So many books, articles, web articles and therapists talk about gaining and maintaining a positive attitude in life. Optimists are healthier than pessimists and accomplish more. Most sources will advise you to consider the benefits of reducing stress, eliminating worry from your life and developing a positive attitude. High achievers swear by a positive attitude and will share their powerful beliefs in articles all over the place. What most of them don't do is provide nuts and bolts how-to for doing that when you are surrounded by critical, discouraging people who laugh at your affirmations, pick on you if you stand out or dare to do anything outside the ordinary, and line up a big list of worries for you. Most of those will claim it's for your own good.
People are agreeable. The social instinct is very high in human beings. Everyone has this vulnerability, it's not just you. It goes with being human. If everyone around you is worried about credit card debt and talking about those worries constantly, it's very hard to avoid being worried about your own finances. This kind of social pressure can run so deep that it's easy to ignore reality in favor of a popular public worry.
If you don't have major debts and pay your credit cards promptly, live within your means, budget carefully every month and spend only the spending money you put in the budget -- effective budgets do allow pleasure money as well as savings, then the truth is that you do live within your means. Many people do. More than you would think given the trouble the majority have with debt. The average is made up of people who have extreme problems as well as the people who have successfully learned how to manage money. It's relatively rare, but it's a real skill.
Socially, mentioning that is going to be a faux pas unless you are careful about how you do it. "I used to have that problem and I had a point in the eighties when I was just fed up with it and decided to control my finances" is a good approach. It still makes that connection. Or "My family was always frugal and I grew up expecting to live within my means. I never really bought into materialism." Alternately "My family had major problems with credit and I swore to myself as a kid that I wouldn't have to deal with the problem." Whatever really happened to increase your awareness of debt problems and gain control of your finances, tell the real story. Show a connection between the people who are grousing and the reason why you don't share their common problem right now. You do live in the same country, you do share the same economic environment, what you did differently is important information to these friends.
Do not lord it over them with that kind of information. More share it as equals, discussing it in a way that makes it clear it's just something that can be learned and you had your own reasons for learning it. One thing all the discouragement in this country is about is fending off One-Upmanship.
Watch people at a party. There will be some blowhards wandering around touting their accomplishments and listing their academic, social or economic credentials as if they were applying for a job, to total strangers. They'll get annoying. Especially the ones that if you share an accomplishment, will immediately counter it with something bigger than yours.
"I just finished my first novel."
"I have three textbooks in print and a contract with a major New York publisher." Pontiferous Author has just put me in my place for daring to be a new author -- no matter how many years of misery and work I went through to finish that first novel. No matter that in all honesty, my first novel may be a bigger change in my life than how I'd feel about it after my fourth pro publication. Mr. Bigger there is trying to put me down and make my "finished my first novel" less shiny, establish rank within authordom.
There is a way to disarm this. Self honesty works. Go ahead and let him have the spotlight for a moment. The reality of your achievement isn't going to change because he has his ego to feed. I knew in the above example that my first novel was the dream of a lifetime and the biggest turning point of my life. So I might turn it around and ask him about that moment. "What was the point it really mattered to you to write? What did you experience when you wrote your first book? Were you scared, exhilarated, happy, driving yourself round the bend?"
If you lost ten pounds and the lady you're talking to at the party lost fifty, you actually have a topic in common. Both of you worked at losing weight and she obviously had a bigger problem to start with by having had to lose fifty pounds. It is possible to steer the conversation back toward the general topic of weight loss.
If you aren't dieting and don't want to hear it, try to disengage and get into something else. Maybe talk to someone else. In any social situation after high school, it is up to you to choose your friends. Your coworkers are people you can either associate with or not -- it's possible to go through work without telling anyone at work any personal details about your life or socializing at all outside the workplace.
In fact, if you do, if you listen to other people's rants and gripes and venting sympathetically, a side effect comes up. You will be very liked. You will make friends easily because the one thing everyone wants is appreciation.
There's a pattern in society I've seen throughout my life, and I've lived in all the major regions of the USA. It may be a leftover of Puritanism, but wherever it got started, it's more common than crabgrass. It's socially acceptable to criticize other people in public over petty things, personal things and achievements as much as over their mistakes and flaws. That's just the flow of society as it is. To achieve anything in life and feel good about it, you have to be aware that is their problem and their opinion. It has nothing to do with reality.
What you give out comes back to you.
In the 1980s I noticed this pattern of criticism and decided to turn it inside out. I hated being discouraged, so I would not be one of the discouragers. I'd just deliberately compliment something random about everyone I hung out with, find something I liked about them or their clothes or their personality and actually say it whenever I noticed something positive. Also, I shut up on criticism and advice unless it was asked.
