How can you assert your boundaries and respond to negativity?

AVAlexander Volchek

This is the key to resolving this question. We are looking at a situation that allows you to gradually remove an enormous number of different barriers, an enormous number of different barriers. The very act of paying attention to this state—because it is the only state that is profoundly true. It is the only state that is honest toward other people. It is the only state that is lawful from the Universe's perspective, lawful, truly lawful. It cannot violate anything. You cannot upset the balance.

AVAnna Volchek

How do you learn to deal with negativity directed at you? People very often encounter negativity directed at them that really is unfounded. We are not talking about feedback here, but about critical, negative remarks, perhaps even something bordering on bullying, something that happens simply because people in society very often tend to communicate with one another this way. In the moment, a person cannot defend themselves. They don't know how to respond. They simply stay silent and take in that negativity. Then, that evening, or after sleeping on it, the next day, they think, “Why didn't I answer that way? Why didn't I react that way? Why didn't I act differently and stand up for my boundaries?” But you can't turn back the clock. How do you learn to stand up for your boundaries and work with this, to be resilient in the face of negativity from other people?

AVAlexander Volchek

You know, when you mentioned negativity just now, I imagined something like a bear coming out toward us right now and triggering a state in you that is completely beyond your control. And it is the same with people sitting in a meeting, perhaps, when someone starts shouting at them or expressing some kind of negative reaction. Or a brother says something to his sister, or a sister to her brother, or a husband to his wife, or an acquaintance. All sorts of different situations. Someone starts expressing something, and the person enters that state of encountering a bear. Again, we are not looking at who is right and who is to blame.

AVAnna Volchek

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes. Why does a person enter that state in the first place? I am really emphasizing that we are not looking at who is right and who is to blame. Because as I offer a solution, you will see a somewhat different path. Look, if a person enters that state, it is important to understand that, fundamentally, they are not prepared for it. Not prepared, not prepared. In this case, that does not mean the state is unfamiliar to them. “Not prepared” means that they do not know how to work with it, do not want to work with it, and have not lived through that experience. For example, in theory, you and I could learn to react more or less normally to a bear. Could we? We certainly could.

AVAnna Volchek

Well, I think so. At the very least, after encountering it ten times and understanding—

—that I might encounter it.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, going out and encountering it. There are people who interact with bears quite readily, spend time with them constantly, and so on. Being in regular contact with a bear. At some point, you will at least begin to feel a little calmer. That does not mean you will have the solution, but you will feel a little calmer. The more time you spend there, the more calmly you will be able to be around it. That is a task. For this task to work, you need to learn to catch these situations as they arise. With a bear, it is obvious. The bear appears, and it is obvious. With other people, it is not obvious when a particular situation arises. Fundamentally, people are not inclined to keep noticing the situation; they are inclined to resolve the situation itself. There is a big difference between observing a situation and wanting to observe it, and wanting the situation to work out well for you, wanting it not to happen. A person does not like being shouted at, so they want people not to shout at them. A person does not like what someone else is telling them, so they want that person to stop telling them.

There is another position: let them tell me whatever they like. Look, with a bear, you are not trying to change the bear's behavior. It is very simple. You do not even imagine negotiating with it so that it will react to you differently. We looked at a situation where the bear is guaranteed to—for example, or a lion, let's say, or some other animal. There are certain animals that are guaranteed to attack you, or at least might attack you. It comes out, you have no control over the circumstances, and you say, “Listen, could you not be so frightening? Could you not express that particular state, or trigger that particular hormonal state in me? Could you do those things?” That is impossible. But here, if you really analyze things and really look, you will see that in most situations, in most cases, a person wants not to be treated that way. To truly learn to catch these situations properly, the first thing you need to do, the first thing you need to tell yourself, is to stop wanting other people to behave differently and learn to be in that situation.

And Anna, that is the number one task: learning to be there. Have you noticed what happens when you ask people where they would like to live, for example, or how they would feel? Just a few days ago, you and I were talking with Polina. Remember, there was a time when we spent three months in Indonesia with the children. And Polina was asked, “Polina, would you like to go back to Indonesia?” She said, “No, never, not for anything.” That immediately shuts down her perception of that possibility, right? If you ask me personally whether I want to live in Indonesia, I would say that I am not generally considering a life in Indonesia. But I think that if I were destined to live there, if I had to go there and stay, if circumstances worked out that way, I would be there. From the outset, I regard that situation neutrally, not aggressively. Not positively, not even negatively, but neutrally. You know my attitude: I view it neutrally.

