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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this video I'm going to talk about how to deal with difficult and toxic people so let's talk about how to deal with people in your life who are bringing you down these are people that I call either difficult or I like the word toxic so what's the secret with dealing with these types of people because these types of people can destroy your life there's really a spectrum a spectrum of toxicity of other people in your life sometimes you have mildly toxic people who are just more like an annoyance or frustration but then it can get so bad on the other end on the other end of the spectrum that it really gets into abusive territory just feel like very dysfunctional territory and one of the things that's really key to understand about your life is that you are like a sponge and no matter how personally developed you are how successful you are how happy you are how optimistic you are if you are living in a negative environment whether it's a negative physical environment but here we're talking about negative relationships if you're living in this kind of negative relationship environment then this is robbing you of your potential and it's making basically making you miserable and these people they're dragging you down because they're constantly feeding you with negativity and pessimism and limiting beliefs and maybe anger or other things and these are rubbing off on you right because you're the sponge so you're soaking it all in and it's affecting your psyche and you have to work really really hard to counteract these effects so in this video what I want to do is want to cover some of the ways that you can go about handling these kinds of people and it give me different techniques and strategies basically my philosophy on this is really simple it's the philosophy that life is too short for dealing with difficult and toxic people I mean like why why make life more difficult for yourself life is already pretty challenging you're already working really hard on your own life on your ownself why are you bringing yourself down with these with these toxic people there's like there's no reason for it right so my strategy here and my solution ultimately is to get rid of these people out of my life I want to live a life where the people that are in my life are supporting me encouraging me bringing and positivity they're building they're building something with me rather than going against me and so that's kind of the the ultimate solution Iowa I really want to get to like the root cause of it here because a lot of people what they do what I see them doing is they're so stuck like in the social matrix they're so worried about being relied relying upon various social relationships that they're not willing to get rid of these stalks of people out of their lives and what this does is it just it creates this like spiral of negativity that goes down and down and down and it brings you with it and there's no need to live a life like that in fact what I'm gonna argue is that you can't really self actualize you can't really create a powerful and happy fulfilling life if you're surrounding yourself with these types of folks Jim Rohn love Jim Rome has a lot of great wisdom one of the most wise things that he said was that you are the average of the top five associates that you hang out with what this means is that if you take and make a list of all the people in your life and you write a number down for how many hours per week you're spending with with each one of those people and you then rank everybody according to the number of hours you spend with them the top five people that you spend the most time with these are the people that have the most influence on you it's a very simple theory basically whoever you hang out with is we are going to absorb into yourself and you kind of become the average of all that well if this principle is true then who do you want to surround yourself with positive empowering people or negative disempowering people if you do this exercise you actually write this out you actually tally up the numbers you might be shocked to discover that you hang out with some people a lot more than others you might also be shocked to discover that some of those people that you hang out with and spend five or ten or even twenty hours a week with that those are super negative super pessimistic super miserable and depressive anger prone type of people and maybe that's why you're not getting the success you want on your life is because you're around these types of people all the time you're stuck in this kind of environment if that's the case then we'll help you sort that out right now let's talk a little bit more about the types of people that we're talking about here I want to get very specific take the abstract bring it down into the concrete so here are some of the people that qualify as being toxic basically it can be anybody but here are some categories that you really want to look out for your boss your co-workers and/or business partners that you have these are people that usually spend a lot of time with because you put a lot of time into your work so if these people are negative you really want to watch out for that next is clients or customers that you have if you're self-employed you're working with clients and customers or if you're even working for somebody else you might be working with clients and customers that are toxic wanna watch out for those of course you want to watch out for your friends what kind of circle of friends are you keeping around you you have a lot of choices about what kind of friends you keep next is of course your intimate relationships girlfriend boyfriend wife husband you got to really watch out for that because of course you're you submit relationship is your most intimate relationship so that's where you get the closest to the other person it's also probably your relationship that you spend the most time in or one of the most so toxicity there is very is very damaging and finally and this is the most difficult one really it's it's family your mom your dad your brother your sister aunts uncles cousins and of course your own children so this category is a pretty broad and there's a lot of stuff in here and it's difficult to deal with it because family issues tend to be the most like sticky and thorny issues because these are the people that are the most difficult to cut from your life these are the people that you grew up with these are the people that you probably want to keep around for a long long time to come so those are the categories right and anybody that these categories didn't cover other types of people they they can also be toxic basically anybody