How to Deal with Negative People Without Losing Yourself

We all know the person.

The colleague who complains before the meeting has even started. The family member who can’t let a happy moment stay happy. The friend whose drama somehow becomes everyone else’s afternoon.

Negative people can be exhausting, especially when you can’t simply avoid them.

In this episode, Janelle talks about how to be around negativity without absorbing it, fixing it, joining it or becoming someone you don’t want to be.

This isn’t about pretending people don’t affect you. It’s about noticing what happens inside you, choosing your response, and keeping hold of yourself when someone else’s mood starts filling the room.

If you’ve ever walked away from a conversation feeling drained, annoyed or like someone else’s energy came home with you, this one is for you.

Here are the links Janelle mentions:

Complimentary Gifts

The Unshakeable Woman Blueprint
Success Was The Warm-Up

The Soft Strength Salon

If this speaks to a deeper pattern, The Soft Strength Salon is where we work with the real conversations, relationships and moments that ask you to hold more of yourself.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to or welcome back to Sky Hard Coaching Conversations. Today is a goodie. So listen along, note down anything that comes up for you, and then you can decide what you'd like to do with that insight after this episode is over. I'm Janelle Ryan. I'm so happy you're here. Let's dive in. Today I want to talk about something that has come up in a few client conversations recently, and it's this how do you deal with negative people without losing yourself? And when I say negative people, I mean the people who drain you, the people who complain constantly, the ones who seem to find a problem for every solution, the ones who walk into a meeting and somehow the whole room feels heavier. So it might be the colleague who continually complains about upper management, maybe your clients or even their own role. It might be the boss who only ever points out what's wrong. It might be the team member who resists every idea. It might be the friend who turns every conversation into a drama. It might be the family member who just can't celebrate anything without adding some criticism. It might even be that group chat, you know, the one that leaves you feeling irritated, heavy, annoyed, or even suddenly questioning yourself. And the challenging part is we can't always get away from these people. Wouldn't that be lovely? Imagine if every time someone drained your energy, you could say, thank you so much for your contribution. I am now removing myself from this entire dynamic forever. Unfortunately, life doesn't usually work like that, does it? You still have to work with them, sit beside them, answer the email, attend the meeting, go to the family lunch, reply to the message, stay professional, stay polite, stay in the conversation without it ruining your entire mood for the rest of the day. So this episode isn't about how to avoid negative people. It's about how to be around negative people without becoming negative yourself. And more, maybe perhaps more importantly, without becoming a smaller, snappier, quieter, more defensive, or more exhausted version of yourself. Now I wrote about this years ago, five or six years ago, I wrote an article about nurturing yourself. It was called nurturing yourself around negative people. And I used the phrase negative Nellies, which even then I didn't love because it has a direct link to my own my own name, right? I definitely don't love it now because it's too simple. It makes the other person the problem full stop. It puts them in a neat little box called negative, annoying, draining, maybe impossible. And then we don't have to look any further, do we? And I don't think that's the whole truth. Because people are complicated, people are layered, people are carrying pressure, fear, disappointment, grief, resentment, exhaustion, and old habits we may know nothing about. The person who complains all the time may have learned that complaining is the only way they get attention. The person who criticizes everything may be trying to feel in control. The person who competes with everyone may be terrified there isn't enough room for them, or that they're unseen, or unappreciated, or unheard. The person, oh, the poison. Suddenly I um gained an accent. The person, like Popeye, if you're old enough to know who Popeye was. The person who always points out what could go wrong may have been rewarded for doing that for a very long time. Now, this doesn't mean their behavior is easy to be around, and it doesn't mean you have to absorb it, excuse it, or make yourself endlessly available for it. It simply means we can be honest about the impact someone has on us without reducing them to a label. We can have compassion for what might be going on underneath someone's behavior without pretending the behavior hasn't any impact. We can understand that someone may be struggling without handing them our whole afternoon, our confidence, our mood, or our peace. And to me, that is the more useful conversation. Because when someone feels negative to us, there are usually two things happening. There is what they are doing, and then there's what is happening inside us