Best Of: Dealing with the Doubters and Complainers
18 Aug 2018 · 13 min
In this best‑of episode of the Brendon Show, Brendon Burchard addresses how to handle doubters, complainers, and other negative people who can drain your energy. He begins by urging listeners to decide what truly matters at their current life stage—namely, preserving and generating personal emotional energy rather than letting others control it. Burchard stresses that you are the sole authority over your feelings, citing Eleanor Roosevelt’s reminder that no one can make you feel anything but what you choose, and Viktor Frankl’s insight that the last human freedom is the ability to control one’s attitude. He proposes reframing encounters with negativity as a "game"—seeing others’ energy as a challenge to earn points by staying un‑triggered and, when possible, turning the conversation toward positivity without judgment. When negativity becomes chronic, he advises setting clear boundaries: directly, yet subtly, tell the person their constant complaining affects you and limit exposure if they do not change. Burchard distinguishes between influencing others’ energy (which is permissible) and taking responsibility for it (which he rejects). He shares personal anecdotes from his upbringing in a fight‑prone environment and his martial‑arts training that taught him to rise above anger. Finally, he offers practical mood‑boost tactics such as calling fun‑loving friends when his own mood dips, and he closes by inviting listeners to join his high‑performance monthly program and share the episode on social media.
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Hey, my friends, it's Brendon Burchard and welcome to a best of edition of the Brendan show. These best of episodes feature training that I have done live, sometimes online to 10 of thousands of people or live on stage where I was speaking on.
Some stages across the world.
Or these might be some of my monthly training programs and highlights of those that I do every single month with our monthly students. So I know you're going to really enjoy these because these are a little bit more of a deep dive look at some of my training as a personal and professional development trainer. You know, I focus so much on helping you find that deeper level of motivation and and start practicing some of those high performance habits. Well, you hear me talk about many of those concepts in these special episodes here. These are my best of trainings only and exclusively right here on the Brendon show. So I hope you enjoy them. Please note that as you hear me speak in many of these, you'll hear me reference something because sometimes I'll have been training live or on video or on stage or through a broadcast. So you might not be able to see something, I'm sorry, suggesting or motioning tool or maybe even drawing out on a flip chart or motioning towards on a presentation. But you'll get the gist of it. So make sure you bust out your journal. Take some good notes here because this is really valuable insights on the mindset or the strategies that you need to adopt in order to improve your life. And if you want to go and get more content like this but much more deeper and have more of an interactive relationship with me in this type of training, make sure you join our high performance monthly training program. That's our monthly subscription program where I go live with you and our high performance students every single month and I train on a new topic or a new piece of research that we've created from the high performance institute and I train on that and then I do Q and A and actual live coaching, interactive coaching with people every single month. That's called high performance monthly and you can Access it at brendon.com monthly that's brendon.com monthly B R E N--O-N.com monthly to get deeper dive training similar to this. So if you like this, you would love that training program. But without further ado, let's jump in right now to one of the Brendon show's best of trainings.
How do you deal with someone who doubts you, complains, has negative energy, is not supportive of you if you're experiencing that in some way, we'll talk about how to deal with that. Number one, decide what's important. What's going to be important right now at this stage of your life? I mean, what is it? Is it for you? What's challenging, what's frustrating, is letting other people push you around, boss you around, make you feel bad. Are you somebody at this point in your life can decide? What's really important to you is your own personal energy. And you're going to learn to generate that or keep relying on other people. I often get, I would say I get a little bit of criticism for the way I talk about this. Because when people say to me, often.
In live or on television, they've asked.
Me this before, Brendan, how do you deal with doubters and complainers and negative Nellies? Because they can just suck the energy right out of you, right? I go, no, they can't. And that's the end of the conversation. I don't have a lot more to contribute to it than that, and I don't mean that to be flippant. But if you are still allowing the people around you to control your energy.
It is time to get deeper into.