could be toxic but these are the categories are the most important to look at and then the next thing that I want to get really clear on is what do we mean by toxic what is toxicity actually mean because this could mean different things to different people it's a pretty subjective term let's break it down a little bit here's what I consider toxic and these are the things you really want watch out for one is depression people who are very depressed feeling really down on themselves - is negativity limiting beliefs there can be people that aren't per se depressed but they're always pessimistic they're always casting doubts they're always talking about how stuff can't happen stuff won't work they're always playing the victim role and they've got all these sorts of beliefs about how life can't allow them to do what they want to do and how it can't allow you to do what you want to do see it like it starts to rub off on you next is really dogmatic and close-minded people so these are folks that are just like really really set in their ways right they have certain sets of beliefs maybe religious beliefs political beliefs business beliefs life beliefs and they just they just have to have it that way and they want you to fit into that one particular mold that they're playing so they're playing a role they want you to play the same role like really close minded people next is anger prone people and violent people so anger anger could be a spectrum you can have mild forms of anger and then you can get worse and worse and worse and really devolve into a full-out violence or fights throwing objects like that kind of really toxic stuff after that comes drama dramas horrible drama you know those people there's always there's always something happening in their life doesn't matter what the circumstances are they always make it dramatic they always take a molehill they make a huge mountain out of it it's always up and down and up and down like it's predictable these people just have a very turbulent dramatic lifestyle and that's just like how they live but that's not how you want to live and finally criminal activity maybe your friends are involved in criminal activity maybe someone in your family is maybe your someone at your job maybe your company is involved with some sort of shady activities that you don't wanna be sucked into but criminal activity is a really dangerous one because once you have those types of people around you you tend to get more and more sucked into that and then you're prone to get involved with that even if you didn't intend to from the very beginning and those people can be like real leeches on your life because their life is so upside-down that it can't help just like rubbing off and infecting you so that one is really important to consider as far as Texas City goes and lastly I would say people with addictions it could be hardcore addictions but even softcore addictions so of course if you have people around you who are using drugs and really involved with something pretty heavy like that that's obviously very toxic but even more milder forms of addictions maybe your friends are addicted to television or addicted to video games and they suck you into it too or maybe they're addicted to food they go out and eat all the time maybe your family is addicted to food I know that's how my family was so that stuff can be really toxic to you and keep you from from progressing and breaking out of those negative habits so what's the ultimate solution we talked about the types of people we talked about the talk of specific types of toxicities what's the ultimate solution for how to deal with this problem it's actually pretty simple it's to cut people cut people out of your life it's so simple that sometimes people forget that this is an option right literally what you do is you take a scalpel and you cut that person out of your life like a tumor you excise a tumor from your body this is a very apt metaphor for what you're doing because this is what's happening because of this sponge-like effect that your mind has and it soaks everything up because of this averaging law that we talked about from Jim Rohn it really is the case that once negativity seeps into your system and just kind of like builds and builds and it metastasizes like a cancer and it just like spreads throughout your whole body spreads through your through your mind and then sooner or later it starts to infect your habits and affects your behaviors and infects your ways of thinking it really colors your perspective of the world and so this can be a dangerous thing as it if it happens like over prolonged periods of time months and years go by so what you really got to do is you've got a you got to build up the courage to cut these kinds of people out of your life just simply cut them out one of the things I want you to kind of acknowledge to yourself and admit to yourself right now is that it doesn't matter who if someone is violating your standards your principles and your values in life then that person can be cut and it doesn't matter who it is bosses and co-workers friends customers they can all be cut and even family can be cut this is where sometimes people have trouble is with family they'll say but Leo family like you can't cut family and maybe they you might even say something like well I have this really good friend old friend from from middle school I've known him for four decades now I can't cut him I can't cut her I can't cut this client it's a really important client I can't cut my boss off my work off so there's all these sorts of excuses and stories about who you can and can't cut and why there are certain people in your life that you can never cut you got except that everyone can be cut you have to have boundaries you have to have principles the human being you hold yourself to principles you hold other people to principles this doesn't mean you have to be like a stickler and just for any stupid reason you cut someone off that's not what I'm saying I'm saying what something really violates an important principle of yours they get cut of course the closer the person is to you the more important they are then the more a little more leeway you can give them but even with people like your mom your dad your brother your sister even your own children you still have to have boundaries because if you don't set any boundaries subconsciously people realize that you have no boundaries and even people that are really close to you what they'll do is they'll basically just kind of like they'll see what they can get away with and will get away with more and more and more and more especially these toxic people they're not really self developed people they're not doing their operating from a place of high consciousness