Do You Want To Be Successful? Avoid These 10 Types Of People

Success is the ultimate goal for every individual. Everyone wants to achieve great things in life and make all of their dreams come true. However, one thing that is often overlooked when pursuing success is deciding who you associate with in your life, both personally and professionally.

What I have found is that the most successful people I have met have made it a rule to avoid negative people. Here are 10 reasons why you should avoid negative people in your life.

1. Negative people can affect your attitude.

Negative people tend to discourage others and they will try to drag you down with them to the dark side. They will discourage you and tell you that your goals are unrealistic or unachievable. If you choose to listen to those negative people, it will affect your attitude about your goals and your dreams.

Robert Tew once said, “Don’t let negative and toxic people rent space in your head. Raise the rent and kick them out.”

2. Negative feedback from negative people affects your thinking.

Negative people are energy sucking vampires. The problem with negative people is that if you hang around with them enough, and listen to them long enough, they start impacting your thinking, and you soon realize that instead of thinking positively, you are thinking negatively.

They are very stealth at this, and before you know it, you will find that they can definitely impact the way that you think and change your belief system when they shouldn’t.

3. They are an energy drain.

Positive people who are enthusiastic raise other people’s energy levels. Negative people do the opposite; they tend to be an energy drain. Negative people suck the energy out of a room, and everyone who is present in the room feels it.

4. It damages your credibility.

If you surround yourself with negative people, it makes you look negative and small minded yourself. If you associate with negative, small-minded people, it damages your credibility in the eyes of others.

You may not realize it, but other people in your life will judge you by the people that you associate with. At one point in my life, I had a business partner who was negative and small-minded. After I stopped working with him, several people said that they were surprised that I was ever doing business with him. Little did I know that my association with him was damaging my credibility.

5. Negative people won’t provide encouragement.

Negative people are not only negative, but they’re also great at discouraging you and giving you negative feedback. They are so good at it that they can make the negative sound like it makes sense.

In life, there are going to be times when you are struggling or are facing adversity. What you need during those times is someone who will encourage you, support you, and convince you that it can be done, not someone who does the opposite. You need someone to lift you up, not knock you down.

6. They are hard to get rid of.

Many people have a friend who is very negative that they have been friends with for years. They say that they have been friends since high school and that they would feel bad getting rid of them. However, the truth is that negative people have a huge negative impact on your life, and you should end the relationships with them.

As Hans F. Hanson once said, “people inspire you or they drain you, pick them wisely.”

7. Life is too short.

Life is short, and we don’t want to spend our time being around negative, crabby, grumpy, or grouchy people. They tend to make life miserable, and we want to live a life of happiness. We want to live a quality life by being with quality people. So, one of the ways to do that is to limit our contact with negative people and to increase our contact with positive people who bring us joy and happiness.

8. Negative reinforcement versus positive reinforcement.

Negative people will simply reinforce anything negative that you say, and give you all the reasons why you’re right in your negativity and toxic thinking. Positive people will tell you can do it, and will give you positive reinforcement which is what you need when you have doubts.

Negative people will make you believe your doubts, while positive people will convince you that you’re wrong and that you can do it after all. As Joel Osteen once said, “you cannot hang out with negative people and expect to live a positive life.”

9. They love drama.

The negative people of the world thrive on drama, and it’s not something you need in your life. They want to involve you as a character in the drama. They have many dramatic things going on in their life, and they will not make any changes to fix them. You will find that they relish and enjoy drama.

As Tony Gaskins once said, “negative people need drama like oxygen, stay positive, it will take their breath away.”

10. You won’t grow.

If you’re friends with negative people, they will revel in stagnation and negative thinking and they really do not want to grow. Because they don’t want to grow, they want to discourage you from growing as well. The only way to move forward in your life is to associate with people who are also moving forward and will help you move forward with your goals.

The positive person has their foot on the gas pedal, and the negative person has a foot on the brake.

In the end, it is up to you to decide what kind of people you’re going to be friends with and the kinds of people you’re going to spend your time with. I strongly recommend that if you have negative friends, you should end the relationship. If you have negative family members, you should spend as little time with them as possible.

I guarantee you that if you eliminate negative people from your life, you will be more successful, far more productive, and truly happy. As W. Clement Stone once said, “there is little difference in people but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude, the big difference is whether it is positive or negative.”