Remember the Dementors from Harry Potter? They were those awful creatures that sucked the life out of people. Have you ever met anyone who does this in real life? Someone whose negative energy impacts others.

Jon Gordon, author of the Energy Bus calls them ‘energy vampires’, I like to refer to them as Energy Dementors. It creates a very visual image of people that literally suck the energy from a room and leave you very drained after interacting with them. You know the ones I’m talking about!

Events will constantly happen in your life that you can’t control, you are impacted by people every day, these things are often out of your control, but you do have a choice about how you react to these events and how you react to negative people.

For some people being negative has become a hugely ingrained habit. No one sets out to drain others of energy, but over time it just becomes second nature to how some people to respond to circumstances going on around them. It can be useful to consider how you react in different situations and try and identify if your initial response is positive or negative.

Here are some tips on how to become more positive:

1) Be aware of your negativity and change it to a positivity habit 

Often, when we react to a circumstances we encounter, it is an automatic response. Over time, those responses can become negative ones. You have unknowingly formed a habit of reacting negatively. Start thinking more consciously about whether you have started acting negatively out of habit.

Do you often find yourself thinking how bad things are and focusing on the issue rather than the solution. If you are more aware of this, you can catch yourself doing it and make a decision to be positive instead. Adapt the approach of ‘making a plan‘, to turn a situation round to a desirable outcome

Look at each complaint or issue as an opportunity to turn something negative into something positive.

2) Implement a timed moaning approach

How much time would you say you spend moaning about other people, your boss, work, your partner, life in general, each day? If you want to reduce the amount of time spent whinging, one approach you can adopt is to allow yourself a moaning session, but with a time limit. Allow yourself 2 minutes of ranting, then think to yourself, “OK, that’s off my chest, now….how do I move forward?”

3) Adopt a no blame approach

We can sometimes spend so long looking at whose fault something is, why something happened or who can we blame, that we can focus all our energy identifying who is at fault, not realising that understanding this is probably not going to help the situation in any way. If you can move straight past looking for someone to blame and immediately move into the mode of how to find a solution, your energy is channeled in a much more effective use.

4) Learn from positive role models

Think about who you admire for their positivity. What is it about them that you admire? Observe what they do, how they respond to different situations. Learn from them. Try and implement an approach you have seen them use.

5) Surround yourself with positive people

Sometimes we spend time with people who have a lot of negativity and they bring us down, and drain us of energy. When you socialise with these people often you can start to become negative yourself, or come away feeling like the life has been sucked from your soul! Try to spend less time with people like this and instead surround yourself with people who display positive energy, support you and make you feel great. Positive energy is contagious, it rubs off on one another, you’ll find its much easier to be positive if you are surrounded by like minded friends. Don’t waste your valuable time on people who bring you down and make you feel bad. Life is too short for that!

I’d love to hear how you ensure you keep your energy positive and any hints and tips you have in the comments below.