by Janelle Legge | Nov 15, 2016 | Wellbeing |
Are you tired of negative people draining you of your energy and enthusiasm for life? Maybe you’ve spent way too long politely and stoically listening to them? Hoping that they will finally ease up on dumping their negative vibes all over you? But they don’t.
If you’re nodding your head in agreement, then it’s time to limit your exposure to negative people, or in some cases disengage from them entirely. Because the impacts of spending too much time around negative people can be insidious and long-lasting:
5 Top Reasons To Stop Spending Time With Negative People
# 1 Increased Self-Doubt
When you’re pioneering your own path in life and feeling a bit vulnerable because you’re venturing into the unknown, it doesn’t take much for a negative person’s remark or disapproving vibe to trigger self doubt in you. It can make you start questioning whether the path you’ve chosen is the right one for you. If you don’t limit your exposure to toxic negative people by setting good boundaries, you can end up losing a lot of precious time second-guessing yourself and your decisions. Robbing you of your optimism and natural exuberance for life.
# 2 Low Self-Esteem
When the negative people in your life are family members, not getting their validation and approval can erode your self-esteem and self-confidence. If this is the case, you need to get some distance from them so you can grow your own psychological roots, and a more robust level of self-esteem. It’s about intentionally disengaging from the negative thinking patterns and beliefs that have been unconsciously passed down from one generation to the next.
#3 Compromised Wellbeing
Negative thinking is bad for your brain. So it’s important to be aware of what you’re thinking and what ideas and views you’re absorbing from other people. Good mental health and overall wellbeing requires positive, optimistic thinking. Repetitive toxic thinking is like a virus. It can deplete you physically and emotionally and compromise your immune system.
#4 Restlessness And Discontent
Regular exposure to negative thinking messes with your desire nature. When this happens it doesn’t matter what opportunities come your way, nothing ever seems quite right for you, or good enough. You struggle to value what you’ve already achieved. You’re always feeling restless and never quite satisfied.
# 5 Abandoning Your Dreams
There’s nothing more demotivating and draining than ending up on the wrong pathway in life because you’ve spent too much time listening to negative people. If this is you, then you need to get back on the right track. Because the longer you leave it, the bigger the task of course-correcting and realigning with your dreams and vision of how you want your life to be.
You are constantly being imprinted and shaped by the 3-5 people you spend the most time with. So if you’re wanting to live a positive, self-directed and successful life, you need to be around like-minded, optimistic people who support and encourage you. Doing this will accelerate your growth like nothing else. You’ll also feel happier, more confident and fulfilled.
by Janelle Legge | Aug 16, 2016 | Anxiety |
Knowing how to make good decisions that support you is vital to living a fulfilling and self-directed life. It’s how you reach, and then exceed your potential. So if you’re constantly being pushed around by fear-based, anxiety driven thinking, it’s time to stop listening to your Lizard fear-brain and start making decisions from a more empowered place.
Fear-based thinking seems to be on the rise. This makes sense given what’s going on around the world. We’re living in incredibly fast-changing and dynamic times. Change is something that your Lizard brain, the more primitive part of your brain that takes care of fight, flight or freeze responses, just doesn’t like. But when you’re letting this survival-driven part of your brain run the show and inform all of your important decisions, you’re dramatically limiting the scope of your choices in life. And when you constantly do this you end up stagnating. You feel even more frustrated, anxious and uncertain.
Knowing how to make good decisions in life that aren’t subconsciously driven by fear is the antidote to resisting change and getting stuck at your current level of success.
Flipping From Fear To Self Confidence: How To Make Good Decisions
#1 Centre And Ground
The first essential step to learning how to overcome fear is knowing how to centre and ground yourself. This instantly puts you into the present moment. And when you’re fully in the moment, you’re not ruminating on the past or constantly fast forwarding into the future. You’re then able to self-reflect.
Here are some effective ways to do this:
Breathing techniques, moving meditations like yoga, drawing, painting, gardening, swimming, body work – any activity that gets your attention fully immersed and engaged in the now and that grounds your energy is always the first step in disengaging from your Lizard brain’s fear-based, worst case scenario thinking. It’s getting out of your head and into your body and the Now.