they're just kind of like really running their life almost like an animal it's very like an animalistic type of lifestyle very low consciousness just kind of like doing the easy stuff in life and that is a type of person they'll tend to just like demand more and more and more life out of you right and it'll be a bigger and bigger and bigger drag so I find that with those types of people boundaries are even more important so right now acknowledge yourself that there are circumstances under which you will cut anybody right even someone that's really close to even a child of yours at some point if your child starts to behave in such a ridiculous way just doing some like totally wrong things after a certain while you have to set set some boundaries and you have to enforce those boundaries those boundaries have to have teeth you can't just be issuing like idle threats because people quickly learn that it's just it's just like empty threats and then they just keep breaking and breaking those boundaries of yours so some people you're gonna cut as a last resort that would be your family other people maybe you'd be less you know less you have less reservations to cut how do you cut someone out of your life it's actually pretty simple there's depending on the type of person how close they are to you how important they are to you you know there's different situations but here are some ideas one is you sit down with the person you really tell them the problems that you have with them and then you tell them that that's it it's over don't contact me anymore I'm not contacting you and just like draw a line the other thing you could do is you could simply like delete the person's number if it's someone that's more of a casual acquaintance just delete their number don't contact them anymore block their number block their emails block whatever means of communication there is just like literally block it or stop responding to them if it's the case that you're in a relationship and it's like an intimate relationship that you're dealing with then break up with that person breakups are really tough but sometimes you got to do them even when they're really tough if you're in a marriage and the person is really toxic consider divorce that can be a long and nasty and ruling process but hey it's better than sitting through a toxic marriage for 10 20 30 years you're not gonna be able to sit in that for a long time it's just gonna like it's gonna rot you it's gonna rot your soul so you gotta like you gotta cut it off before it gets even worse than it is if it's with a career and in business consider quitting your job or changing jobs or transferring to a different department doing a different type of job within the company if you're in a if you got in a bad department if you're the boss or you're self-employed and you're you have employees then consider consider firing bad employees if you have contracts with customers or clients that are bad cut off those contracts say no to those contracts even if they are gonna bring you business and if worse comes to worse and you're in a really negative environment maybe you're in a really bad part of the city really bad part of the state part of the country maybe you're in a in a very dangerous or like toxic country even somewhere in the third world then consider relocating worse comes to worse find a new new part of the city or go to a new city or go to a new state or go to a new country if if you have to do that because your environment is very influential on the kind of life that you have the kind of emotions you in a feel and the kind of success you get so take this stuff seriously of course you don't need to cut everybody sometimes you it's possible to do a roof like a reform like a reformation you can sit down if somebody's really violating your values if you've had enough you're like fed up with all the text toxicity and negativity and anger and all that stuff then you can sit down with that person and you can lay out what your boundaries are what your principles are what your expectations are it's going to be a difficult talk but you can have that talk and then you can see what happens sometimes that kind of talk will really change that person it'll be kind of like a light bulb when there they'll say oh wow I didn't even realize I was hurting you so bad I didn't realize I was I was messing up your life with my toxicity and my negativity let me see if I can change something and sometimes they'll do that because they value the relationship and they know that you'll cut them off if you don't right there's that like seriousness to you but then of course some of these people there's so there's there's such a low consciousness state that they can't help themselves maybe they're addicted to stuff maybe they're chronically depressed maybe they're just like so negative maybe they have a lot of bad habits and maybe they don't want to change maybe they don't care about changing this is actually probably gonna be the most common case they these people simply don't care they don't want to change they're not going to accommodate you and they're gonna keep repeatedly violating your values they're not really gonna listen to you even if you sit down and talk to them they'll just continue running on autopilot and continue breaking and breaking and breaking your boundaries you have to be smart about this you have to become a good judge of character right this is something you develop as you grow older the human being is you get like a good eye for who's a good character in life and who's a bad character you know according to your own values it's not an objective thing it's a subjective thing but you get a good eye for that and then you can see what kind of people will keep on those bad habits because usually human beings we run on patterns we're very very like simple minded creatures when we're stuck in a bad loop of habits we just kind of keep going and going and going down that road and it gets like worse and worse and worse and some people they just like can't help it they're they're incorrigible you got to look out for those and then when you see that that's that type of person and you think like there's no way that guy's going to reform then steer clear those are the people you got to cut and then of course if your boundaries keep getting broken repeatedly then you just decide to cut that person off okay so that's as far as cutting goes what happens if you can't cut the person can't cut them off why would this happen here's a metaphor for you I think it's a good metaphor it's a chess metaphor imagine that I'm playing white you're playing black we got sport like this in chess they have a scenario that you can get yourself into it's really kind of a pickle of a scenario and it's