When we talk about aggression from other people, we need to establish from the outset that the task is not to change other people. The task is not to change the environment or gain a better advantage for ourselves. The task is to learn to be in any environment—any environment where there is no threat to your life—and feel all right. And to do that, when we say “feel all right in any environment,” Anna, it means feeling exactly the same in the most beautiful environment as in the least beautiful one. Let's not take this to extremes or anything like that. In the best city or place you could live, and in a city where you probably would not want to live, be ready to feel all right. Try to feel all right. Even make it a task, Anna: to feel all right. That does not mean that, in order to want to feel all right living somewhere—for example, I don't know how I would live in Nepal or Nigeria—I would necessarily aspire to live there.

It does not mean you need to go there and live through that experience. No, you don't need to live through it. It is a question of my state: if circumstances work out that way, I am ready to perceive them calmly, from a place of calm, without negativity, calmly, from a state of observation. If I perceive this from a calm state of observation, if I perceive it consciously, that gives me the opportunity to prepare myself. That is step one. Without that step, there is no point in going anywhere, no point in going anywhere. Again, the best way to hear this and see it is to feel that you are in the same state whether aggression is directed at you or not. This is not a lack of emotional involvement. It is much stronger than any emotional involvement. It is a free, real, true perception of the situation that is unfolding. Believe me, anyone would want to be in that state. Of course. Why? Why? Because it is a state of truth. Let's look at another aspect. How does a person feel when someone else is being shouted at? Some people feel perfectly calm, while others worry about themselves. Yes.

Some people worry about themselves, that the person will now start shouting at them. Others worry about the other person, right? The central, fundamental question is always what you want, what you want to get. For example, you are at work, and your boss is constantly shouting at everyone. You understand that he has always shouted and will keep shouting. His shouting does not change your main purpose in working, which, for example, is to earn money. Suppose a person's main purpose in working is to earn money. Does that purpose change because the boss shouts at them? The person looks and sees that he shouted at four hundred people, and the amount of money they got did not change. You say, “Well, go ahead and shout.” From there, you choose for yourself: am I willing to be in an environment where people shout at me, or am I not? But that in no way means you should not respond calmly. Why does a person become upset when the boss shouts at them at a job where they work in order to earn money?

Why do they react that way? Because they are used to it. Someone told them that no one has the right to shout at them. Someone, at some point in their life, told them that no one has the right to shout at them. If they had been told everywhere, all their life, that shouting is normal, we would all walk around yelling and pay no attention to it. But in society, if you enter a quiet environment and someone starts shouting, everyone goes... In San Francisco, for example, if you are walking down the street and someone is shouting, you probably know it is someone destitute or poor, someone living on the street, or someone who is ill and simply shouting. You are used to the possibility that someone might shout. There is a certain habit. There are places where people may shout and places where they may not. What should you really look at when your boss shouts at you? Again, a person looks and says, “I don't want him to shout. He's my boss. This is inappropriate behavior. He's not behaving normally.” What you should really look at—again, what you should look at—is that you work at this job for money.

I am generally willing to be on a team where someone shouts. I am generally willing to be on a team where someone shouts. Right now, I am slipping into an unconscious state not because I am earning less money, not because there is a threat to my life, but because I have seen that my boss did not like my work. He simply did not like it. Or because my boss disagrees with my opinion, or disagrees with my idea, or because, if he shouted at someone else, he could shout at me too. Of course, there are different traumas and psychological barriers: parents shouted at someone in childhood, someone was frightened somewhere, something happened. There are all sorts of situations. I absolutely agree that there are different situations, but here, in this conversation, it is fundamentally important to see what is really happening. If you see what is truly happening, truly see what is happening, then you will not... You will not experience that loss of awareness. It will not happen. You will perceive the reaction very calmly. We looked at the bear example. We did nothing to change the situation with the bear.

We said that you simply need to prepare for it. Now let's move on to what you should actually do. What should you do?

AVAnna Volchek

If we are talking about some kind of mistreatment or bullying that happens to someone over and over, what then? They cannot do anything; in the moment, they simply lose their nerve and don't know how to behave. They just stay silent and take it in, absorb it.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look at what to do. What to do? Yes, including with bullying. Always, absolutely always, one hundred percent, you need to understand why the other person is doing it. You need to work that out. Why are they doing it? What are their motives? You need to understand causes and effects. There are always causes and effects. Why is this person doing it? A person may bully someone without having any grievance against that person at all. At work, for example. Without any grievance at all. Or a husband comes home in the evening, or a wife comes home tired and angry and starts shouting at the children. Yet she clearly wasn't planning to shout at the children, didn't even want to. She is shouting at them because she has lost control. It is her outburst, an outpouring of her sense of importance and significance that she wants to convey to everyone. Do you see what I mean? She wants to convey it to everyone. She wants to show her power. Or a man comes home tired and wants to show his power. It is an expression of power, Anna. It is an expression of a lack of love. Negative power. I am not talking about the power of love. I am talking about negative power: an expression of negative power, an expression of authority, an assertion of authority. Just like the many bosses who shout at work: it is an expression of authority.

