The Mindset Mentor - Six Steps to Deal with Toxic People

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Ever feel like someone in your life just drains the energy right out of you? In this episode, I’m breaking down six powerful steps to deal with toxic people—whether it’s a coworker, friend, or even family member. You’ll learn exactly how to identify them, set boundaries, and even cut them off if necessary. Don’t let toxic people control your life! Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. If you're out there and you've realized that you have some patterns, some habits, some ways of speaking to yourself that you need to break and you need a subconscious reprogramming. It's something that you need to do to yourself. I've created a video lesson that teaches you exactly step-by-step how to do that.

It is a morning priming technique, so if you wanna download that lesson for free, go to morningpriming.com. Once again, morningpriming.com, and you can download it for free. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about how to deal with the toxic people in your life step by step. And we all know at least one person who drains the life out of us. It might be a co-worker that you just can't avoid that thrives on gossip.

It might be a friend that only calls you when they need something or it could be a family member who constantly Criticizes every single step that you make in your life I want you to realize that toxic people can be really exhausting They can be very manipulative and quite frankly They are bad for your mental health studies show that people who have toxic relationships Actually die earlier than people who have toxic relationships actually die earlier than people who have good relationships. So this is a very serious thing that you should pay attention to. And so if you have them in your life, how do you deal with them?

How do you minimize the impact that they have on your life and not bring any unnecessary drama? Well, let's break it down six different steps on how to do so. Okay. Step number one, I want you to identify the toxic people in your life. And let me take a step back before I dive into it. I want you to be honest with yourself and stop lying to yourself about who is toxic and who isn't toxic. Because not everyone who annoys you is toxic. When you look at a toxic person you pretty much know like there's probably already somebody who's jumped into your mind. That's probably the person you need to deal with first. And

so a toxic person is someone who repeatedly disrespects your boundaries. They might make you feel emotionally exhausted after you hang out with them. Maybe they try to manipulate you, or they try to give you guilt trips, or they try to gaslight you and make you think that you're the bad person. It's also usually somebody who thrives on drama and thrives on negativity.

And rarely do these people take responsibility for their own actions. And so one way that you can really identify a toxic person quickly is if you go and hang out with this person for two hours, how do you feel after hanging out with them? Do you feel excited about life? Do you feel energized or do you feel emotionally, physically drained? Because I was taught when I was younger by one of my mentors, there's kind of two different types of people in the world. There's batteries and there's vacuums a battery is somebody who you can spend an hour with them and you leave their presence after having

Coffee and you feel great for another hour. You're excited. You're motivated. You feel good about being around that person That's a battery a vacuum is somebody who sucks the energy out of you You can hang out with them for three minutes and you want a nap after. You can think about them right now and start to feel exhausted just thinking about them. So if someone consistently makes you feel bad about yourself or is toxic to you or talks down to you or drains your energy, it's really, really important that you start to rethink their role in your life. Your mental health is extremely important. You've got to stop acting like this person just deserves all of your time. And so that's the first thing.

You just got to get really real with yourself and you've got to identify the people who are toxic. So get that first person in your head right now. Who's the most toxic person in your life? Who's the person that popped up before even said anything? Okay, so that's step number one. Step number two is to either remove them from your life completely, or I understand, most of the time you can't remove somebody from your life completely, or reduce time with the toxic people. You don't always have to completely cut toxic people

out of your life. Sometimes it's not really realistic. You might have toxic coworkers and you love your job or at least you need it to pay your bills and you've got Tom who works in your office, who's a dick and you hate him. Well, you can't really like quit your job because you gotta pay your bills,

but you still got Tom that you gotta deal with. Or maybe it's your in-laws in some sort of way. Oh, you can't really get rid of the in-laws, so how do you deal with the in-laws? But with all of that, whether it's Tom or whether it's the in-laws or whether it's brother, sister, mother, father, as well, you can limit your interactions with them. You can start to pull back on the time. Okay? And here's how you do it.

The first thing is this thing that's called the fade out method. You're going to gradually spend less time with them. So what I mean by that is over time, you're going to take longer to respond to their text messages. You're not going to get back to them right away. You're going to leave them on read for maybe a little bit longer, right? You're going to be busy quote unquote busy more often. You've got a lot going on in the future when it comes to this person, when they, Hey, do you want to hang out on Saturday? Hmm. Yeah. I've got a, I got a whole family day. You know, I got to hang out with the kids and they got soccer. And then I told my wife, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z, right?

