How negative People destroy the happiness of others

Over the years, every one of us has already met a whole lot different people with different characters, attitudes and ideas for life. There are perfectionists, there are people who are constantly worried, there are those who have a jolly nature – and then there are those whom I want to write about today: those who have a basically negative approach to life and everything around it.

Yes, there are such people who don’t really enjoy anything they are doing and what is happening around them. They are negative about each and everything and try to find a problem. I won’t even say that it is necessarily a conscious effort to find a problem. No, they are so used to searching for that one tiny hole in a huge, beautiful blanket, that they will definitely find it! And then they will point it out to all others around them.

The biggest problem is, I think, that they influence everyone around them. They project their negativity to those who are close-by, so that they, too, start seeing things from this negative point of view!

You know that we have a lot of visitors at the Ashram throughout the year. Hundreds of people have been here. With the same setup, the same people taking care of them and the same food, there may be 99 who enjoy and are happy, who are fine with everything that is going on. And then one comes who isn’t.

Now this is not a statistic based on any survey and maybe there are one or two more of them but I think you get my point: it is not the problem of their surrounding! Even people who were there at the exact same time, with even the same weather were just happy and satisfied – just they were not. And once you have this one negative person in a group, there is the danger that the atmosphere of the complete group gets pulled down.

When you are caught up in this kind of situation, you will have difficulties to deal with it the proper way because you have to take into account all the group dynamics that can make everything fine or everything bad!

There is not much that you can do to help that negative person. You may realize that there is a lot of unhappiness at the root of the problem and that these people need to change their attitude in order to actually enjoy life – but they won’t let you come very close to try. You can prevent damage however, cushion the effect, avoid certain sensitive topics and find ways to share a laugh with the whole group.

Whatever you do, stay positive! Admit any mistakes on your side that may be there and try to improve yourself – which this person is a great helper for, pointing out every little spot that you could work on. Show that you really mean it while at the same time staying positive. Positivity is what the people around them now need to get out of this hole of negativity! They are drawn towards negativity but your positivity can hold against it!

And for anybody with this negative approach to life, I would just like to recommend to watch exactly what the effect of this thinking is: you are destroying your own happiness and on top of it the happiness of those who are around you! You are not enjoying it – so why don’t you just rethink, change your mind and start the day with a smile (a real one, not the fake one you normally use), look at things without searching for mistakes and enjoy whatever comes?