Your studies of psychology and personal development. And I say that respectfully, because I know some people. You have a negative spouse or you have a negative neighbor or negative person at work, and it's easy to blame them. No one, no one gives you permission to feel anything but yourself. I know that's really hard to accept when you got negative people, but Eleanor Roosevelt said it. No one can make you feel any way but the way you decide that you're going to feel. And it's very important to realize that and to condition yourself not to get tossed into other people's pools of pessimism. Look, there's always gonna be doubters, there's always gonna be critics. There's always gonna be people around you who are negative. And here's what I say, so what? Your job is not to turn them, to make them magical people skipping through a field of roses. They're probably that way. They've probably been conditioned that way. They're probably gonna be that way for years. So why even attempt to deal with anything related to them except how you are allowing yourself to deal with that? Because here's the thing. You're the one allowing yourself to feel the way you do. You're the one conditioning yourself. You're the one triggering yourself. Have you ever been with two people and you saw one person say something just completely benign? And didn't have an emotional hook or they weren't being mean, and the other person blew up at it. And you're like, what happened there? It didn't mean anything to you. But this person made it mean something big. And they blew up and they went on a tirade about it. Well, in that experience, you see the power of emotional control. You saw the same thing. They took it and they went level five. Anger. I learned very young that I didn't like anger. I saw it all the time around me all the time. I grew up in a town where if somebody didn't like something about you or. Or something you said, it wasn't a conflict of words. It was a fight, a duel. It literally went to fists. I grew up fighting all until I was probably 22 years old, constantly in fights, physical fights. That's why I developed so much of a skill in martial arts, because I was like, I don't want to deal with this. I want to be better at this. But it was constant. I grew up around such a culture of people who wanted to fight all the time that I was like, I don't want to. I'm going to learn not to let people get me angry, that I would get into fights. I decided that anger, if I was letting anger win, I was a lesser person. If I let somebody's negativity win, I was a lesser person. I did it in a very stoic way that said, you know what? These people are presented to me as a challenge to my character. Will I rise above it or will I sink to their level? And I think that's, first and foremost what's important, is for you to get a grasp of your own attitude, your own energy. There's going to be a lot of people who are going to think you're crazy. And you've probably already encountered a lot of people. They're making fun of you. They're saying negative things. And all I can share with you is this. It is vital that you decide to start generating the emotional energy and experience you want of life and never, never be a victim to other people's energy. I always recognize, I go, oh, there's the energy. And then say, oh. And here's a trigger in my mind. He wants to go over there. It wants to please. He wants to placate. He wants to join them. No. Now people immediately say, well, Brendan, what if they get mad at you for not being in their energy? They don't like that you're positive. They make fun of you. They're mad. So What? Because look, someone's not going to like someone in that situation. Either they're not going to like you for you being who you are or, or you aren't going to like yourself and you're not going to like them for conforming to their energy. It is a lose lose situation. The only way out of it is above it. And above it is you maintaining your emotional energy despite it all. It's what Viktor Frankl taught us. In man's search for meaning, the last of human freedoms is the ability to control one's own attitude. How magical is that? It's up to you. Now for those who are still going, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you don't understand my spouse. Let me talk to you real quickly. One, watch this recording again and start to own the reality that you're in charge of your emotions, you're in charge of how you feel. You got to own that. Doubters, complainers, don't give them time, don't give them credit, don't give them the ability or the permission to knock you off your path. Second, make it a game. I love making a game. It's a game to me. People's energy is a game to me. I look at it and I go, huh? I wonder if I can not get pulled into this. If I don't get it to pull this, I get some points. And then I also think in those circumstances where everybody's negative and it all looks like it's going to fall apart, I make it a game. I go, I wonder if I could turn this around. I don't try to turn people around because I feel superior or it's an obligation in any way whatsoever. I try to make a positive effect because I think that's part of our mission in the world, is to make more positive energy and to generate that energy that brings more joy