Gurus #14: How to Make Space for Better Things (Louise Hay)

I recently wrote a post about the positive benefits you can get from social e-mail groups. A lot of folks are starting to think through the opposite side of the coin -- what do you do with the negative people in your networks?
In fact, there are some super-simple procedures to help you.

(As advertised, this article has a long intro, with great resources from others at the end... skim to the back half after the cartoon, or the back quarter after Louise Hay's photo, before clicking away, if you would prefer the quick version.)

Table of Contents
1. A historical rambling reflection (skip it if you like)
2. A cartoon
3. A great philosophical music video 
4. Louise Hay's useful procedure that's easy for you to learn to use 
5. Unfriending, or blocking, which is better?

I am an editor, so for many years of my career, it was very easy to be surrounded by critical people. I am also a scientist, and we're trained to think critically, to analyze the whies and the wherefores and the how-to-improves of everything. For a long time, my young self thought that being critical was some kind of badge of intelligence (many young students seem to think the same, have you noticed?). After all, we need that kind of thought if society is ever going to improve, and not everyone seems able to do it. My life spiralled downwards as I cleverly criticized everything (and sought out clever critical people). I learned this:

If you're always seeking for things to be better, then they never seem good enough the way they are in the present. 

Oh, it's not that we weren't right in our criticisms. We often were. Or are. When things are bad, it does need speaking up about. I believe that. 

However, it doesn't need to be talked about all the time. At the age I am now, I feel pity for people who can't stop criticizing. There is a time and a place to do these things:

• Put away criticism and choose to be supportive.
• Just stop talking about the bad stuff for a while and find some good stuff to talk about.
• Just let somebody be wrong, and let everyone be happy.

As we all know, there seem to be plenty of people on the internet who can't seem to do those things. 

There are a few things you want to do now:
1. Don't be one of those people.
2. Keep away from those people, at least when they're in a mood (and probably more than that).
3. Identify some red flags to help you cull the chaff and cancerous folks. Here are some that I have low tolerance for: 

• sarcasm (it's rarely as funny as imagined)
• picking on other people (they'll turn around and do it to me next)
• betraying others
• inability to let conflict go after a reasonable discussion period online
• personal attacks of others' work
• another category it's worth being wary of are the "poor-you" folks. I'm a single mom, and even when I was creating a much better life out of the shreds I had than others were in their abundance, I always ran into people who wanted to talk about how horrible my life was. Nah. It's not horrible, and stop telling me it is. Nix. Cull them. (They might be long-term friends who you don't want to lose. If so, limit your conversations with them, or learn to steer that steamship another direction and insist on positivity to help you create a good life.)

An excellent measure of a person's real value to you is how you feel about yourself after you talk to them.Also, what's your mood? 
Are you in a happy, productive, helpful, go-love-the-world mood after talking to them, or are you needing to hide away and lick your wounds, or feeling like you want to go out and snarl at people? Pay attention to that. You know what to do.

It's pretty easy, actually, if you just follow the procedure below.

You know this phrase:

"Ignorance is Bliss."

Happiness on the internet is often found by choosing to close our eyes to critical garbage that really doesn' t matter. It's that easy. You choose to think about something else. You make a habit of it. Every single time you want to criticize and complain, you leave that conversation, and you choose someone from your vast list of friends who you can send a random positive message to (a hello, a compliment, or an "I'm thinking of you.")

It's not easy at the beginning, but if you start, and you keep at it, it soon becomes habit: when people are arguing idiotically, you simply turn away and find something more positive to do. 

I think we have all seen this cartoon from xkcd, now: https://xkcd.com/386/

It's a procedure. You just need to keep doing it over and over again, and you get better at recognizing when you're doing it.
1. Recognize futile negative timewastingness.
2. Stop it.
3. Replace it with something positive (the person in the cartoon seems to have someone who loves them right in the room with them! Dude! Put the phone down.)(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX_pZTlERaI)

You also get better at recognizing when other people are doing it. And you start choosing to minimize interactions with those people in your life.

I find that allowing yourself to have a low tolerance for complainers, haters, and criticizers on the internet has excellent results.

It makes more space for the wonderful people.

There are plenty of articles here on LinkedIn about finding the right people to help you grow your career. About how visionaries and positive, supportive people work, and about how negative people, narcissists, and other poisons can destroy not just your daily life, but your career.

You know that the above is true. So choose to do something about it!

Facebook and LinkedIn have a wonderful feature called "Block." Use it!

Use it when you notice that certain people in an e-mail thread always criticize, without care for colleagues.

• Blocking these people allows me to stop seeing their poison, and so I can stop trying to defend others against them (sometimes we feel compelled, futile as it may be... when you realize you're in a futile argument, consider the master block!). 
• It also has the benefit that anything that I post will not be seen by those critics, so the conversation and discussion on the threads I start will be of much better quality in the group.