in response. They may be complaining, they may be critical, they may be dismissive, they may be pessimistic, they may be closed to every idea, they may be the person who always finds the cloud behind the silver lining. But then we have our part. Do we absorb it? Do we try to fix it? Do we argue with it? Do we become overly nice? Do we overexplain? Do we try to cheer them up? Do we join in because for a moment complaining feels like connection? Do we spend the rest of the day replaying the conversation and wishing we'd said something different? This, my beautiful friend, is where our power is. Not in trying to turn every negative person into a sunny, emotionally generous delight. Good luck with that. But in learning how to stay connected to who we are when someone else is bringing in energy we don't want to take on. So today I want to give you five places to begin. The first is to notice your reaction before you respond. Now, most of us know the feeling. You see their name appear on your phone, and your whole body reacts before you've even read the message. You hear they're coming to the meeting and you start bracing yourself before they've walked into the room. They make one comment, and suddenly you feel irritated, defensive, small, anxious, annoyed, or determined to prove yourself. Now, that reaction is information. It doesn't mean you're wrong. It certainly doesn't mean you're too sensitive. And it doesn't mean you should be above it. It means you're human. We all have people who press buttons we wish they didn't even know existed. But the earlier you notice your reaction, the more choice you have about what comes next. Because sometimes you are not reacting to this one comment, are you? You're reacting to every comment they've made for the past two years. Sometimes you're not reacting to this one email, you're reacting to the story you already have about them. Sometimes you've already decided they're going to be negative, so you enter the conversation ready to defend, explain, smooth over, or brace yourself. I know because I have felt this too. And listen, maybe they're going to be negative. And I'm not asking you to pretend otherwise. But if you walk into the room already expecting the worst, you may find yourself in your old pattern before anything has really happened. So before you reply, do yourself a favor, pause. Before you defend yourself, breathe. Before you join the complaint, ask yourself, is this really where I want this conversation to go? Before you send the very long email explaining every detail in the hope they will finally understand. Ask yourself, am I responding to the subject matter, the topic on hand? Or am I trying to be validated by someone who may never give me that? That tiny pause is important. Not because it magically makes the other person more positive, it won't. But because it gives you a moment to come back to yourself before you hand the interaction over to habit. Okay. The second place to begin is to prepare yourself before you're around them. If you know someone's negativity tends to affect you, don't wait until you're already in front of them to decide who you want to be. Do it before. Before the meeting, before the lunch, before the family gathering, before the phone call, before the message. And I don't mean you need to sit cross-legged in a field for 45 minutes and become the most enlightened version of yourself. Lovely, if you have the time, please go and do that. But you don't need to. What I really mean is this. Take a moment and ask yourself, how do I want to show up here? Not how do they usually make me behave, not what version of me normally appears around this person, but who do I want to be in this conversation? Do you want to be calm, clear, direct, light, professional, kind, but not available for drama, open to a better conversation, but not dependent on one. That decision changes how you enter the room. Some people like to imagine themselves surrounded by light. Some imagine a clear bubble around them. Some put their feet on the floor, take a slow breath and remind themselves I don't have to take this on. One client of mine once imagined a very negative colleague speaking in a Donald Duck voice, which made it almost impossible to be pulled into the dynamic. Ridiculous? Absolutely. Did it work? Yes. Because sometimes we give negative people a kind of authority in our minds that they haven't actually earned. We make them bigger, louder, more powerful, more important. And sometimes making them a tiny bit ridiculous in your mind helps you remember they are a person, not a life sentence. The third place is to stop joining the negative spiral, and this one is big because it's one of the easiest things to do around negative people. One of the easiest things to do is to join them. Someone complains, so we complain too. Someone criticizes, so we add our own criticism. Someone's cynical, so we become cynical. Someone says, This'll never work. And suddenly we're also listing all the reasons it probably won't. It can feel like oh, we're on the same side. It can feel like relief. But afterwards, you may notice you feel heavy or irritated or ashamed of something you said, or annoyed that you got pulled into a conversation you didn't really want to have. That's the negative spiral. And you don't have to climb