A Simple Technique I Use to Silence Negative People (without Having to Confront Them)
There’s this rule that I follow.
Never talk behind someone else’s back (an idea taken from Stephen and Sean Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). When something about someone makes me feel uncomfortable (for example, their chattiness, poor sense of style, or annoying habit), I ask myself: “Does it really hurt or harm anyone?” If the answer is no (which it usually is), I keep my mouth shut about it and let the discomfort go — because, unless someone is genuinely hurting someone else with their way of being, there is no mature reason to complain about their so-called flaws.
Sadly, not everyone has this outlook on other people and their “flaws”.
Way too many of us, including some of the closest people in my life, have this tendency to badmouth perfectly innocent individuals. A person might be nice to someone’s face, and then make fun of them to me once they have left the room. Or they might ask, “Did you see that person over there?” and then tell me exactly what they did to offend their comfort (usually this involves their appearance, lifestyle, or awkward/untypical behavior).
I really, deeply hate this.
But I am not a confrontational person at heart. Sure, over the years, I have taught myself to stand up for my beliefs and tell several people off about their offensive or rude remarks. However, it is not always easy (or even entirely safe, if some power structure is at play) to simply tell another person, “I think you’re being rude, so stop that!”
Fortunately, with a heavy dose of inspiration from an old tweet by Chris Hladczuk, I devised a simple technique that has worked wonders to disable the negativity of others.
The Technique
When someone badmouths another person and I feel too scared or unsafe to tell them off directly, I do one of three things:
- (1) I look at them and bluntly ask, “What do you mean?”
This is the method that was borrowed from Hladczuk’s tweet about pretending not to have caught someone’s offensive comment and then requesting them to repeat themselves. Just like Hladczuk writes about his own, this first approach is effective because it forces that person to confront their own blatant and immature rudeness. In my own experience, doing this has caused several people to stumble on their words in their semi-embarrassed attempt to logically explain whatever it was that the other person did to upset them (and oftentimes, they end up saying something like, “Forget it, it was nothing”).
- (2) I act like nothing at all out of the ordinary happened
Offensive remarks always miss when the target is absent. Sometimes, a discouragement to someone from seeing a thing as peculiar, strange, or odd is that the person right next to them doesn’t even acknowledge its particularity. Based on my observations, this has caused several people to lose the steam behind their insults and maybe even privately evaluate just how important it was to point out that thing about someone’s clothes or personality.
- (3) I make the completely opposite reaction from them
Love and positivity can defeat hate and negativity — and, thus, an effective response to a person’s negativity (like when someone once complained to me about a fellow diner’s table manners, which merely sounded unique and cute to me), is a phrase like, “That’s so cool of them!” or, “I thought they looked amazing!” (In the case that it would make you feel safer, you could even feign obliviousness to the fact that they were intending to badmouth rather than praise the other person, and instead say something like, “Right? I loved their hair too!”) This kind of response completely turns the insult on its head and truly creates an unignorable contrast between your open-mindedness and their own useless sourness.
It is not easy to confront another person about their less favorable habits.
However, in my experience, this technique is a great way to stop someone’s negativity (at least for the time being) without having to make any direct, difficult, or personal accusations against them. In the first method, you are simply asking them, quite innocently, to clarify their sentiment; in the second, you are simply experiencing a neutral reaction to an event, which no one can reasonably blame you for having; and in the third, you are simply displaying your own personal opinion of the same thing, which so largely unavoidable to have in social situations anyway. In fortunate cases, doing one or more of these may even cause the other person to reconsider their impractical hostility and petty complaints — and, thus, recognize their own faults in the matter and become a better person for it.
Badmouthing is a social activity; so, it depends on both parties enjoying the fun-making.
If one party does not, the joint power of negativity is disabled.