Use the block function when someone shows negative business sense. There's a highly respected editor I know who posts a lot for colleagues, and I have valued some conversations with him in the past. However, when I experienced his completely-without-compassion, hateful, fight-like-a-dog reaction to some plagiarism of his work, I realized I would never want to do business with him. It's not that he wasn't right. He was right, and the plagiarist was 100% wrong. However, he was completely unable to feel any compassion or to let the issue go for his own health. Imagine doing business with someone who was so unilateral and unwilling to explore alternatives when something goes wrong. I couldn't. And I couldn't imagine witnessing any more of the furious conversation on his page, either.

Hence, why keep him in my network? The negative potential outweighs the positive. 
Block!

Consider using the block function when you ask for help and don't get it. Do you want to try to maintain a friendship or a business relationship with someone who won't give you anything back?

Again, weigh it out. What are the negative consequences of trusting this person? Are they really worth the potential positive of having them in your network?

We tend to think that a bigger network is a better network, and for the most part, that's true. But it's not true when you have cancerous members. The poison from negative people can erode and destroy your relationships with others.

You wouldn't keep a cancerous tumour, thinking it would make your stomach function better, would you? Don't keep the cancerous negativity in your network, either.

You'll find that a little surgery helps the rest of your network flourish better.

I used to hesitate about blocking people. I would think,  "oh, but so and so is so influential, or so wise, or so smart."

Nope. They're mean. If they're mean online, they're unprofessional. You don't want to do business with them (the costs can easily exponentially outweigh the benefits), and you don't want to try to keep up friendships with people who can turn on a dime, bite like a rabid snake, and not apologize.

Caveat: Of course, everyone has an off day. Everyone makes a mistake now and then. Seriously consider the offender's remorse/willingness to change. 
Are they likely to reoffend? 
Will they apologize?

If they might do it again, and they won't apologize, ditch them. Another little question to address: blocking or unfriending someone?

• Unfriend them if you'd simply prefer not to be associated with them any more because they are embarrassing or irritating (even online, and maybe more so than before the online world, you ARE judged by your friends), but they haven't seriously attacked.
• Block them if they have demonstrated that they will attack people. It doesn't matter if they've attacked you or someone else. We are all one. If you see someone abusing another person, assume that they could turn around and do the same to you. They will, at some point (I've another article about that).

 

So how do you get more positive people in your networks?

Listen to a life-changing hour from visionary Louise Hay, called "Receiving Prosperity."(Last time I checked, $5.95 on iTunes.)

Here's the gist of it:

1. Every day has good and bad in it.
2. Whether it seems overall good or bad depends on what you focus on.
3. In general, you will get more of what you focus on.

Louise Hay's life started out really, really bad. And as often happens with bad childhoods, it led to a bad young adulthood. At some point along the way, though, she learned something.

She learned that she could focus more on the positive things every day. She says everyone can do this. Every day, you try to get a little bit better. She says that when she first learned this, she had maybe 10% positive thoughts. Now, she is up to about 90% positive thoughts in a day, simply by persistently replacing a negative thought with a positive one. 

Do the same thing with your social networks. 

• Minimize the time you spend with people who are not good for you, no matter how important they may seem to be. They may currently hold major roles in your life, such as family members or work colleagues. That doesn't matter. You can choose to spend less time with them, and let go of the guilt. You do not have to spend your Saturdays golfing with a nasty colleague who pressures you about your income when you'd rather be with your family (who you should feel a greater duty to anyway!). You do not have to invest a lot of time in relatives who disparage you, either. You are free to stop it, now.
  And definitely, definitely, don't waste online time with haters. A total waste of your time on this earth. 
• Find ways to maximize your time with people who are kind, interesting, supportive, no matter how minor you might perceive them to be. You can maximize the positive, minor people in your life, and end up with a much happier life! (Many families or jobs do not endorse this idea. Instead they tell us we have a duty to limit ourselves to certain people, for some reason made up by them (profit, duty, tradition, whatever). No. Actually, how it is, is that you are free. You have the right (and even duty!) to choose people who are good for you.
  Do invest online time interacting positively. It pays off. I still have offers and contacts showing up from help or kindness I gave a decade ago. 

If you're scientifically trained like me, you might assume that the cheerful people are not as smart as the gloomy ones.
In fact, when you start spending more time with the cheerful people, you might discover that they are much more successful than you expected (given that they're probably not bragging about it -- they don't need to!) -- with opportunities to share, and a willingness to connect you with others for your success, too.

Imagine an example with me, here:

1. You start your morning with an encouraging note from a stranger who has been impressed with your profile. Score!

2. Your day turns south when you ask a question in a professional list and someone attacks you.

There are two ways you could handle this:

Always do that. Always choose to honour the positive, respectful, and wonderful people first.

If you give any time to the negative people, put it as your last task to do. Sometimes problems like those really do take care of themselves (and trust me, they do so more and more as you practice these strategies).

Unfortunately, both because of our instincts and because of our society, we tend to give our attention to the problems first, instead of creating more great stuff. 
But we can change that with considered and careful thought and strategies.

I would love to hear how this works for you! Comment below or drop me a line sometime!

Thanks to http://motherhood.modernmom.com/deal-someone-not-respect-personal-boundaries-10313.html for the image.