But just be busy more often. You're starting to fade the mouse a little bit and then slowly just start to decrease communication in some sort of way. And it's gonna, you're gonna fade out. It's not just like a light switch where like you hang out with them, you don't hang out with them. It's less and less and less so that it almost starts to go unnoticed over time. And what you're gonna do is when you do spend time with them, you're actually gonna schedule

it out. You're gonna do time blocking. If you must see them in some sort of way, like say for instance, you've got to go to a maybe maybe a toxic person in your life is your brother, then you've got to go to a family event. If you must see them like they are a family member or something, schedule short visits and have a very clear end time when you have to leave and clearly communicate that like almost as soon as you arrive and just have something that's scheduled so that you can get out of there because your mind is going to feel much better when you know, okay, I've only

got 45 minutes and I'm about to leave and they know we've got 45 minutes. So hopefully they don't guilt and shame me and if they do, then I'm just not going to take it on. So that's the second thing. The third thing is something that I love. I learned this over the past year and I've never shared this in the podcast, but I've been excited to share it once I created an episode on toxic people step three is to start using What's called the gray rock method? So the gray rock method is one of the best tools for dealing with Toxic people dealing with people who like to gaslight you dealing people who manipulate you dealing with people who love Drama and the idea

of the gray rock method, you're like, what is that? Why would you want to, why is it called the gray rock method? The idea behind it is to be as boring and uninteresting as a gray rock. It's like, you want to be, you want to be as interesting as a rock, basically, so that they lose interest in you. That's really what it comes down to. Here's how you do it. When they say something to you, you want your responses to be short and very neutral. So it's like, hmm, yeah, okay. Like you want to be boring, as boring as you possibly can.

And what you're trying to do is as you go through this, is they're used to in some sort of way getting a response out of you. And people who are toxic, they want you to engage. They want to get a rise out of you. They want to get a response from you. And so you're going to avoid giving emotional reactions to these people. So they know your buttons,

whether it's consciously or unconsciously, and they're gonna try to push these buttons in as many ways they can. Nope, don't be triggered. Try your best just to completely distance yourself and just remind yourself, you're not even you. I'm not Rob, I'm a gray rock. So gray rocks don't get triggered, I'm not gonna be triggered. And really what it comes down to is just you avoid giving them the reactions that they want to get out of you. They're trying to get something from you. You're just not going to play the game. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. Another thing that's really important in this method is to not

give any personal details about you that they can use against you from now on. A lot of times what people who are manipulative like to do is once they learn about what's going on in your life, they usually pull it back in to try to get a rise out of you, so then you get triggered in some sort of way. So you're not gonna give them

any more personal details from now on. And you're gonna show no enthusiasm for their drama. Hmm, okay. Yeah. And so the point is that you want to be so boring, they don't want to hang out with you anymore because they're not getting what they want. They want to find somebody else to feed off of in some sort of way. And if you do happen to notice yourself starting to be triggered, because these are people who know how to trigger you

You've been treated in the past and when you're triggered sometimes it's an unconscious pattern that you go down if you notice yourself Starting to be triggered you want to make sure that you remind yourself to breathe through it And if you need to you can distance yourself for a moment You can go to the bathroom if you feel yourself being triggered. They say something. Oh, hey, I gotta go to the bathroom real quick Go to the bathroom real quick. Go to the bathroom, you know, pretend you're taking a dump. Be there for five minutes, breathe through it, do whatever as you need to do, get yourself back to gray rock, you know, boringness, and then go back out there and just be a boring person. And this works really, really well with people who are like narcissists, it works with people who are gossippers, energy vampires, the drama people.

Remember this, the less entertaining that you are, the sooner that they will move on from you, which is really, really important. So that's step number three, be a gray rock. Step number four, you want to start to set and enforce boundaries. Toxic people love pushing boundaries. And that's why it's really critical for you to set firm limits and to stick with them. And so one of the things that's really important boundaries, it's three-step process with boundaries that I created, that I've created for coaching clients over years. It's very simple, but you've

got to do this. Number one is you have to get really clear on what your boundaries are. Don't just be like, I don't want them to speak to me that way anymore. You've got to get very clear. What way do they speak to you? What do they say? Oh, it's when they speak about your children that you get that way.

Okay, right. So you've got to get very clear on your boundaries. That's the first step on them. The second thing is that you need to communicate those boundaries with the other person. So you've got to clearly say your boundaries to them. And then number three, you have to stay firm on your boundaries because I promise you 100% of the time, they will overstep your boundaries. I've never heard of somebody being like, I had a toxic person in my life. I told him my

boundaries and they never ever set the boundaries ever again. No, if they're toxic, it is in their nature to continue to try to keep pushing the boundaries. So you just have to remind them of the boundary over and over and over again. It will take multiple times, I promise you that. And a boundary, just so you know, and so you can understand it, it's not a suggestion. It's a rule for people to understand

how to interact with you. You teach people how to treat you, whether you realize it or not. And if they can't respect it, then they don't deserve your time. OK, so here's what this might look like in action, right? They might say something to you like, you never make time for me anymore. I guess I just don't matter. They try to guilt you. Your response to them is just, hey, I'm prioritizing my mental health.