called a skewer what is a skewer so you're the black player I'm the white player let's say your king is in the middle of the board right here your queen is here in the corner and it's on a diagonal from from your king now I've got a bishop a bishop is a piece that moves diagonally I'm white what I do is I put my I put my bishop here in the corner and it's diagonally right across and it checks your king and your queen is right behind it this is called a skewer why is it a skewer because what happens is that because your king is in check now you have to move your king but if you move your king then I can take your Queen because now your your queen is vulnerable and the Queen is the most important piece but you can't move your Queen first because your king is in check basically in this situation what happens is that you really exposed yourself you left yourself very vulnerable and now because you did that strip from a strategic standpoint now I can just position my my Bishop right here and I basically got you by the balls and so this is ultimately the the most fundamental reason of why you can't cut people from your life so easily is because you've exposed yourself and you've put yourself strategically in a bad position and so now you're you're there and they've got you by the balls so what does this mean well one solution to figure out how to deal with toxic people when you can't cut them out is kind of a long term solution and this is to actually sit down and redesign your life so that you're no longer vulnerable you're no longer exposed and you're no longer relying on these people then you can cut them off because here's some problems you might have maybe you want to cut off that person over there but you can't because you're relying on him financially he literally pays your bills or he pays your rent he pays for your food so what can you do you can't really cut them off because you got to eat you got to pay the rent you're not financially independent basically what about with intimate relationships they're the thing that could have you by the balls is you either want love or companionship or sex and so that's the thing that you want and you feel like you're getting out from in this relationship and so you can't cut her off or you can't cut him off because you need that exchange that's going on there you don't really have relationship abundance you don't have sexual abundance that's the problem you have there what about with with work with employment situations well maybe you're relying on somebody who is giving you employment opportunities maybe you're relying on somebody who is helping you to grease the wheels for your business and make stuff happen there and so that's important to you and you don't want to just cut that person off because you'd lose something that's very valuable there well that shows you that you're relying on bad characters and business and you're not independent with your business or with your employment what about with your friends sometimes your friends you really like your friends you have a whole history built up with your friends sometimes your friends are like a good shoulder for you to cry on so they give you kind of like emotional stability so that might be something that keeps you attached to a friend who's being toxic to you and there again you're kind of putting yourself in a compromising situation and also with business you might have a client or customer maybe you have a big client somebody who's going to give you millions of dollars to to make something happen but this person is also toxic and so on the one hand you don't want to do it on the other hand you do want to do it and so you're in this bind which you really don't want to avoid as you're thinking about how to re-engineer your life is these kinds of binds and skewering situations so long term the root of this of this problem is solved here is you think about how do i make myself independent how do I make myself have financial independence and abundance how do I myself have a relationship and sexual abundance so I'm not needy there how do I get myself abundance in my business and abundance with my friends once you build up all this abundance then actually it's very easy you can enforce your boundaries very easily because you don't need any particular individual in your life that's a powerful place to come from so this is not something you can create immediately but this is something you start to work on so if you have a situation where you feel like you're trapped the the bright side there is that you can sit down and say okay I'm trapped now but over the next year or two I can untrap myself let me see what kind of steps I need to take to untrap myself and then go ahead and take those steps the next thing you can do is if you can't cut a person simply limit your exposure to that person sit down and ask yourself how many hours a week am i spending with this person is it five hours 10 hours 20 hours well if it's something like 20 hours let's say maybe with a co-worker you're spending 20 hours that's 20 hours of toxicity that's quite a lot of time if you can reduce that to 15 hours or 10 hours or even 5 hours that would be pretty good that means you may be you can't cut that person off entirely you don't have that authority not your job he's a co-worker okay but maybe you can do what you can do is you can just like limit your time and exposure with that person cut it in half it's gonna have your toxicity it's pretty like simple kind of obvious thing and you can do with my little creative ways about how to limit your exposure even to your family even to your kids if they're really toxic to your life even to your spouse even to your girlfriend or boyfriend you know for now at least two whole things over hopefully in the long run you're kind of working to solve that stuff more at the root like I was talking about just earlier the other thing you can do is you can add more positive people into your life so let's say you've got someone who's really negative in your life you can't cut them out for whatever reason you're in a bind but what you can do is you can add more positive influences into your life this could be people but also the next thing is that you can add influences that aren't just face to face people they could also be like digital media so for example listening to self-help videos so I'll help audios reading high-quality books going to seminars it's kind of stuff this can be one of your associations when Jim Rohn is talking about those five associates you hang out with the most well if you spend a lot of your time reading or if you spend a lot of your time watching these videos or somebody else's videos you know stuff that is positive and uplifting and aspiring to you then that's a that's