How to Respond to a Negative Situation

Important: GDPR Email Preferences

As you may already know, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be coming into effect on 25th May 2018. We take your privacy seriously and we are working hard to ensure we comply with the new data protection laws. You can find out more about how we're doing this in our privacy policy on our website.

We want to make sure you continue to receive the latest newsletters, blogs, special offers and more.

As someone who has opted-in to receive our emails in the past, we’d like to give you this opportunity to confirm what you wish to receive:

Just so you know, if you don’t let us know what kinds of emails you want to receive from us, we’ll stop emailing you on the 24th May 2018 - you'll be missing out!

You are of course free to change your mind at any time – just follow the link at the bottom of any of our emails.

Advert

How to Respond to a Negative Situation

The sad truth is that "Life ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It can be a very mean and nasty place".

You often need to negotiate with a person who is giving you highly emotionalised negative feedback.

In real life, practically nobody uses the words, "Negative feedback". Instead they use other words to describe the same thing.

• Arguments
• Failure
• Breakdowns
• Criticism
• Rejection
• Defeat
• Blame
• Complaints
• Conflicts

And these negative situations tend to generate the corresponding negative emotions in both parties.

• Anger
• Upset
• Annoyance
• Frustration
• Stress
• Tears and
• Tantrums

If you are to make progress, you will need to know how to handle these negative emotions, (both yours and theirs). You need to move quickly to resolve the negative issue and to restore the relationship back to its original congenial state.

How would you do that?

In order to achieve these goals, you need to learn the following model:

Five steps to an experience

Your personal experience of any situation is not one thing. It is composed of five things fused together. Your personal experience of any event is process consisting of five parts.

1. The objective facts of reality.
2. The evidence of the facts as revealed by your five senses.
3. The identification of the facts (or perhaps the MIS-identification of the facts).
4. The subjective evaluation of the (mis) identified facts.
5. Your emotional response to your "evaluation of the facts".

There are therefore two major sets.

1. The objective set (comprising of the facts as identified by direct sense perception).
2. The subjective set (comprising of the evaluations, opinions and judgements you make and your emotional responses to them).

Distinguish between the two forms of language; objective and subjective

Objective language

Objective language is the language of facts as revealed by direct sensory evidence and primary perception.

It is non-opinionated; non-evaluative; non-judgemental; non-emotional.

Subjective language

Subjective language is the opposite: it is the language of opinions, evaluations and judgements; it is highly emotionalised; it is about your personal feelings.

When people are in a negative state, they generally start their communication at the extreme right-hand side of the above model; by verbalising their negative emotions, derogatory opinions and by using highly subjective language.

Responding to Negative Situation Summary

Your task is to:

1. Listen to their negative emotions and derogatory opinions without interruption.
2. Empathise with them (without necessarily agreeing with anything).
3. Separate the facts from their feelings.
4. Separate the facts from their opinions.
5. Act only on the evidence of the objective facts.
6. Base your responses on a logical evaluation of all the available evidence of the facts.
7. Recognise that emotions, have NO power to change the facts.

Blogs by Email

Do you want to receive an email whenever we post a new blog? The blogs contain article 5-10 minutes long - ideal for reading during your coffee break!

Your Comments

Further Reading in Personal Effectiveness

• Know When to Stop
  Everyone needs to know went to stop; waiting for things to change, talking or eating too much, working or playing too hard.
  Read Article >
• The Art of Clear Thinking
  Being able to think clearly is a useful skill. Learn how to distinguish the difference between arbitrary and possible statements. Seek evidence to support claims that others make, and back up your own points with facts.
  Read Article >
• What is Your Purpose?
  Your purpose is to add value to others, either your boss, your organisation, your customers, or friends and family. If you are able to give value to others, you will get others to willingly cooperate and work with you. A win-win situation all round.
  Read Article >
• How to solve my problems
  How to solve all your problems Imagine what life would be like if you could solve all your problems. Wouldn't that be exciting? I don't mean that you would never have problems; rather, I mean that when problems do occur, as they inevitably will, then you could more easily and more...
  Read Article >
• More haste, less speed
  With so much to do, so little time in which to do it, the temptation is to do everything as fast as possible. This is not always a good thing.
  Read Article >