Whom can they not control? Themselves. Or there is another situation. For example, I have personally managed thousands of people. Because of the way I operate, I propose a great many different ideas in meetings. Imagine I am sitting there suggesting ideas. Some people are willing to consider any idea, while others argue with every idea, argue with every idea. I had businesses where thirty directors reported to me. From the very beginning, I always told all of them very calmly and clearly, “Please work with me in one particular way. Whenever I propose an idea, you always take it on. Always, without exception. And tell me, ‘Thank you. We have received the idea.’ Do you want to discuss it separately, express an opinion of your own? Express it, understanding right away, very clearly, that you are not entering into a conflict with the idea or trying to dispute it. You don't say, ‘But there is this situation.’ You say, ‘Great idea, Alexander, we've written it down,’ and a little later you bring up some other circumstance. Or you come and ask, ‘Alexander, you gave me an idea about having eight light bulbs. But our chandelier has four light bulbs.

“‘How did you envision implementing this idea? Do you want to buy a different chandelier, make this one bigger? What do you want to do?’ At that point, I will say, ‘We have four? Oh, well, I made a mistake. Let it be four.’” But if people say that to me during a meeting, when I have this enormous, endless flow—say, fourteen hours of meetings, with a large number of people present, and I am generating a large amount of information—I start to get angry, because I perceive many of those things as resistance. And very often, people really are resisting. Moreover, I pick up on resistance very easily. Look, I pick up on it very easily; I can see the resistance directly. I can see that the person is resisting inside. This starts to create other situations where I may respond quite sharply. What am I saying? We need to understand why one person might respond sharply to another. Did you create that situation? Did you bring it to that point? That is why it is very important always to understand exactly why a person reacts that way. They don't like you bringing them an eight-page presentation. They like an odd number of pages? Bring a presentation with an odd number of pages. The thing is, Anna, that a huge number of the things in our lives that we react to with difficulty are connected to us, to our own behavior and our own desire, our own desire to contribute something.

That is one side of it, of course, you understand? I am talking about one part of it.

AVAnna Volchek

If someone yells at you in a store and you cannot say anything in response—not yell back, but should you respond somehow or not? Or you go to a hospital and someone speaks to you rudely.

AVAlexander Volchek

I'll answer. I'll answer. Look, now you are talking about even more serious, deeper things. For example, that situation in the store: someone simply yelled at you. You are walking down the street, and some drunk person is sitting there and starts shouting at you, “Hey, idiot!” What are you supposed to do? Answer, “Hey, idiot!”? What should you do? What would be humane? What is the most humane thing you could do?

AVAnna Volchek

Well, I don't pay any attention to that at all. I'll walk past.

AVAlexander Volchek

And if you look even deeper, from the standpoint of true spirituality, what can you do?

AVAnna Volchek

Well, recognize that the person is in trouble, has a problem.

AVAlexander Volchek

And what can you do?

AVAnna Volchek

Well, I probably know the right answer, but it feels difficult to apply it to myself.

AVAlexander Volchek

Direct love toward that person.

AVAnna Volchek

Yes, exactly.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, the single greatest thing you can do is direct love toward that person. The greatest thing you can do is direct a feeling of understanding and compassion toward them. Anna, leaving everything else aside, that is the greatest thing you can do. Another thing you can do, okay, is walk past neutrally. So, when this happens in a store, to learn how to interact with it, you need to add love to your actions, Anna. Anna, this is an extraordinary feeling of love. Even something as simple as this: someone is shouting at you, and you think, “Right, Volchek said in the video that I should direct a feeling of love toward them. This person is shouting, and I'm shaking. Somehow, I find human love within myself and direct it toward them as a human being, then leave the store.” Anna, this will save you in an incredibly powerful way. Not just in terms of your development, not just in terms of a holistic—

—a holistic perception and understanding of the truth about people. Anna, it will save you, you and your soul. It will always save you in your life. It will save you in the most difficult situations, in the most difficult situations. By no means with a lion or a bear. We are not talking about situations where you are being attacked. We are talking about situations where a certain state arises within us that is not connected to a physical threat. This is very important: not connected to a physical threat. Although I understand that many people enter these states because they have an association with physical danger as well. But we will not go into that area now, because directing attention, love... You cannot argue with that. Why was it difficult for you to come up with love in relation to that unfortunate person? Why did you just want to keep walking?

AVAnna Volchek

Well, I think it would be difficult for me personally to convey love to a stranger who insulted me or insulted someone else, instead of responding as neutrally as possible. For me, the solution would be not to pay attention to it, not to take it personally, not to stir up any energy or negativity in myself. That would be a solution for me. As of today. I am not saying it is right; that is just how I see it. It would be hard for me to convey love to him, especially in that situation. It is not easy to do that toward a stranger at all. It really isn't easy. The more you think about it, the more you realize that. And if you feel or see a threat or aggression from that stranger—or even feel fear... I have been in situations where people on the street frightened me and put me in a state of fear, to the point of screaming. In that moment, it is like the bear example.