in with both feet. If the conversation is about a project, bring it back to the project. If the meeting starts turning into gossip, don't feed it. If someone keeps circling around the same complaint, ask them what they want to do next or what their solution is or where do we go from here? If the like, cut them off. Stop the the um the complaining spiral or cycle. If the family conversation starts heading towards the same old argument, you don't have to go with it. You can keep it simple. You might say, I hear you. What do you think would help? Or let's bring this back to what we need to decide. Or, you know what, I don't want to talk about her when she's not here. Or I'm happy to talk through the issue, but I don't think going over the same thing again is helping. Or even I'm going to step away from this conversation for now. I had a situation a few months ago where I was walking along in a group, um, and someone started bringing up something that I felt had the potential because I was very self-aware and I was listening mindfully, had the potential to go in a direction of gossip or negativity. And uh after this person said what they wanted to say, I said instantly, um, I'm happy to do that, because there was a suggestion around something, but I don't want any drama. And straight away the person walking on the other side of me said, I don't want any drama either. So I almost gave her permission to say the same thing. So it can even be as simple as that. None of this needs to be dramatic. You don't need to announce, I'm now setting a boundary. Um, you don't need a speech, you don't need a drum roll, you don't need to explain it so thoroughly that everyone approves of the way you've handled yourself. You simply stop giving the conversation more energy than it deserves. And that's often where people get caught. They don't want to be rude. We don't want to be rude, do we? We don't want to seem uncaring. We don't want to make things awkward. So we keep listening, nodding, we keep absorbing, keep smoothing, keep offering, keep being available. And then we wonder why we feel resentful. Sometimes your resentment is not because the other person is taking too much, sometimes it's because you keep giving more than you actually want to give. Take that in. The fourth place is to begin to have compassion without taking over. This is an important distinction. Because if you are a very thoughtful or empathetic person, you can see the nuance in people, right? It's very easy to start making allowances for everything because you can see why someone might be negative. You can see their fear, their insecurity, their pressure, their loneliness, their disappointment, their old pattern playing out. And because you can see it, you start to carry it. You tell yourself, oh, they've had a hard time, or they don't really mean it, or they're under pressure, or, oh well, that's just how they are, or I don't want to make things worse. And some of that may be true. But understanding someone's negativity doesn't mean you have to become endlessly available for it. You can have compassion and still say no. You can understand they're under pressure and still not accept to be spoken to unkindly or rudely. You can care about them and still leave the conversation. You can want the absolute best for them and still stop being the person they unload on every week. Compassion is not the same as overfunctioning. Compassion doesn't require you to become the emotional cleanup crew. And this is where many intelligent, caring people get caught because they can feel the pain underneath the negativity. So they keep making room for the negativity. They stay too long, listen too much, soften too quickly, give another chance, offer another solution, smooth another edge, make another allowance. And then they're exhausted. Not because they don't care, because they've confused caring, excuse me, with carrying. I'll say that again. Because they've confused caring with carrying, and they're not the same thing. The fifth place is the one most people would rather skip, let's be honest. Ask yourself why the person's negativity affects you so much. Have you ever been in a room and someone is really pressing your buttons, and the next person is absolutely fine. They have no problem with them at all. So sometimes it's worth having a little look inside, having a little look at ourselves. Because it's so much easier to focus on them, what they said, how they said it, how negative they are, how draining they are, how they always do this, how they never see the good in anything. And they may well be draining. Absolutely. But if one person's mood can change your whole mood, or ruin your afternoon, or make you feel inadequate, or silence you, or sharpen your tongue, or send you in a two-hour mental replay, it's worth asking yourself, what's happening here? Why this person? Why this behavior? Why this tone? Why do you need them to understand you? Why does their opinion carry so much weight? Why do you keep trying to win them over? Why do you feel so responsible for making the conversation better? Why do you become someone you don't particularly like around them? Now these questions are not for self-blame. They are for self-understanding. You might realize this person reminds you of someone from your past. You might