Five Habits to End Toxic Situations | EP 100

Paul Leon (00:03)
In this video, I'm going to share five lessons to help you overcome a toxic situation. I am Paul Leon. I'm a full-time sales trainer, MBA candidate and part-time podcaster. I've survived several toxic situations in my professional career. One situation was so intense, it required over 40 appointments with a therapist just to psychologically survive.

and focus on my work. If you believe in positive people management like I do and a psychologically safe place to work, hit the like and subscribe button. So, the first lesson is that you want to be smoke. And what do I mean by that? So, to illustrate being smoke, here's how I'll do it. The biggest mistake I see a lot of people make is feeding the toxic person. And what poisonous people like to do in the workplace is they like to see you squirm.

because they like to see you get emotionally bigger than they do, because what they've done is they've enabled you with that insecurity and it gives them the feeling of satisfaction watching you be toxic. I wrote 150 PowerPoint slides. I wrote 150 PowerPoint slides. And included with that, I wrote a 40 plus participant guide once. I completed this task in under 30 days.

Now I had five spelling mistakes. Now I try to be perfect just like anybody else, which is just not realistic. But the way I discovered these five spelling mistakes was I got an email and the email wrote, Paul, I found five spelling mistakes. You are always a bad speller. Let me be very clear as some bonus content and bonus information here. Words like always and never are very harmful in the workplace.

Even outside of this example of just keeping it in the corporate environment, if you're in a toxic situation or you feel you're struggling with toxic communication, avoid words like always and never because they don't give you any breathing room. But going back to my point, yes, I did struggle with spelling mistakes because I grew up in the age of the internet where everything was there for me, where everything was supposed to do spell check.

But even with Spellcheck, ChatGPT, everything we have today, mistakes are still gonna happen. So in this email exchange with this toxic person, we went back and forth and back and forth. And that was the mistake I should have not done. What I should have done when I saw that email, I said I should have done nothing. If you're in this situation, I recommend ignoring them or sleeping on it.

Typically a couple things when happen when you ignore this painful or toxic person in their life. They'll typically try to send you an email that will entrap you. And that email will read something along the lines of, it looks like you made a mistake. Please confirm that you understand this mistake by responding to this current email. What you wanna do, instead of responding to that email, if this happens to you,

save that email and document it and in no way shape or form respond to that email. What that is an attempt to do, it is an attempt to record you and entrap you so that in your next one-on-one they can bring it back, they can document it, and it might be something they can use as leverage to prove that you're actually not a good worker and reframe and tell a story that might be false. So again, be smoke.

Do not let them catch you. You will thank me for this later if you are in this situation. Lesson two, be structured steadily in data and facts. I personally like leveraging the inbox zero method to track my emails. It allows me to attack everything. That's my preferred system. I won't go into how to do that system for this video. There's actually a better video on that from somebody by the name of Jeff Su's YouTube channel. I'm gonna link.

and put a link to his YouTube channel in my description. I recommend you check out Jeff Su's inbox zero video. Very good. So what my only addition after you're done watching his video is make another tag and tag it documentation for questionable content. That way you can journal the details later. It'll help you to track dates easier for each instance.

I'm not an employment lawyer. I want to be very, very clear. I'm just a professional who survived over 40 appointments as a therapist. And that's where this is coming from, just pure personal experience. But I understand the state you may be in if this is you. And remember this though, your memory is evidence. Your words, what you write and dates and times is data. And it is evidence to help protect you if you are in this really intense, toxic situation.

And if you're anything like me who has a family to feed and you can't afford to get fired just because of misinformation, this is going to save you a lot of peace of mind and documenting this outside of lesson one. On Netflix, there's a documentary called Take Care of Maya. I'm not going to spoil this documentary. Just be ready to be sad is the easiest way I can say it. The reason I mentioned that reference is what was really amazing about that documentary.

despite the intensity of the story was the primary reason that any type of light at the end of the tunnel situation was happening of this family going for a very tense situation. says the mother in the documentary, Take Care of Maya took excessive notes and even, I'm just going to paraphrase some of this, but later there was actually a scene where a lawyer had said, if the mother had not taken detail notes, we don't know where this family would be.

