Nine toxic behaviours that we must all keep at bay

By Neil Patrick

Many self-help books and coaches talk about the dangers of toxic people. We should distance ourselves from them they say. Better still remove them from our lives. I'm not so sure about this.

Sometimes that’s easier said than done. Just how would you go about removing a person from your life I wonder? Like your boss, or a colleague or a family member? Short of committing illegal acts, it all seems a bit tricky to me.

There's a much more realistic alternative option I think. We all have some of these toxins within ourselves. And it’s a much more practical proposition to change ourselves than attempting to change or remove those around us.

So not only should we be alert to toxic character traits in others, we should also try to purify our own system.

I am not here to preach or claim I am above criticism. I can count at least two or three traces of these toxins within myself. I don’t quite need a Betty Ford Clinic-style detox I hope, but relentless alertness to them and removing them is a sure way to purify ourselves I think.

And just as toxins in others make them destructive and debilitating to be around, toxins within ourselves don’t just erode our own strengths, they drive a wedge between ourselves and those we want to have productive and happy relationships with.

Here're my top nine poisons and how to detox from them.

1. Control

Controlling people think they know everything and the best way to do anything. They’ll never give anyone else a chance to contradict them, express a conflicting idea or influence their opinions. Learn to value and listen to the opinions of others. Don’t try to find fault in their views, but seek to find ways to improve their ideas.

2. Arrogance

Confidence and arrogance are totally different things. Confidence inspires; arrogance intimidates. Arrogant people always think they know best and feel superior to others. Remember to celebrate and show more enthusiasm for the success of others than your own.

3. Victims

Negatively charged people see themselves as perpetual victims. Victims look at their own situations and mistakes and seek to find others to blame, from their boss to their staff or their customers. Take ownership of your own life and change to adapt to the world around you. Don’t expect the world to change to suit you.

4. Envy

Those infected with jealousy don’t feel pleasure when good things happen to you. They can't appreciate it when others achieve success or move forward; they feel that if anything good is going to happen, they deserve it more than you. The success of those around you should be just as important to you as it is to them. Help others succeed as a matter of course. Sure, not everyone will reciprocate, but which is better a whole heap of goodwill, or a whole heap of indifference?

5. Lies

Liars are impossible to rely on. You can never know what to believe. You can't trust their promises or their statements. They will lie to you about others, and they will lie to others about you. Likewise we should tell the truth, always. Even if it’s bad news, sharing it now, is better than hoping it will disappear and be forgotten. It won’t.

6. Negativity

Some people are always suspicious of everything and everybody. Negativity destroys relationships, and spending time with negative people makes you feel the world is a much worse place than it actually is. My mantra is this: trust everyone and disappointment is a risk. Trust no-one and disappointment is guaranteed.

7. Possessiveness

Consumer culture relentlessly nags us to want more, achieve more and possess more. Sure, desire and ambition can be good things. But it turns toxic when people want everything for themselves and when possession, rather than doing or being, becomes the focus of their life. Aspire to success not as a way to have more for yourself, but as a way to be able to give more back to others.

8. Judgmentalism

Making a judgment and being judgmental are not the same thing at all. Judgments are objective and based on discernment, while being judgmental is just about criticism. Judgmental people are poor listeners and communicators and always too quick to jump to conclusions. Seek to understand before you seek to judge. Then consider how something can be made better.

9. Gossip

Gossips see themselves as being interesting because they share fascinating information about other people. And the more sensational this is the better. They do it because they secretly believe that their own lives are less interesting or deserve more privacy than those of others. They make little distinction between speculation and fact. We all talk about others – that’s natural. But if we bad-mouth someone, we can fully expect that those who hear this criticism will suspect that we will do the same to them.

So personally, I’m not about to remove anyone from my life. I’d much rather try and make others’ lives better by forever striving to become a better person myself. It'll keep me out of jail at least.

Any thoughts on what I should add to round this up to make a top 10?

The dark side of positive thinking

By Neil Patrick

There’s power in positive thinking. But as dogma, it’s dangerous. It’s taken hold to such an extent that it risks blinding us to the reality of situations. Worse, when it becomes group think, that myopia becomes massively amplified. And the leveraging of delusion has created some catastrophic consequences.

In the world of work, positivity has become almost a mandatory pre-condition for employment.

It doesn’t matter how smart we are. How much experience we have. If we don’t fill the world with cheerfulness and positivity, employers don’t want us in their fold. The greatest virtue you can possess as an employee is the willingness to joyfully execute whatever task you are assigned.

The same mantra is provided to those looking for a job. Jobseekers are told that they must think positive. Their lack of a job is not a problem, it’s an opportunity. They should stride out into the world with a great big smile. True, but this is much easier said than done.

Freedom and blind enthusiasm cannot easily co-exist

This blind enthusiasm and mandatory cheerfulness is also a hallmark of the control systems of dictatorships. All that loving devotion to a leader and joyful exuberance at political rallies. We were mostly bewildered by the manipulated mourners at the funeral of Kim Jong-il in December 2011. But although more subtle, the same cult of positivity also underpins many codes of behavior in the west.

The statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang

 CC BY-SA 3.0 J.A. de Roo

The financial collapse of 2008 was foreseen by plenty of people. The trouble is, they were isolated, shut up and drummed out of the party by the rest who were just having too much of a good time to countenance any cautionary advice.

Too much positivity is as dangerous if not more so than too little.

I think of it as a continuum. At one extreme is the viewpoint characterized by thinking such as the cult of the power of attraction. The idea that we can have anything we want if we just want it enough and imagine it enough. This idea is that by some as yet unknown force of nature, we can have anything we desire – we just have to want it enough.

The power of attraction has found a convenient alibi in quantum physics. All those phenomena that fly in the face of conventional scientific thinking. If normal science cannot explain everything, anything is possible right? Well, no actually it isn’t. There’s plenty of stuff we cannot explain, but that doesn’t automatically prove the correctness of any random idea that comes into our heads.

At the other extreme is the idea that we are all victims of an inevitability that we are really powerless to stop. Forces which are so much more powerful than we are, that we are all doomed. This ideology of fearfulness is characterized by the survivalists – those folk that have abandoned all hope in the world avoiding Armageddon and have decided to take to their bunkers to survive whatever horrors are about to descend.

Both extremes are wrong. We can change things and we have a lot more power than we often recognize. But the key isn’t blind cheerfulness and all charging together lemming-like over the cliff, or self-isolation and hunkering down to ensure our families can survive the unimaginable perils of the future.

The power to effect change is by developing our abilities to discriminate between right and wrong. To vigorously pursue our ambitions and to engage with others with whom we can share mutual support and help. And to have the courage to confront and challenge our leaders when they are at risk of getting it wrong.

Sure, doing it with a smile on your face and joy in your heart is no bad thing. Just don’t place too much faith in group think.

My thanks go to Barbara Ehrenreich, whose RSA video here inspired me to write this post.