How to Be Great, Part 4: Avoid Negative Energy

Negative energy limits you. It steals precious energy from you, makes you feel bad, and keeps you from achieving your dreams. In a world that isn’t perfect, only positive energy can help you grow into greatness.

The preparation for success is to identify and protect yourself from all forms of negative energy.

 

Negative People and Negative Energy

Negative people are resisting, refusing, disagreeable, pessimistic, detrimental, destroying, and limiting.

They don’t help you. They don’t make you stronger. Their number one goal is to SHUT YOU DOWN! And for no reason other than because they are negative. It has NOTHING to do with you; they just don’t enjoy life. Nothing is perfect, and their nature makes them react NEGATIVELY to everything.

Negative energy wears you out, takes the fun out of life, and kills all your dreams before they’re even given a chance. Negativity is that little voice that keeps saying, “You can’t, you suck, it’ll never happen.”

And WHY?! Why would anybody want that? How does this kind of thinking help ANYONE? How does negativity make anyone smarter, stronger, harder working, or luckier, or more likely to succeed? Why would we keep an idea lingering in our minds if it didn’t do anything for us? Negativity is useless and there’s no place for it in your life.

Negativity is USELESS!

If you ever want to do anything great with your life, you have to avoid all negative people and negativity.

 

Identifying negative people

The earlier parts of my life were some of the hardest years of my life because I didn’t know how to identify negativity. I didn’t have that inner confidence. Not knowing how to identify negativity made me an easy target for negative people. These are the people in your life who pretend to be your friend. They act like they’re helping you or doing you a favor but for some reason you just feel down and powerless when they’re around. They don’t do anything meaningful for you, and they’re aren’t even fun to be around.

The most obvious ways to identify negative people and/or negative energy:

 

Unsupportive

I call this the “dream-killer” trait. “Dream killers” ARE DANGEROUS and will drag you down in their mediocrity. “Dream killers” are those people who don’t believe in high ambitions. They have no dreams of their own and will certainly not support yours. They’re the ones calling you crazy every time you try to do something amazing, or different, or wildly ambitious. The worst dream killers are not only non-believers, they even get in your way! There are so many talented and hopeful individuals who will never get their chance in life because they’re surrounded by dream killers.

 

Jealous/Envious

It might be hard to imagine but there will always be people jealous of you for something. They want something you have but they don’t know how to get it and so they’ll resent you for being better looking, having more money, having a better bf/gf, driving a nice car, traveling to fun places, getting better grades, etc…the list goes on. It’s really just their insecurity. They’re insecure and mentally weak. They don’t realize you might actually be insecure about yourself for the same reasons! They don’t realize they could have all those same things if only they focused on themselves instead of you!

 

Critics (deconstructive)

Anybody that criticizes you in a way that doesn’t help you AND/OR offends you AND/OR boosts their ego should be avoided at all costs. I call these people haters. They’re very quick to judge and especially enjoy criticizing other people. It’s amazing, really, to have such a nasty disposition on life in general. It’s easy to be a hater because NOTHING IS PERFECT! But instead of improving things, they find it much easier to criticize.

 

Selfish

Selfish people only care about themselves. They don’t care about you or your dreams. They will take everything you have and ruin everything you worked for because they think it benefits them. They have a big ego that needs to feed itself by “taking” from everyone around them. Avoid them at all costs.

 

Negative energy from the outside

Negative strangers

The most common form of negativity will probably come from strangers. Go on youtube and read the comments section, and you’ll see what I mean. For some reason people feel awfully empowered to go around judging and hating people they don’t know. And that’s just how negative strangers work. They come up with a crazy reason in their own head to dislike you and then express it directly or indirectly.

Avoid them immediately. The more time you give to them, the more energy they will draw out from your life! Again, this is YOUR LIFE! There’s no reason why a hateful stranger should even get one second of your time. Their hateful opinions deserve none of your attention. THEY ARE NOTHING.