#2 Trust Your Intuition and Gut Feel
When you know how to stop getting caught up in negative thinking and self-defeating scripts you’re able to screen out all the noise and tune into your intuition and gut feel on what’s best for you. Often you already know what’s going to bring you the most joy, fulfilment and opportunity. But when you’re constantly letting your Lizard brain butt in and tell you why it’s not such a good idea, you end up doubting yourself, and can’t see the woods for the trees.
That little voice deep down inside of you is there for a reason.
The more you listen to it and take what it’s trying to tell you seriously, the stronger and more valuable it becomes. Intuition is a valuable source of data. An energetic, non-verbal read on what’s going on within and around you. Most successful people totally get the value of it. But it often gets dismissed as ‘woo woo women’s fluff’ in the West because it’s not logical or considered to be evidence-based. Yet the more you ignore your intuition, the more frustrated and unfulfilled you end up in the long run. So stop listening to the limbic-brain, fear-based people around you, and start paying attention to what your intuition is trying to tell you. It will change the quality of your present and future life.
#3 Surround Yourself With Positive Self-Confident People
To maintain a positive mindset so that you’re able to make good decisions, you need to have self-confidence and self-belief. If you’re struggling to take control of your Lizard brain and learn how to make good decisions in life that support and nourish your body, mind, and spirit – then you need to seek out positive can-do types who already know how to do this.
This is the fastest way to learn any new skill. Subconsciously you’ll start to absorb and model aspects of their behaviours, mindset, attitudes, and beliefs. That’s also why you need to be discerning around who you choose to spend the most time with. Because you’re impacted the most by the 3 to 5 people around you each day. So make sure they are people who are positive self-actualizers.
Don’t waste years buying into a part of your brain that’s just not designed to encourage you to seek out new opportunities and growth. Irrational fears, inner-resistance, and anxiety-driven faulty beliefs are the biggest success killers around. They create all kinds of maladaptive, negative thinking habits and behaviours that can be tricky to dismantle and replace with more realistic and supportive ones if you’ve been holding onto them for years. Save yourself time and sort it out now so that 10 years later you’re not in the same spot, feeling frustrated and exhausted.
by Janelle Legge | Mar 9, 2016 | Relationships |
Are you basing your self worth on whether someone likes you? If you are, this can become a slippery slope to low self confidence and low self esteem. Not knowing how to develop self confidence leads to inconsistent behaviours, sending out mixed messages to others and not being clear on what exactly it is that you want. Because all your energy and focus is on other people. So you’re never really sure about what you really want and need in order to feel happy, successful and fulfilled. It’s a painful and uncertain way to be in the world and negatively impacts all areas of your life – your personal life, your relationships and your career.
Knowing How To Develop Self Confidence Is A Game Changer
Learning how to develop self confidence when it’s not your strong point, is a total game changer in your relationships and life. Particularly if you’re someone who is highly sensitive to whether someone else likes you or not. Being overly sensitive to other people liking you often stems from not getting enough positive, valuing experiences growing up. Regular day to day experiences of positive validation, encouragement and recognition for just who you are, regardless of what you do or achieve, are the building blocks to healthy self confidence and esteem. It’s not getting enough of these positive validating experiences growing up that can lead to feeling insubstantial as a person. When you don’t feel solid and secure in your own right, it’s hard to fully immerse yourself in the present, because a part of you almost feels like you don’t really exist in the minds of other people. You don’t have a sense of your own agency. You don’t fully believe that what you do has a positive meaningful impact in the world. You’re almost apologising for your very existence by being constantly tuned in to everyone else’s needs and feelings except your own. Because growing up you worked out that that’s what got you love, approval and validation. But it’s based on a false sense of self.
Having a high sensitivity to what other people feel or think about you also comes from being around critical, judgmental or self-absorbed people growing up. When you’re younger you don’t have the capacity or life experience to understand where adults are coming from when they’re negative, critical or emotionally unavailable. Kids tend to take on the burden of this, interpreting it as having done something wrong, or not being good enough or worthy enough to be loved unconditionally. They don’t feel they have a right to be who they naturally are.
This is not about blaming parents or people from your past.
It’s about becoming more self-aware. Learning how to rebuild your confidence and self-worth.