Thank goodness she did do that for her family. it's important that you take diligent notes too, so it can help you survive an intense and toxic situation. Lesson number three, do not gossip. So essentially avoiding gossip sounds like common sense, but if you're anything like me and you're somewhat educated in this world, ⁓ common sense is not always common. So...

Even there's traps that sometimes toxic people will they'll say, hey, can we talk off the record? And even non-toxic people will say this. My recommendation to you, if somebody says, can we talk off the record? Just say no. I don't want to talk off the record. Now, if you are a nice person and you like to hear people out and that doesn't work for your style, instead of saying no, what you can say if somebody says, can we talk off the record?

you can say, that's perfectly fine as long as you're okay with me being a sounding board to you for this conversation. Because that's the best way I can be helpful. The trap is giving advice when you shouldn't. Because sometimes the best advice is no advice at all. Growing up, I had a lot of friends that I lost because they would be like dating a girl or something like that. And then they would vent to me. And I made the mistake of giving advice when I should not have. And then my friend would make up with that girl.

And then all of a sudden they didn't talk to me and I would find out years later it's because I said something and he confided in her once they made up and I lost a friend. So this is just a personal example I want to give you. So when you're in a sounding board conversation, use words like wow. Wow is the best word ever. I like the word wow because it has no meaning. It doesn't mean anything. I ate curry chicken and hurt my stomach. Wow.

I'm considering creating a board game called Zucchini Farmer. Wow, I heard my dog call me ugly yesterday. Wow. Another story I'll give you to illustrate this point further is there's a tale of a man who discovers that his student is gossip about him. Eventually, the student realizes the errors of his mistakes and he goes to the older man and he wants to say sorry. He says, what can I do to make an amends for you?

to say I'm truly sorry and that I should have never gossiped about you in the first place. And the older man says, I want you to meet me in a canyon. And he tells him to bring a feather pillow with him. And so they meet at the canyon, him and the student, and he tells the student, go ahead and rip up that feather pillow. And he rips up the feather pillow and all the feathers go into the canyon. They spread everywhere. The wind takes it all over the place. And he goes, well, what do want to do next?

And the old man goes, I want you to catch all those feathers. He goes, that's absolutely impossible. And he goes, exactly. So you probably knew where that story was going, but I think that story really holds water and true to this date and drives home the point of avoiding gossip. Lesson number four, do not share your wah-wahs with your work network at all. Hey, I'll be real with you. I love to share. But the best thing that helped me in this intense toxic situation

that I had referenced earlier and I think that will help you is getting a therapist. In my family, where I grew up, in my culture, I grew up in the Hispanic culture, my family survived Cuba, they actually frowned upon therapy because in their days when they had survived Cuba, the Fidel Castro era time, people who actually went to a therapist supposedly were put in straight jackets and thrown into rooms just for seeing a therapist. I don't know if that's true or not.

Don't hold against me. Those are just stories that have been passed down to me. So, but for the best thing I can ever recommend to you is getting a therapist, something that you can pragmatically afford if you can.

Because for most of us in life, at least for me, I felt that way too.

Hey, let's be real. I love to share, but the best thing that helped me was getting a therapist. In my family where I grew up, they actually frown upon it and they think you're crazy. In fact, when they were growing up, my family survived a dictatorship in their background and people who went to therapy in their intense situation were actually thrown to room. So I really understand that point of view. But for the most of us here in America, I feel it's one of the best things you can do.

so you don't share your wham-whas with people around you who make gossip about you. And let's put it in this way. If I want a glass of clean water, okay, but then I poured some water from the faucet, it would still look clean and somewhat the same, but it's still not because it didn't go through a filter as well as a normal water or whatnot. And you might drink it and it might still feel good.

but you're still taking in some toxins. And that's what you're doing when you share your wham-whas with someone. They may be drinking clean water and you're taking some of your dirty water and put it in their cup. When they're not really qualified to help you with those personal problems, it's better to project that into a therapist or somebody who's trained professionally to help you reframe. So all you have for the people...

who you work with and for the people in your personal family and love is just the good stuff. That's a huge benefit in going into therapy. And I get it, it feels good, but the reality is personal bias plays a role in your workplace way more than you think, regardless of how awesome your performance is. The Society of Human Resources states that 50 % of the hires they're seeing is through referrals.

