Friends, acquaintances, and enemies: a "how-to" guide for dealing with people who aren't you.

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, so I thought I’d share some advice that will be very basic and obvious for many of you. But for those of you who need this advice, it’ll be a real game-changer — especially during the holidays.

It involves how to deal with the often amazing, often infuriating, often perplexing set of entities called “people who aren’t ourselves”.

So, how should one handle personal relationships? For the extreme cases, this is usually easy. Friends and loved ones that you get along with easily, just do what comes naturally. Live, laugh, love. Repeat.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, it’s fairly obvious what to do with truly toxic and noxious people. Cut them out of your life and don’t look back. Life is far too short to deal with poisonous personalities.

But the vast majority of the people in your life will fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. They have some good qualities. They have some bad qualities. What to do about them?

My advice is to nurture and encourage the traits in people that you value. Shine the light of your attention and appreciation on others when they do things that you would be pleased to see more of.

When these people do things that you’d like to see less of, let them know, but not in a way that causes them to feel attacked or harshly judged. Just point it out and move on. Withdraw your attention and appreciation — but only very slightly.

You’ll be surprised how noticeably people will change their behavior just based on very subtle changes in the energy and attention you give to them. We are a very social species, and we all react instinctively to very basic social cues.

Use them.

Far too many people aren’t following my advice these days. I’ve been shocked over the last 8 years or so to see people completely cut friends and family out of their lives for differences of opinion that more healthy people would just gently tease one another over.

Sometimes it’s for voting the “wrong” way or holding some “wrong” opinion or some “wrong” belief system or “wrong” lifestyle choice. For these “sins”, I’ve seen people just toss good friends away like garbage.

This is madness.

If you cut people out of your life for spurious reasons, you diminish your own life immensely. To avoid some “bad” attribute of a person, you also deny yourself access to all the incredibly good attributes of that person.

Keep that policy up, and you will end up a hermit in the woods, moaning at how awful other people are and how unfair your lonely existence is.

So, if I’m describing you, in whole or in part, stop doing that.

Enjoy the good in the people in your life while mildly retreating or rebuffing the “bad” in people. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And if you want to “level up”, you can start evaluating the way other people treat you as you express various aspects of your character. Are there things that you could emphasize or minimize that would improve your relationship with other people?

Probably worth thinking about.

Happy “Thanksgiving week”!

Naturally,

Adam

PS: To watch me violate all the advice I just gave, follow me on X: @rerazer

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