realize you're still trying to get approval from someone who was never generous with it. You might realize their criticism stings because part of you is afraid they're right. You might realize you call them negative because they say things out loud that you don't give yourself permission to say. You might realize the exhausting part is not only them, it's the version of you that shows up around them. The version that overexplains, the version that tries too hard, the version that goes quiet, the version that becomes sharp, the version that performs being fine, I'm fine, and then goes home and unpacks the whole thing with your partner, your friend, and your dog. And yes, this can be really confronting, but it's also where the freedom is. Because once you can see the pattern, you have choices you didn't have before. You can stop trying to win their approval. You can stop trying to change their mood, you can stop rehearsing the perfect response. You can stop making yourself smaller, nicer, quieter, or more agreeable so everyone else feels comfortable. You can decide this is who I'm going to be in this conversation. And then you practice it. Not perfectly, not every time, but more often. Because the truth is, some people may never become more positive. Some workplaces will always have someone who complains. Some families will always have the critic. Some friendship groups will always have that one person who brings a little storm cloud in their handbag. The work is not to become untouched by people. That would make you a robot and probably not a very fun one. The work is to know how to come back to yourself, to be able to sit in the meeting and not let one person's negativity decide your confidence. Able to attend the family lunch and not become 12 years old the minute someone makes a comment. To be able to listen to a friend without becoming their emotional dumping ground. To be able to stay kind without becoming available for everything. To be able to hold your own mood, your own values, and your own energy, even when someone else is being negative. And sometimes that alone is what changes the dynamic. Not because you force them to be more positive, you can't anyway. Not because you finally found the perfect sentence that made them see the light, but because you stopped organizing yourself around their behavior. That, my beautiful friend, is powerful. This is one of the reasons I created the soft strength salon. It's in the name, right? Because so much of our growth doesn't happen in theory. It happens in these ordinary, everyday moments. The meeting where someone's negativity throws you. The conversation where you know what you want to say, but you go quiet. The friendship where you keep giving more than actually feels good. The family dynamic where you become an old version of yourself before you've even taken your coat off. The workplace situation where you're trying to be professional, but inside you're irritated, you're hurt, you're bracing, or you're desperate to be understood. Inside the salon, we work with those moments, not as concepts, not as pretty ideas, not as here are three ways to be more confident and off you go. We work with the real conversations, real relationships, real decisions, and real patterns that are asking something of you now. We look at where you overexplain, go quiet, try to manage everyone else's reaction, where you soften when you want to be direct, when you become sharp-tongued when you actually wanted to be clear, where you give too much, stay too long, or leave yourself in order to keep the peace. Not by becoming hard, not by becoming cold, not by becoming someone you're not, but by building quiet, unshakable strength from the inside. Now, if this episode has made you realize that negative people are not only draining because of who they are, but because of who you become around them, the soft strength salon may be the room for you. And if you're not ready for the salon, or you'd like another beautiful place to begin, I have two complementary blueprints available for you that I have created with the utmost care. They're not throwaway downloads. They are thoughtful starting points for women who know something in them is ready to shift. The first is the unshakable woman blueprint, and this is for the woman who's trusted, capable, and intelligent, but still finds herself over preparing, over-proving, second guessing herself or quietly wondering if she really belongs in the room. The second is success was the warm-up. This is for the woman who's built so much of the life she once worked for and is now beginning to ask, what do I want now? Who am I becoming? Who is or what is this next chapter asking of me? And you'll find the link in the show notes, along with the invitation into the soft strength salon. And maybe this week the practice is simple. Notice the person whose negativity usually pulls you out of yourself. Notice what happens in your body before you respond. Ask yourself who you want to be in that moment. And then, as best you can, choose from there. Not perfectly, but humanly. Because you may not be able to change the negative person, but you can stop giving them your whole day. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for listening to Sky High Coaching Conversations. Enjoy the rest of your day.