So if we take that data at face value, we can easily see that personal bias is the reason that even people get hired or promoted or level up in the workplace. And that's why this is such an important lesson for us to embrace. Lesson five, selfish moments are normal, but being self-absorbed is dangerous. What do I mean by that? I'm gonna talk from the heart on this one, 100%.

So being selfish, the best way I can give you some some like heart to heart and how I personally interpret this message is sometimes my kids absolutely drive me crazy and I try to reduce screen time and sometimes I just give up because I'm tired or the dog kept me up all night and I'll just be like fine go ahead and watch whatever Minecraft is on YouTube. Totally fine by me. That's being selfish. I'm tired. I I want to rest a moment.

Not bad selfish, that's just selfish. Being self-absorbed is if I went to my kids and they said, hey dad, can I have a hug? And I said, hey, I can't give you love, because I don't have enough love in my life. So I'm not gonna give you love. That's an excessive example of being self-absorbed. And how this works in the workplace is if you're reporting to somebody who's very self-absorbed, it's an incredibly

You have to be so safe with the fact that you have to allow them to feed their own ego and be a sounding board. Self-absorbed people love sounding boards the most because it allows them to keep talking about themselves. And in some ways, you might be even of the state of hearing this and being like, why don't I like these people? I don't want to be around them and I associate with them. And that's a great goal to have.

But realistically for most of us, we're probably in situations where we have to work with toxic people sometimes. So we have to learn to get along, to move along. So I said I was only five, but because I'm in a good mood, I feel like give it a little bit of a bonus content. I think this lesson will hold water and I think it will stay true with you is ensure that you also reframe what a win is in the workplace and in your professional life. One of the things I have personally struggled with

and even creating content, doing a podcast, doing my MBA that I'm pursuing is putting too much of my identity in my professional career and not in the things that truly matter. And the best way I can give you an example of this is through a final story for this video. So my son is in soccer and I love my son very much. He's pretty much struggled in sports and I personally feel that I've taken

Hand in that like I should have been pushing him or whatnot, but I was working a lot And I recently got an opportunity to give some more time to get them off screens Take them out my backyard and even though he was a little bit kicking and screaming we ended up practicing soccer together and We even went to the Swing set made an obstacle course where I swing the swing and he'd have to dribble through there Kick back and forth we spent about an hour together. The reason this is important is because my son recently

wanted to quit soccer. He had got hit in the face with the ball a few times, kind of gave him bad experience. But we did this hour practice, just father and son. He had his first game recently. And in that game, I cannot tell you with one hour of practice change, just with me outside of with his coach inside of his teammates. He was in the game. He was dribbling. He was passing the ball. He was not afraid. He

Even did some kicks. He knew how to throw the ball in because we even practice just that little effort there and going through the goal and even the parents around me, the coach were like, what what changed with your son? It's like he's a different player all of a sudden. And he even went up and said, my dad practiced me for an hour and I have the confidence to do this. I'm just being real with you. That right there is the best win.

that I've had in a long time. I've done over 80 podcasts. It felt better than that. I've had about over five subject matter experts. I've had major executives reach out to me from Fortune 100 companies, 1500 companies to be on the podcast. And even though those are really cool accolades to talk about on a professional level, nothing felt stronger and important to me.

then hearing my son say that, like, if you have this moment, I hope you do, like I'm actually just getting a little teary-eyed just thinking about it, a personal win for your family and people you love is significantly more important than any win you'll have in your professional life or if you're struggling with a toxic person in your professional life. So I hope some of these insights in this video were helpful to you. Again, if you believe in positive,

people management and a psychologically safe place to work, hit the like and subscribe button. My name is Paul Leon, and I want to thank you again for checking out the Manager's Mic Take care.