How Do I Stay Positive In My Negative Environment?

Staying positive is a mindset we all try to strive for. Everyday we encounter many situations that challenge our ability to keep ourselves in the best positive and healthy frame of mind.

On a daily basis even in a moment to moment basis we encounter those who bleed negativity. These folks can be our family, our neighbors, and our co-workers. They can be called energy vampires for they can suck out of us our positive life energy. As a result, it can tempt us to take on a negative attitude.

As challenging as it is to stay positive around negative people, we can look at some helpful tools to maintain our positive energy and mental health.

Regardless of what others do or say, we focus on ourselves, you can control your own attitude by asking yourself the following questions of yourself.

How am I reacting to this situation? How can I make that reaction more positive? We can’t control how others act but we can control what we focus on, how we act and how we react.

Reverse your reaction. Another way to deal with difficult people is to reverse our reaction. When they begin to yell, argue, being passive aggressive using negative language, we try acting the opposite by staying calm and not feed that negative energy.

Don’t take it personally. Their negative attitude isn’t completely about you. Most of the time its what is going on in their life. They may be dealing with a lot of stress. it’s difficult to know what someone else is going through. Not taking it personally makes it easier to deal with.

Staying in the moment. When we focus on the now (not what could happen or would happen), but now. It’s difficult to feel negative. Most of our negative thoughts are associated with worrying about what could happen or being overly preoccupied, worrying about what has happened.

The biggest and most important step we can take is to be positive and free of negativity and to be grateful.

Practicing gratitude when dealing with another person’s negative emotions is to maintain a habit of being grateful for the positive experiences in your life.

Staying positive around negative people is always challenging but make sure you review the 5 steps regardless of what is happening around you. You always have options and choices in how you behave and whether or not accept negativity in your life.

There are always those people we encounter who start drama, bicker about everything or anything they think they are right about. They compare themselves to others. See their glass as half empty and are envious of the positive people they encounter that they think have it together.

I know sometimes most of us, as positive as we try to be, can fall into moments of being negative. The key is not to stay down in it. It’s important to carry a positive attitude and practice gratitude from the mistakes we may make.

For the most part, we can choose our friends, but we can’t choose our co-workers or our family members to spend time with. It’s inevitable that we encounter negative people throughout our day, even the media and social media sites are filled with negative influences. It’s up to us to not take it on as our feeling, but to acknowledge it, and let go of it. We can diffuse a frustrating situation with finding humor in the situation.

We put it all into perspective by a quote by Abraham Lincoln,
“We can complain because the rose bush has thorns or rejoice because the thorn bush has roses.”