Be careful of ‘relationship-breakers’ or negative friends in your life

The friends that we choose tend to tell a lot about us. And the fact that they have a strong influence on our outlook in the world. Because your choice of friends can have such profound influence on you, it is even more important that you select your friends carefully.

When you first know someone and notice that the person always talk bad about others or constantly instigate you to have ill feeling towards another person, you would need to really consider carefully if this friend carries positive influence in your life or is influencing you to think negatively.

No doubt, the person may have very good reason to back up his/her ‘facts’ but realise that sometimes in life, things may not be what they appear.  Also remember that a person who always talk bad about someone could easily turn around and talk bad about you too…

Recently, I was talking to a friend of mine who almost went into deep depression. She was down for many months because she was not doing well in her job and her outlook of the world became very grey with each passing day. Knowing her previous history, she was a relatively successful lady but I was puzzled why she was so down. I did my best to uplift her and offer her all kinds of suggestions from my personal experience and those of my friends.

She’s a very tough girl- she recovered and now bounced back to her old self. But she shared with me one insight- that looking back, she was feeling very down because she was being negatively influenced by another friend whom she thought she could trust. A trusting person will listen wholeheartedly to someone whose opinion that he/she considered superior.

But if the result of listening or having what you taught as a mentor makes you more positive, happy and that you feel less crappy about yourself and others, then the friend’s probably a keeper.

On the contrary, if you always feel negative and probably as a result of listening to that friend bickering about another mutual friend and as the result you developed dislike for that mutual friend, then you need to really start observing the person.

There are people who are what I call relationship breaker. It’s likely that by nature that they’re not happy on the inside, and such, consciously or subconsciously they may not be able to see another two person being happy together. The person may tend to speak speech that divides instead of unites. Sometimes that is done subconsciously, ie the person is not doing it with malicious thoughts but to justify what he/she thinks is right.

If you are not ‘strong’, then you may get easily influenced. So to safeguard yourself, you need to distance from folks like this. Mix with friends who do not like to bitch at the successful and rejoice at the suffering of the ‘enemy’.

Whenever you are feeling down, always do your best to associate with a more positive or optimistic friend. A friend who you know will not cold water when you are on the dumps, someone you know that will make you feel better about yourself. It is affects the rate that you recover.