Two things happened. One was that I got even more popular and people really liked hanging around me. I even got asked for advice on things now and then because I wasn't offering it and shoving it up people's noses. I satisfy the desire to give advice now by writing articles. I know someone looking for the topic is in effect asking for advice, so maybe my ideas will help. But if they'd rather talk about baseball, that's what's making them happy. If they want to talk about their experiences with discouragement -- that is healing for them, and the best advice I can give is to listen and commiserate.
The second thing was that I realized why compliments were given so sparingly. People reject them! It's hard to take compliments gracefully -- to train yourself to smile and say "Thanks," instead of going "Naw, it's just a sketch." or "Naw, it's really nothing," or "I didn't buy this sweater, my daughter got it for me."
No, if someone compliments my sweater and she got it for me, I smile and thank them on her behalf. "Thanks. Yeah, I really like it, my daughter gave it to me last holidays."
Be real. If you are proud of an achievement -- be that losing three pounds or writing a novel or painting a picture or clearing your house of clutter or getting a new job -- then be proud. Accept the compliment. Your house does look nice. The scale does have a lower number. Your novel may be a rough draft but it is there to be edited. You don't have to run down your achievements to be liked by other people.
I stopped doing it decades ago and it has not made me any less likable. I just apply the same positive appreciation to my own achievements that I do to others. It will actually ease another bit of social friction too.
When someone compliments you and encourages you, says you have talent or your painting is lovely, something like that, don't argue with them. You might think it's the worst thing you ever did, but that's their opinion and they like it enough to say something.
Society digs in this mistaken belief that if someone says something negative, that must be "a harsh truth." It could just as easily be a self-serving attack to make them look bigger, the great critic and so on. It could be a control freak's way of keeping you insecure. As many times as criticism is offered, the amount of useful honest critique in it is pretty low.
Yet if someone says something positive, they must be out to get something from you, just buttering you up for some unknown reason. It couldn't be because they actually like it or the good thing is true. We get taught to disbelieve the good and take anything bad seriously as important and true.
The truthfulness of both negative and positive comments is up in the air. But inverting this to believe any positive comment at least has some basis and any negative one might be self-serving can make it easier to dare to achieve something you want. Remember that most of them are real opinions and that it's okay for other people to disagree with you, they're just opinions.
But the people who like your art or support you with your diet or budget or whatever genuinely have some interest in it of some kind. If you're going to pursue your art or something professionally, they are the ones more likely to buy it and ought to be appreciated -- pay more attention to the people who like your work. The ones that don't are someone else's clients.
You can tell real, honest critique because it's not personal. It's technical. It's specific and has a certain ring of happy problem-solving truth to it. "I think this drawing is excellent but it would be a lot stronger if you deepened all the darks to give it more contrast" is real critique, useful critique. Treasure it. Don't mistake that for one-upmanship and don't assume you have to agree with it either -- but appreciate the people who give it, because they care more about your art than about social standing. They want to know you understand what they said. You can reply "No, I wanted this painting to look as if it's all in a soft mist, that was the effect I was looking for" and most times a real critiquer will just accept you disagree and move on.
Their praise is usually that specific and useful too. So that's a whole different category of feedback and likely to be truer, and those people care about your success. They want you to understand and are sharing expertise.
The majority of compliments and criticism are social glue and have nothing to do with you or what's important about you. They are the verbal habits of everyone you meet and they're shaped by the culture we grew up in. To achieve in life it does take bucking that stream of repression -- you have to dare take the risk that someone will call you stuck-up, that someone will say you're showing off, that you'll be criticized for being different.
Accept that. It's okay. You are not really stuck up if you don't go around putting down other people. That's the real line. If you want to be happy in life, do something you love for a living, and share your enjoyment in it. Encourage others. Support groups are very good for this and don't have to be psychology groups or self help groups, they can be topical like art groups or writing groups or weight loss groups or salad lovers.
You never will avoid all criticism. But you don't have to believe all of it verbatim. Take it with a grain of salt. Think about the source -- and if insults come into it and it's vague, like "Your paintings are lousy" without specifics like "You could improve that by deepening the darks," they just want you to feel bad.
That doesn't mean you have to feel or be or do what they want. Learn to say no. It's hard to do, but it helps to stay sane if you can remember that you're you and they're other people with different tastes. Let them be different from you. They don't have to feel what you do. You don't have to be who they say you are.
Finally, seek out people who are supportive and drift away from anyone who's on a constant fault finding mission against you. If you don't enjoy someone's company, why waste time with them? If you come away feeling encouraged and inspired to do the things you wanted to do in the first place, keep that friend. Your social circles will change, but you'll be a lot happier over time.
