How to Deal With Negative People Without Cutting Everyone Off

Negative people are rarely giving you information. They're giving you a belief, usually about their own situation, and saying it out loud. Once you hear it that way, you don't have to argue with it, absorb it, or cut them off. You just stop letting it decide what you do.

"We've tried that"

Near the end of my two years in South Texas, I kept getting moved into new areas where other people had already been working for months. I'd show up with ideas. Let's try this. What if we went here. What if we did it this way.

Over and over, I heard the same thing: "We've tried that. It didn't work."

At first I took it at face value. They'd been there longer. Maybe they knew. But after a while I noticed something. The people saying "we've tried that" were always the ones who were stuck. They weren't speaking from experience. They were speaking from tiredness. Every idea got a wet blanket, and the blanket wasn't information. It was a belief: things don't work here. Every new suggestion was just another chance to confirm it.

Here's what I've noticed since. When you come back months later, the "we've tried that" people are always in the same spot. Still stuck, still explaining why.

Hear the belief, not the verdict

Most negativity sounds like a fact. "That won't work." "You'll never make money doing that." "People here don't go for that kind of thing." It's delivered with confidence, so it lands like a verdict.

Try this instead: when someone shoots something down, ask how many times they tried it, and how. The honest answer is almost always once, under bad conditions, without really committing. Tried once is not tested. It's an excuse with a memory attached.

You don't say that out loud. You don't need to win. You just file their answer where it belongs: as one person's experience with one half-hearted attempt, not as the truth about what's possible.

Three moves that work

1. Don't argue, and don't absorb. Arguing spends your energy convincing someone who wasn't going to be convinced. Absorbing it means their belief becomes yours. Nod, say "maybe," and move on.
2. Stop handing them your plans. You can keep the relationship and still keep your vision in your pocket. Talk about the game, the weather, the kids. Take the things you care about to people who've built something. (More on choosing who gets to hear your plans in how to stop caring what people think.)
3. Bring back evidence. The only thing that ends "that doesn't work" is doing it and standing there with the result. When I ran the ideas anyway, enough of them worked that the sentence stopped being available. Nobody argues with a result they can see.

What the research says

Mood travels through your relationships. In a 20-year study of nearly 5,000 people, researchers found that happiness spreads from person to person. When a friend living within a mile became happy, a person's own chance of being happy went up by about 25 percent. The people closest to you shape how you feel more than you'd guess. (Fowler & Christakis, 2008)

That cuts both ways. It's a good reason to protect the time you spend with people who are building something, and to be careful how much of your week the "we've tried that" crowd gets.

This week

1. Write down the last negative thing someone said about a plan of yours. Then write down how many times they've actually tried it.
2. Pick one idea they shot down and test it properly once. Committed, under decent conditions. Note what happens.
3. Name one person who makes you more likely to act. Spend an hour with them this week.