like a that's like a virtual associate that you have and that can help you to kind of like pull you out from a negative situation that you're in face to face with somebody so if you can't cut the negative influences at least raise the positive influences good so those are some ideas for if you can't cut somebody and lastly what I want to cover here is what do you do in the heat of the moment so let's say that you're dealing with a toxic person and of course everything we've talked about now is kind of like a long-term strategy but what if somebody literally like blows up in your face let's say you're sitting there at home watching TV clicking through the channels and somebody let's say your spouse or your girlfriend or boyfriend they burst through the door it's a it's drama it's anger the fruit they're throwing stuff they're yelling at you like this is happening right and now you're like in the heat of the moment what do you do how do you handle that situation well the problem here is that you allowed yourself to be in this situation in the first place so I really want you to realize that this problem has to be fixed much earlier in life right you got to ask yourself like why am I in this situation in the first place why am i allowing this kind of person to be in my life but okay let's say it's too late for that now you should have thought about that before but let's say you didn't so now what do you do well really this these types of people the best thing to do and this is difficult there's not to engage them don't engage them don't engage them mentally and definitely don't image them physically try not to engage them verbally either because what you're going to do if you engage them is you're going to get into like a mudslinging contest and because they're in a low consciousness state and you get into a low consciousness state it just starts to devolve into something nasty and nothing good ever comes from that you're not gonna get any piece of gold or you know some beautiful piece of wisdom from that kind of interaction with somebody that only comes from all like a high consciousness type of interaction so the best thing to do there is just try to like distance yourself as much as you can if you and walk out walk out of the house walk out of the car walk out of the office walk out of the building right just like leave if you're on the phone call hang up the phone if you're getting text messages like block the texts if you're shooting emails like cut off that email thread it's like very simple very obvious but a lot of people what they do is they could just I get triggered and triggered and triggered into it and it's difficult because you're trying to work on yourself you're trying to do the best you can this person comes in maybe they're totally in the wrong they're violating your standards and your boundaries maybe you've already talked to that person a lot of time a lot of times about it and they still keep doing it so you're very frustrated obviously and this is going to take this is going to take the most from you to maintain that kind of a equanimity or evenness of mind and that's that's the best way to handle this situation is to not react emotionally at all to be detached from the outcome totally emotionally unreactive just like cool collected and practicing mindfulness this is where mindfulness practice really helps where meditation helps I have a lot of different videos out there that tell you how to deal with stress how to deal with anger how to deal with with negativity from other people and how to like calm your own emotions there are very different techniques that you can use just like to calm yourself down in the heat at the moment and of course if you practice meditation every morning like you're supposed to be doing and you've been doing that habitually for for weeks and months every single day then that makes you grounded that makes you more even keeled that makes you easier to it makes it easier for you to deal with kind of difficult people simply by not reacting to them and you see that when you don't react to them a lot of times these people just kind of like they settle down or even if they don't settle down at least you don't feed into their anger and their their negativity it's a lot of times that's the worst thing is when you start to feed into it and it creates like a this cyclone so practice walking away and practice mindfulness don't engage these people also don't be too judgmental of these people a lot of times what will tend to do is we see someone doing something very wrong in our life and we'll say oh how could he how could she what are they doing what are they thinking and then we start getting too this kind of judgment mode that's also a low consciousness trap that you don't wanna get caught in in fact I have a video called how to exploit people to grow yourself which tells you kind of an advanced technique that I've learned about how to reframe in your mind these situations where people are doing stupid stuff stuff that isn't right according to your values how to reframe that instead of judging them use that to actually build yourself up to develop wisdom and see okay so they're doing something weird there how am i doing something similar my own life and basically what you use you do is you use those people as a mirror to show you how you could improve yourself because you always want to be focused on yourself versus focused on trying to control and manipulate and sticks other people because that tends to backfire a lot so these people that are toxic they can actually be important reminders for you of your own personal development needs so if you keep all that in mind then I think that's gonna help you a lot to fix some of these toxic people cut them out or to minimize their effects on your life alright this is Leo and be signing off go ahead post your comments down below and let me hear what you think click on the like button leave me a like that spreads the videos around go ahead and share the video on Facebook or somewhere else the more these videos spread the more free content I keep releasing and finally come and sign up to my newsletter this is the newsletter right here at actualised org you can sign up there I release new updates for free every single week I have a lot of cool new stuff planned for my subscriber that's gonna be exclusive that won't be possible on youtube so you want to sign up for that if you're if you're diggin what I'm sharing here on YouTube and really the reason you want to sign up is because I'm excited about delivering more wisdom about how to master yourself how to master your psychology how to understand how to work with people how to understand how to get your 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