Negative coaches

Now this is kind of sad. These might be teachers, mentors, coaches, trainers, or otherwise people WHO WERE SUPPOSED TO HELP YOU. They were supposed to be making you better, boosting your skills and confidence. But instead, they do the opposite. They make you feel weak and pathetic, insecure and inadequate. Remember, a coach’s job is to improve you! And if you don’t feel like you’re improving and feeling better about yourself, you need to get a better coach.

Some of the worst coaches I’ve ever seen are the ones with the biggest ego. They care more about making themselves feel good than making you feel good. They’re the ones always forcing you to prove yourself. The ones making you feel like you’re not good enough to be coached by them, or that you’re lucky to even have them for a coach. They make you feel guilty for not having suffered the same way they suffered. NOW WHAT THE HELL KIND OF COACHING RELATIONSHIP IS THAT?!

Negative friends

This happens all the time! Many people will never be successful because they just don’t know how to choose good friends. Negative friends are basically “haters in disguise”. Maybe they were positive when you first met them but now they’ve turned negative because they become victims of negativity elsewhere in their life.

Friends are typically the first people you will go to when asking for advice or an opinion. Negative feedback over the years will only turn you into a negative person and look at the world in a negative way. It makes you mentally weak, mentally confined, and scared to take chances and dream big and work hard. It’s impossible to be successful when all you’re surrounded by is negativity.

Negative family

Negativity coming from the family is the saddest thing. Family was supposed to be a place of comfort and security, not just for your body, but for your mind, your hopes, dreams, ambitions, goals, and happiness. Unfortunately, it isn’t always the case. Maybe something tragic happened to your parents. Maybe they were denied their own dreams or subjected to negative parents themselves and now they’ve projected it back to you. It hurts to say that toxic parents are often the cause of failed dreams.

 

Negative energy from the inside

This is the worst part! Negative energy from the inside is the worst. If you have it, somebody might have said something so horrible to you that you’ve actually internalized it and now live it. Negative energy from the inside will always cause insecurity and lack of self-confidence. It gives you fear, doubt, and makes you think less of yourself. It closes opportunities in your life and makes life less fun. I don’t care how fear and doubt is supposed to make you “realistic”. Life is about making yourself the absolute best you can be and this won’t be possible if you got issues with yourself.

Most people identify themselves a certain way because other people MADE them feel that way. Your parents gave you a name, your teachers told you what you were good at, your friends defined your personality. Somewhere along the line, you forget to control your identity.

You forgot that you and only you should have the biggest impact on your life and your future. Don’t let anybody else define you. They don’t get to tell you what you are and aren’t good at. Everyone has talents, but talents don’t define your identity. That’s for you to decide. It’s your life; you get to choose what you want to be.

YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE WHAT YOU WANT TO BE…or else other people will choose for you.

 

The cost of being negative

Being a negative person turns you into the negative people I described above. It will cost you and you might not even realize it. People might avoid you. Not because they’re better than you but because they don’t want negativity in their own lives.

As a boxing coach, I find it hard to work with negative people. My job is to make people better and it’s harder to do when they’re full of insecurity. The number one trait holding people back from living the lives they dreamed of is insecurity. “Oh but what if I wasn’t born with natural reflexes? What if I CAN’T BE a good fighter?” No coach wants to hear that. There are so many fighters hustling to be the best and I would rather focus on the ones that haven’t given up on themselves a long time ago.

 

Over-coming weaknesses

While it is true that everyone has weaknesses and disadvantages, they CAN be overcome. Even if you can’t overcome it, you still have to try! All the great fighters had to overcome something. In fact, it’s usually their ACT of overcoming their weakness that made them great. Sometimes it’s the one thing that you fail at, that makes you go out and become the best at it. Some of the most successful individuals became great because they were motivated by being so terrible at something. The only way is to overcome your weakness is to SURROUND YOURSELF WITH GOOD PEOPLE AND DEVELOP YOURSELF FROM WITHIN.

Mike Tyson was too short.
Thomas Hearns had no chin.
Willie Pep had no power.

So what’s your weakness? What’s your excuse for not being great?

 

Dealing with Negativity

When it comes to people, the best thing you can do is to avoid them. Stop listening to them, stop talking to them. Don’t waste your time trying to argue, or reason, or help them. Stop all of it. If you keep coming back, then you’re asking for trouble.

