Truly positive people are easy to spot as are truly Negative people, but there is a category of Pseudo-Positive People who are nice but actually may be Undermining you. The Negative Power of Pseudo-Positive People Tara Parker-Pope just published an interesting article in the New York Times about the health benefits of spending time with positive people. She recommends that if we want to be healthier, we ought to spend less time with negative people and a lot more time hanging out with positive ones. It seems self-evident that there would be benefits to associating with those individuals who are optimistic, supportive, generous and kind. It’s obvious that this would be preferable to being around people who are angry, spiteful, jealous, hostile or undermining. The article got me thinking, though, about people who seem positive but aren’t. What if you’ve been hanging around with some friends who you thought were positive people when in fact, they weren’t? What if they were in fact, pseudo-positive people? You’d want to know this, wouldn’t you? Especially in the light of all the research, Ms. Parker-Pope quoted in her article. In fact, I believe that as much as there’s value to spending time with positive people, there’s a detriment to associating with the pseudo-positive ones, and I’ll explain my reasoning for this in a moment. So who are these seemingly positive people who aren’t so positive after all? They’re the people-pleasers of the world; those unfailingly nice, helpful, generous folks. They constantly do for everyone around them, both personally and professionally. The people-pleasers never say “no,” and they never confront you about anything they don’t like. They never directly express anger at you, and they never ask directly for what they want. They’re always there for you, no matter how inconvenient it might be for...

Continue Reading