Let’s use this to help us face a tough situation. Just think of the emotional states that you would like to have. For example when dealing with someone tends to get angry, useful emotional states are Friendly love and Kindness. Depending on your specific scenario, you might want to use more emotional states. Then find memories where you had these emotions and relive them. Now you are good get benefits from encounters where you had disastrous results before.