AVAlexander Volchek

Again, there is always the extreme situation, all the way up to the bear, and there is the situation where you reach the point of being afraid of every person on the street. There are points somewhere in between. We are looking at something that allows you to gradually remove an enormous number of different barriers, an enormous number of different barriers. The very act of paying attention to this state—because it is the only state that is profoundly true. It is the only state that is honest toward other people. It is the only state that is lawful from the Universe's perspective, lawful, truly lawful. It cannot violate anything. You cannot upset the balance. A person may be shouting because they are having a heart attack. A person may be shouting because they have learned that ten of their children died at the same time. A person may be shouting in agony because they have realized what terrible things they have done. Different things may be happening at that moment that bring you into a state of aggression, among other things—or a state of stress. This is the only state, the situation that allows you to arrive at a balanced, normal perception of the other person and understand what really needs to be done at that moment. And in some situations, if someone is shouting at you, you need to say, “Stop. You will not treat me this way anymore.”

AVAnna Volchek

We have been talking quite a lot about shouting. But what about a generally negative context directed toward you, where you enter a kind of stupor? There really is another side to it. It might be unfair; it might be the other person's problem that they are projecting onto you. At the same time, it could be your own inability to hear feedback, your own denial.

AVAlexander Volchek

Of course.

AVAnna Volchek

Yes, for example, how do you also learn to sort those things out, to tell them apart?

AVAlexander Volchek

If you start recognizing causes and effects, start looking at what is really happening, you may see, for example, that you reacted negatively. You reacted negatively to another person not because they were telling the truth about something you did wrong, but because they pointed it out in public. If you had been alone, for example, you might have responded calmly. But with other people sitting around, you did not like it. Anna, I lead a great many groups, and you hear me constantly giving different examples. You attend some of those groups; you hear it. I give examples in those groups of other situations and meetings with people. Sometimes I name people, and sometimes I do not name them openly. An interesting situation can arise. I watch their reactions. Sometimes I give examples involving people sitting in that very group, among those dozens of people, listening to what I am saying. I watch how they react when I have spoken about them, or when I haven't, what is really happening inside them. People react in very different ways.

Some respond with kindness and warmth and great gratitude that their example has been discussed. Others sit there without listening to the answer and begin to react negatively, get angry and enter the very state you described, simply because they are being talked about. Can you imagine how many different directions the same event can take? You can be happy and grateful that your situation is being discussed, discussed in a group, and that other people are about to join in too. That someone, a teacher, for example, has given it their attention. Or you can get angry and think, “Why are you talking about me at all, telling someone else about me and this situation?” Can you imagine how different those directions are? The answer here is very simple. In one case, you are acting from clear consciousness and a desire to understand, to live and to develop yourself. In the other, you are acting out of selfishness, self-importance and your own personality, out of a desire to show who you are. Not who you really are, but who you want to be, who you are not. A huge number of our reactions everywhere, Anna, are closely connected with this as well. That is why we need to understand causes and effects.

When I talk about this person, am I trying to belittle them? Am I presenting it in order to hammer them down? Am I pointing this out so that they will at least hear it and realize it? Am I doing it for other people, sharing it with them? Why is it happening? There are different possibilities. Why does a person perform the same action? If you are at work and your boss points out something negative, is he doing it simply to crush you because this is the only place where he can crush people? Or is he doing it so that the company will be healthy, you will be healthy, the other employees will be healthy, and the company as a whole will be healthy? Why is he doing it? You look at him and see whether he is doing it from strength or weakness. Perhaps he cannot do it another way. Anna, today we discussed people who are ill, right? You were talking about saving those people in another video, another episode that will be on the channel. The thing is, Anna, this is what truly saving people means.

You want to save a person who has cancer, but you don't want to save a person who is unbalanced and shouts at other people. You want to save someone who is dying before old age, but you don't want to save someone who walks around with a scowl. You want to save an acquaintance who has been diagnosed with a tumor, but you don't want to save an ill person on the street who addressed you with an insult. Anna, that is dividing people up and choosing: we save this one, but not that one. It is something that society has increasingly become over the past several hundred years. These are the faithful, those are the unfaithful. This one is good, that one is bad. This person said that, so they're all right. This one dresses properly, that one doesn't. This is a real job, that one isn't. This company is great, that one is bad. This country is good, that one is bad. This politician is good, that one is bad. This wife is good, that one is bad. This is the key to resolving this question, along with putting into practice what we discussed at the very beginning.