I just won't be available as often. That's just the way that it goes. They might say something like, you tell me, tell me everything that's going on with the children at school. You know, insert drama here is basically what they're looking for. Tell me everything about that person. Hey, I'm not comfortable talking to you about it. I've realized I'm going to start keeping things a little bit more closer to the vest. I'm just not going to start telling you those things anymore. It's not just you, it's other people as well. Of course, they're going to keep overstepping them, right? Maybe they say something like they criticize you about your life

choices, your decisions, all of that. You just respond with, hey, listen, I'm happy with my decision. I'm happy with where my life is. And I'm just really not open to discussing any further with you. That's just really how you start to communicate and hold a firm boundary against somebody Okay, so that's step number four step number five is when necessary as I said You need to completely cut them off. Sometimes a toxic person is so damaging The only solution is you need to remove them entirely if you have Tried to be a gray rock and it's not working as well as you want, if you have tried to set boundaries

and it's just not working as well as you want, sometimes you need to remove them entirely. And I understand this can be hard, especially if it is a long-term friend, especially if it's a family member, especially if it's a partner. But your peace of mind, your mental health is extremely important.

And it's time for you to stop being somebody that gets stepped on by other people. And so if you need to just go no contact with them. Just and I've had many people who I've had a coach through this because there's just somebody who's just absolutely toxic, makes them feel like shit, just terrible person to this other person. If you need to go no contact, you can't. You can block them on social media. You can block your block them on your phone. You don't need to explain them. You If you need to go no contact, you can. You can block them on social media. You can block them on your phone. You don't need to explain them. You don't need to tell them that you're blocking them. Just disappear. If you have mutual friends with the person or if it's someone in your family, tell the other people. Tell them mutual friends. Let them

know you're stepping away and I'm done with all of the gossip. I don't need you to tell me what's going on in their life and I don't need you to tell them what's going on in my life. And then what's really important about this whole thing too is you gotta just understand you need to resist the urge to explain. They won't accept your reasoning anyways. So just go out the back door, exit, be a Houdini, just disappear.

Because if somebody's abusive to you, if they're manipulative with you in some sort of way, or dangerous to your well-being, don't feel guilty about cutting ties with that person. Your mental health always comes first. Okay, so that's step number five. And then step number six is really make it a focus of yours to protect your mental energy going forward. Because now that you've set boundaries, now that you've distanced yourself from these people or gone no contact, it's time for you to start focusing on you with some of that spare time.

What I recommend is that you start surrounding yourself with positive people. You start surrounding yourself with people who make you feel good about you, who are excited about your growth. They love helping you feel better about yourself and they celebrate your wins. Because people like that, their energy is contagious. And so when you start spending

more time with those types of people who uplift you and support you, you start becoming better. And so it's really good for you to take a pen and paper and start planning this out. Like what type of people do you want to surround yourself with? Like make a list, what habits, what traits, what do you want them to do in life? How do you want them to speak to themselves to each other all of that? Like make a list of people that you want to surround yourself with the type of person and maybe you know one or two people who Maybe they're a friend of a friend or an acquaintance. You've seen them a couple times and you're like, I really like that person Like they have really great energy I want to spend more time with them make a list of those people as well and then start thinking like if there are people that

You don't have but you want to find more people, where are the people who line up with that list that you have of the habits and traits and qualities? You know, you can go to meetup.com, you can find networking events, you can, you know, hang out with a really good friend that you do like and meet their friends. Sometimes, as you know, birds of a feather flock together. So if you hang out with somebody you really like them,, you're probably gonna really like their friends as well. And so it's really important to do that and to start prioritizing your mental health in this way

and protecting your energy moving forward. It's also really important for you to learn to start saying, no, I'm gonna say this. You don't have to please everybody in your life. And this is really big for the people pleasers that are listening. People pleasing is something that you created in your childhood as a safety mechanism.

It made you feel safe. It kept safety probably in the family unit in some sort of way for you to be the people pleaser. But now that you're an adult, it's not needed anymore. And so it's time for you to break that pattern by saying no sometimes, because a lot of times saying no is a form of self-respect. And that's really what it comes down to. And so dealing with toxic people isn't about fixing them.

It's about protecting you. And so a lot of toxic people thrive on negativity, on drama, on manipulation, on bringing you down. That's their business. That's not your business. Your business is your peace because your peace is priceless. So you have to guard that thing fiercely. And so I've got a question for you.

Who's the person that came to mind while you were listening to this? That's probably the first person you need to work with. Figure out one boundary that you can set with them today. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in it, RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. The only way this podcast grows is from you guys

sharing it. So if you would share it with anybody that it could help, it allows us to help more people in this world. And that's really ultimately all I'm trying to do. So if you would share it, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. And once again, if you want to brainwash yourself and get that morning priming video lesson, go ahead and go to morningpriming.com. Once again, morningpriming.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.