When Perfectionism And People Pleasing Compensate For Low Self-Confidence: Case Study
Bianca (*not her real name) had just turned 30 and was constantly getting into a confused muddle when it came to dating. She would date someone for a few months and then get frustrated when the guy she was dating wasn’t responding at the pace and speed that she wanted. Being able to just stay in the present was almost impossible for her. There was constant anxiety around needing to know whether the guy she was dating really liked her. The more she liked a guy, the more she had a deep seated fear and belief that the relationship wouldn’t last. That he would lose interest in her and look for someone else. Someone who was sexier, more attractive, more desirable, [more …]. The negative comparison list went on and on in her head and eventually became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Guys eventually tired of Bianca’s mixed messages and vibes. One minute she appeared confident and together, only to then slip back into negative and self-defeating patterns and beliefs that sabotaged the relationship. Bianca just couldn’t relax and wait and see how things developed.
Rejection by guys would then send Bianca into a total tailspin. Her worst fears had yet again become realized. Her self esteem would plummet and it would take her months to regain her confidence and start to feel good about herself. Technically gifted in her chosen field of work, Bianca had wanted to progress to a team leader role to broaden her skills and career options. But the feedback she’d received was that the company wasn’t prepared to put her into the leadership talent pool until she sorted out the issues in her personal life which were impacting her performance and potentially derailing her career. Bianca’s manager knew she had the potential to achieve a lot more, so encouraged Bianca to sort out her personal life so that she could progress in her career.
When we looked at what was behind Bianca’s anxiety around dating and how she approached most of her life, it was around perfectionism and constantly needing approval from others. Never feeling good enough or worthy enough in her own right as a child, Bianca had become the ‘good girl’ at home and at school. Both parents were struggling with issues in their relationship whilst Bianca was growing up and were often preoccupied. So Bianca discovered that focusing on everyone else’s needs, being perfect and always doing well at school is what got her the positive attention she craved. It made her feel liked. But these feelings never lasted and were fleeting at best because they were based on Bianca developing a false sense of self, shaped mostly around perfectionism and other people’s needs and agendas.
How To Develop Self Confidence:
Self Acceptance, Self Empathy And Self Love
At first, learning to just focus on her own wants, needs and vulnerabilities seemed like a Herculean effort to Bianca. She had spent most of her life looking outwards, not inwards. Insight-oriented psychotherapy helped Bianca understand the forces that had shaped her and why deep down she felt so anxious and insecure. It was about getting to know and fully embrace who she really was and what she wanted. Bianca hadn’t felt entitled to receive love and acceptance for just being her, outside of her academic achievements and people pleasing. She’d grown up with a faulty belief that she wasn’t worthy or good enough to have someone in her life that would love her for who she was. It was realizing that she didn’t have to keep striving to be perfect. In her dating life her perfectionism and lack of self confidence was driving guys away.
Self confidence comes from quietly knowing deep down inside that you’re good enough just as you are. It’s being confident in your abilities and okay with your vulnerabilities. Realizing that being vulnerable and not perfect is a normal part of being human. It’s also about getting enough positive real time experiences where you feel valued. Knowing that what you say and do counts. That your feelings and needs matter. It’s also about being able to give other people permission to be who they really are. Accepting that they are allowed to say “No” to you, just as you’re able to say “No” to them. And that “No” doesn’t mean that you’re defective in some way or unworthy of being loved.
Bianca had to learn how to develop self confidence by not personalising someone else’s choice and right to say “No”. Accepting that it was okay to give herself and others permission to be who they are and not try and constantly control situations and outcomes. To let things move along at a pace that felt healthy and safe for both parties, which then started to free things up. Trusting that she would be okay regardless of whether it worked out or not with the guy she was dating was a huge mindset shift.
Discovering How To Build Self Confidence Made The Guys Bianca Dated Feel More Comfortable Around Her
The guys Bianca dated stopped feeling pushed around by her emotional insecurities and constant need for certainty that things would progress to the next level after only a few dates. Bianca is now into her second year of dating the same guy. A first for her. That’s because Bianca took the time to learn more about herself and how to develop self confidence that endured. She became more self-aware around her strengths, vulnerabilities and the beliefs and behaviours that kept tripping her up and impacting her present. Bianca has developed a new level of confidence that’s far more solid and real. Her self confidence is no longer precariously based on perfectionism and a constant need to be liked.
* All identifying features have been removed from this article to protect the privacy of my client.
Janelle Legge is a Psychotherapist, Leadership, Mindfulness and Wellbeing Consultant and Coach who specialises in Relationships, Career Success, Work-Life Integration and Wellbeing. Janelle sees clients in person in Sydney and works with clients around the world via Skype. To book a skype session with Janelle click here.
