Using Haters to Your Benefit

Without giving too much of gyaan, let me put it down simply that whatever you think or feel about yourself, there will always be swarms of haters all around. If you watched Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds", the Nazi colonel played by Christoph Waltz reminds that though rat and squirrel look alike except their tails and carry same kind of diseases, people loathe the very sight of the rat but not squirrel. So we are programmed to hate rats over squirrels without any fault of theirs.

So regardless what you do, act, behave or not, SOME PEOPLE LOVE TO HATE YOU. You can't do much about that but to take their hatred into your stride or ignore them or hate them back with more vigor, based on what are you made up of.

The problem usually won't be with those random chronic haters, but the other group who actually matter; those who loved us at certain point, were close to our lives, part of our journey and then turned into closet haters. The reasons for their hatred could be anything from vicious to ludicrous and could be because

• they don't like you not living as per their suggestions, guidelines and expectations
• they believe you don't deserve the love or success you experience
• they don't want to acknowledge your contribution to their well-being
• they can't accept you could do better than them in life
• they feel better about themselves by belittling you
• they can't tolerate you surpassing their predictions about you
• they simply can't stand your tastes or behavior or attitude or identity
• et al.

Some people hate and develop a grudge against you and some others stoop to slander, denigrate, manipulate, exploit, gossip, waiting for you to fail, pretend to help, humiliate to feel greater etc. 

When somebody indulges in negativity against you, that automatically generates negative energy, anger, outrage within. Now what to do with this energy decides what are you going to do with your life.

Anger Management:

You can find hundreds of articles in internet how to manage anger and how to use humor, self-control etc to ease out the anger in the best way possible but very few articles propose how to use the negative energy to your benefit. 

While retaliation sounds to be the most natural reaction, a moment of pause to know if that would impact your life in any way takes you miles ahead. If that does and if you can afford to invest that energy, time and mind to do so, go ahead and retaliate, react and respond. But if you want to react only to protect your ego, my friend, you are making a grave disservice to yourself.

Ego tussles often go in vain. Even if you win, you'll face another person doing that exact thing sooner or later. So life will be a series of retaliations and when you grow older, you'll only see yourself as that clueless gladiator indulging in imaginary fights.

Also when you react to every non-entity you are only giving credibility to their rant. You can instead rise two notches above and pretend they don't exist than getting into a dirty duel. Also you can save yourself from uttering some nonsense which can potentially haunt you in the future when you mend your fences with them.

So the simple solution is try to avoid them and cut them off from your close circles gradually without matching their vileness and channelize all the negative energy to do something more creative and knowledgeable. Though it sounds too much of a text-book strategy, it works. It worked for many. 

Take this as an example: What would you do when you haven't opened a book in the entire semester and you have an exam the next day ? The fear in you generates high pressure concentration resulting in extremely high efficiency and productivity. Same when you know you haven't maintained any accounting records and you get an out-of-the-blue audit notice, court notice etc.

Fear and anger work on your brain similarly. If you are angry, you can easily channelize all your negative energy, rage, temper and fury to thrust yourself with multi-fold momentum. This is the exact state of mind when you must take up learning a new language or say, a technology, enroll yourself into some sport, club, gym or start writing articles, blogs, books. The result will be of astonishingly superior quality.

Those who are financially stable can afford to buy a meal to the homeless every-time they are upset or sponsor an unfortunate kid learn something and then see the difference in their state of mind. If you are not easy on money, write something really nice to your loved one. Your unconditional, unexpected gesture of love will overturn the entire world around you upside down and will earn you more love. The best way to handle each hater is to express love to 5 people you adore. As cliche as it might sound, expression of love always trumps hatred and viciousness.

Though the article is more about how to handle hatred and negativity from others, proper care need to taken not to turn yourself into a hater of somebody else and especially of those who love you. In the world brimming with negative people, finding those who like you unconditionally and look forward to your friendship is rare. Hold them tight and winnow the rest like the chaff from wheat.

Ignoring unwanted people is an art. Be an artist !