or peace, satisfaction, fulfillment in other people's lives. We're not responsible for other people's lives, but we can influence them. As soon as you say, I'm not responsible for their energy, it gives you freedom. You are not responsible for the hot mess of other people's lives. The day that you own that, you're like, ah, life is so good. I'm not responsible for other people's energy, but I do have the opportunity to influence it. And now you are free to approach it as a game like I do. So it was one of my favorite games. If I'm sitting down with somebody who's constantly complaining and negative, I just take it as a test. I'm like, I Wonder if I can get them laughing. I wonder if I can get them talking about something positive without judging them, without criticizing them. Just try and turn that conversation. That's what I try to do. So it's like a game to me. And then I'll finally say this. The third thing you can do with doubters and complainers. If you just can't get yourself away from that victim mentality. You're always being brought in. If you don't want to take on the responsibility or even the opportunity to influence the energy. Third piece. If it's constant and it's constant, it's constant. It's time for you to put your foot down, look a person in the face and say, look, I really want to be around you. I think you're great. But what I've noticed is you have this pattern of constantly complaining. And you know what? I think you actually have the right to. I think there's a lot of things going on in your life. I get it. It's a struggle. But you know what? If you keep talking about all the things in such a negative way, you're generating a negative energy for yourself and for me. Now, if you want to do that for yourself, that's cool. But I just want you to know I can't be part of negative conversations all the time. And I do everything I can to avoid those things. But in that process, I don't wanna avoid you. Cause I like you. So either we need to change our communication pattern here and talk about positive things or things that we can do in a better way, or I need to limit our conversations. I don't wanna do that. But I'm gonna let you know my energy is important to me enough that I would and I can share with you. I've probably said that to seven or eight people in my life. I would say that three of them reacted very poorly and I limited my exposure to them. The other four were like, I do. What do you mean? I make you feel bad. And sometimes people just don't realize how.
Much they moan and complain.
And you just have to say it subtly and directly at the same time. Subtly in a way that you're not judging them, but directly in telling them. You'll have to limit the exposure to it. And all I can share with you is what I do is when my mood sucks, I call my friends. When my mood sucks, it's like, let's go do something. And I get around people who are fun. And that fun changes the game for me. So that's my ways to improve mood. I know this has been great. Thank you all. I want to honor you for being here again. I love having you as part of this community. Thanks everybody. Go out there every single day of this year. Know that this year can be whatever you decide to make it up. And as always, go out and live fully, love, openly, make your difference today. Thanks everybody for being here. Goodbye.
All right, my friend, I hope that you enjoyed that best of episode. Was that inspiring? Were you fired up? Did you love it? If you did, make sure you do me a favor, go out on social media somewhere and share that episode. Just go out, post it somewhere, post yourself, listening to it. Make sure you hashtag the Brendon show because when you do that I can look you up and we can find you on instagram and post that on the social media. And sometimes we do all expense paid trips to people we find. We just randomly select people. We send them gifts, autograph books, swag T shirts, all expense paid trips to some of my seminars. So make sure you let us know, share what you thought about this episode out there on the social media worlds and then we can find you and celebrate you. And also I would love to invite you to join us in our high performance monthly program. So just go to brendon.com monthly. That's brendon.com monthly. That's where we do deeper dive trainings like you just heard. But we do that every single month and there's some live Q and A there and I do some giveaways and we give students in that monthly program tickets to my seminars and some extra special training on leadership. So make sure you check it out@brendon.com monthly. I appreciate you being part of this community of so many people dedicated to finding that deeper drive of motivation and practicing high performance habits so that they can become extraordinary in their careers. In your personal life, in your health, you can live an extraordinary quality of life. And sometimes you just need a little bit more training and a little bit more nudge, a little bit more energy, a little bit more drive and consistency. And I'm hoping that being part of this community with the Brendon show, I'm providing that to you in some way. So thank you, my friend for listening. I look forward to seeing you or listening with you on the next episode of the B r e N D o N show.
Sam.