Many people who practice feeling good say it’s easier to stay positive when they’re by themselves, but harder amongst people.

How do you prevent yourself from getting sucked into other people’s negativity?

Step 1: First practice feeling good on your own
If you can already do this consistently, you are doing very well! If you still need to practice this some more, then put in the practice of watching your thoughts, pivoting negativity towards positivity and engaging in self-soothing self-talk.

Step 2: Recognise that we attract to ourselves situations which are in tune with our vibrations
Even if you think you’ve mastered “Step 1″, when you’re with people, often the people around us provide a mirror that shows us something we didn’t realise was there. We attract to ourselves situations with are in tune with some vibration that we’ve got active inside ourselves, so if we’re attracting a person into our experience who is telling us a negative story, the only reason we were able to attract this experience is because we have some cleaning up to do of our vibration still. So take it as a welcome flag that can help you refine your vibration to better and better levels. As Abraham tell us, people around us help us to expand and grow, and I think this is partly because they show us things we still have to work on vibrationally.

Step 3: Practice feeling good when with people
After you’ve practiced feeling good on your own and have got a pretty good handle of that, the next “level up” is practising to maintain your positivity in the presence of others.

To carry out this training intentionally, choose a time you want to practice. Then before entering a room with people, go in with the pre-paved intention that you will watch your thoughts, words and feelings for the next 30mins or 1 hour. (I say “for 30 mins or 1 hour” to start small, because in my experience it can be tricky keeping your focus and concentration, consciously watching your thoughts and pivoting them for long periods of time when you’re not used to it. As you become more advanced, you can do it for longer periods of time and eventually all the time).

When you’re in the group environment, be very conscious of your feelings. You’ll start noticing feeling-responses to what others say. You then have a couple of choices:

a.) Practice not engaging emotionally:
Without judgement, listen, observing how the words feel in your body. If something doesn’t feel good, at that moment, you can aknowledge in your mind that your inner being doesn’t agree with it, and this can help you not get caught up with the words emotionally. Once you feel your body resisting to a statement, with consciousness you can observe the resistance, breathe it out and let it go. It’s a silent watching and recognising that the words don’t have to have an emotional impact on you if you realise they are not true. This is the Eckhart Tolle-esque approach of “being very conscious”, conscious enough to not let yourself get carried away by other people’s thought-forms. At best, this will help you not get sucked in but probably would keep you more or less neutral in vibration.
Personally I prefer a more active approach that has more feel-good power to it – see option (b.).

b.) Practice pivoting with the person
Engage in conversation with the storyteller who is telling a negative story and *help them to pivot the story* out loud. Offer soothing words to counter their story to bring the whole conversation to a better-feeling place.
By doing this you are doing a positive service both to yourself and to the person who’s telling the story. You can help act as their guide, bringing them to awareness about their story.
Warning: In my experience, initially, your discomfort with the negative story can lead you to pivot them in a way which comes across as angry / aggressive / snappy.. because at first you may still have some discomfort and some resistance to their story which can manifest in a negatively-emotionally-charged response from you – but with continued practice, you can learn to train yourself to offer soothing words in a soft, gentle way that feels good both to you and the person you’re with.

c.) Put a stop to the conversation if it doesn’t feel good:

Leave a conversation if it doesn’t feel good. Sometimes it can be too much for us to handle and we don’t know what to say or do and can feel ourselves getting emotionally dragged into someone else’s negative story. In that case, because how *you* feel is the most important thing, the best thing you could do is take yourself out of the situation until you are ready to practice again, where you can try to carry out options (a.) or (b.). Polite ways to leave the conversation could be:
- Change the subject to a more pleasant subject
- Apologise and take your leave