Now what about people you can’t get rid of? You can’t get rid of negative family or negative co-workers. What you can do is develop a stronger mental shield. And this is something I feel everyone should develop as soon as possible. Because the stronger this mental shield, the more you can protect yourself and thrive even in the presence of negative energy. You have to be able to take criticism. You have to be able to accept the fact that people you don’t know, are going to look at you, and judge you, and hate what they see. And you need to have the confidence to know that this is perfectly fine! Because the more successful you become, the more haters you will have!

It’s ok for haters to exist,
it’s not ok for them to affect your life!

Negative people will always make you feel like it’s you that’s negative. They’ll blame your race, your language, your hair color, anything that would differentiate you from them could be blamed. They make everything about you when in fact it’s not. It’s about them, their issues, their failures, their lack of joy in life. And the moment you realize their negativity is because they’re unhappy with their own lives, you will no longer feel bad about yourself!

 

The moment you realize negative people are unhappy with themselves,
you no longer blame yourself for their negativity.

Haters will exist no matter what you do. I’ll use myself for instance. My passion is boxing, because it makes me happy. I built a website to help other boxers, like myself. My knowledge is helpful but it can always be improved. My focus of course is to help myself and help others as best as I can. My site is free for anybody to read; it’s not forced down anyone’s throat. I’m not spreading any negativity or causing harm to anybody. I don’t even have time to notice what other people are doing. Simply put, I’m minding my own business. So far so good, right?

…but here come the haters!!!

Every now and then I get a couple comments on my articles or videos of people telling me that not only am I wrong, but I’m also stupid and inexperienced. WOW, really? So let’s say I AM stupid and that I AM wrong. But how does them saying negative things benefit me or benefit a reader or benefit the sport of boxing or anybody at all? It’s a useless comment, I can’t do anything with it. And haters are basically a bunch of useless people.

And then there are the people “just trying to help”. I’m referring to ones that like to push their knowledge *COUGH* EGO *COUGH* onto others. These are the trolls who argue back and forth on the internet because they feel the absolute need to prove a point (maybe ’cause their superficial identity is dependent on this?). These people aren’t helping anybody either. How can you possibly be helping when you focus your energy on the people arguing against you as opposed to the people who want to listen to you? Not only are they not helping anyone, but they’re also creating enemies and feeding the negative energy in arguments.

If these people actually wanted to help, they’d be focusing on their own website or their own personal goals. Think about it. If I was a Christian who believed in Christian values, I wouldn’t waste my time preaching at a Catholic church.

Protect Your Future

You have to protect your future! You are responsible for your own life. You can’t afford to waste your energy on people and things that don’t improve your life. You need every last bit of energy, every opportunity, every shred of hope, and all the love you can gather in order to be successful. TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF AND YOUR FUTURE! Control the type of energy you let into your life!

If I see something I don’t like, I simply delete it from my life. I don’t have time for people like that. There are so many things that I enjoy in life, friends I want to be with, places I want to see, things I want to do. Life is so amazing but unfortunately I won’t live forever to enjoy it all. And so I really don’t have any time for negativity in my life. I also don’t have time to be negative because I’m so busy being positive!

It’s really important that you surround yourself with positive people because this will make you go out and do positive things! Hang out with a bunch of adventurous, free-spirited people, and guess what you will become! Hang out with musicians and artists, and guess what you will become. Hang out with happy, successful people, AND GUESS WHAT YOU WILL BECOME!

When the end of time comes; you don’t want to be the guy crying on the street because his family left him, his friends forgot him, his business partner cheated him, etc and etc. And all that starts with today. Surround yourself with the people who care about you and want to be a part of your success and/or help you in whatever way they can. Surround yourself with positive energy and be happy forever!

 

Read the other parts of this series:

• How to Be Great, Part 1: Deciding to Be Great
• How to Be Great, Part 2: Strengthen the Mind
• How to Be Great, Part 3: Change Your Life
• How to Be Great, Part 5: Dealing with Failure