We all have those people who we avoid if we see them coming. We avoid them because we know as soon as they see us we will be in a 30 minute conversation full of their drama, bitterness and emotions. We know after the 30 minutes we will be useless, we will have emptied ourselves on listening and engaging with these people.
Around the web recently there have been a couple of articles about protecting yourself from “Energy Vampires”. It kind of sums up how these kind of people “feed” off of everyone they come into contact with. The way in which they just off-load on to people and they are always negative.
There are two things I have learnt on this issue. Firstly is to understand and indentify who the people are who drain you and to ensure that you balance them with those who energise you so you don’t go through 3 or 4 hours straight of draining times. Secondly if someone who drains my time walks unexpectedly into my office then stand up so that we don’t get into too deep a conversation with no parameters having been put around it.
