Why You Really Want to Focus on People’s Best Traits

Are there any people you know that you just really don’t care for all that much? A person that either drives you crazy and/or does things that you just find offensive and inappropriate. These are people we would rather spend as little time as possible with or avoid completely.

Despite the fact many of these people do have some serious idiosyncrasies, the alternaview is that the challenge in dealing with them actually belongs to us personally and requires that we try and view these people from a different perspective. All people are multidimensional and have both “good” and “bad” things about them, so we have to push ourselves to view people holistically. It is not that you overlook their bad traits, but rather that you take a look at the entire picture and appreciate the fact that there really are good things about the person too that serve as a counterweight to their idiosyncrasies.

In the past, I have totally just written these people off and put them in the “bad” person box. I can think of one person in particular that I had classified as bad. Everything she did that I disagreed with was heightened and that much worse because of the box I had put her into. Now, don’t get me wrong, some of the things she did (and still does) are just plain wrong, but I am able to see her in a different light which helps when I have to deal with her not so great actions.  This different perspective I have somehow been able to find has even made me appreciate some of the good aspects of her personality. As a result, even though I continue to disagree with many of her not so great actions, I realize they don’t alone define who she is and I have been able to remove her from that “bad” person category. I guess I kind of understand her a little better and that makes her much easier to deal with and my tolerance much higher.

She is not an anomaly by any stretch of the imagination.  There are always good and bad things about people. The issue is not that people have idiosyncrasies because that is human nature, but rather that they have allowed their idiosyncrasies to overshadow their good traits. Consequently, it can be difficult to see the positive things about them unless we take it upon ourselves to look really closely….(I mean really, really closely in some instances).

The reality is we do have the option to choose how we want to view people and what we want to focus on. We can literally temper our negative feelings about anyone by taking into consideration the positive sides of their personality that we may otherwise not notice or overlook because we are only focused on what they have done wrong.  Being able to look at people in a positive light is not something we just do for them, in essence we are also doing it for ourselves because we are freeing our mind to focus on those things that will not negatively impact us or weigh us down mentally. Think of negative thoughts about a person as a heavy weight tied around your ankle. The quicker we are able to remove that weight, the much easier it is to take great strides forward.

If you are really struggling with identifying any positive attributes of a person, then as unbelievable as it sounds, you are probably just not looking hard enough.  Yes, I know that there are people out there that are just terrible to deal with and impossible to understand.  Althought it is understandable that these people frustrate you and push your tolerance to places unknown, we can’t really give ourselves a pass and we need to do what we can to view these people differently.  It is not that you can’t choose to limit the time you spend with them (I mean a person can understandably only take so much), but rather that we choose to positively manage our interactions with these people and our thoughts about them…this is the alternaview.

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