If you are sitting at a desk, standing in a queue, seated on the train, standing in front of the sink or standing in front of a large waiting audience, close your eyes for a little longer that just a blink and feel the energy surge in your own body.  You are energy, all is energy, your energy impacts all energy.  Let your energy out.  Be the very best you that you can be, regardless of where you are or what you are doing right now.

We all know people who we wish would simply evaporate! We all have - from time to time - deal with people who simply do not know how to behave themselves. The truth of the matter is that, from time to time, we all answer to that description... given that the ordinary mind is normally in neutral. Being in neutral, however, means that your mind is actively working against you... all of the time. You make sense of reality by filtering that reality through your personality (who you believe yourself to be) - a process known as cognitive appraisal. Your personality was formed during your formative years (obviously!) so that its role in evaluating and enabling you respond to current reality is pretty dubious... with the best will in the world, behaving in 2016 on the basis of how you learned to behave in 1970 is a recipe for all the little disasters that make up the average day.

As a result, we find it difficult to deal with difficult people because they make us feel as if we're under attack - they may even, in attacking us, confirm to us the bad things that we think we know about ourselves. In fact it is our personality that is under attack. The consequences are needless anxiety, annoyance, frustration, fear, anger. A needless waste of our precious psychological energy, we feel wasted as a consequence of an encounter with such people.

All this "toxicity" does not, in fact exist. OK, your protagonist may be an a**hole, but, in reacting to him or her in the automatic way that you do, you're only feeding the beast. OK, you may have to put up with treatment that a dog shouldn't have to endure but, the problem is, you keep replaying it afterwards... subjecting yourself to the abuse all over again - something that makes no sense at all. Toxicity, inappropriate behaviour, whatever you want to call it, persists because we, the sufferers, give it legs. In order to cut it off at the knees, we need to stop playing that bully's game, stop reacting according to an established inner stereotype and start behaving like a person in mindful control of oneself, in the moment.

How can you do that? Well, to be mindfully in control when it matters, you need to train to be mindfully in control when it doesn't. Meditation will get you there. It will enable you, first of all, understand that all things pass... and, thereby, prevent you from pushing the replay button after the event. It will enable you behave differently in the moment - meditation breaks our pathetic dependence on our out-of-date but oh so self-conscious personality. You start behaving in a way that cuts off the other's supply of oxygen... if they don't respond, chances are they'll eventually just go away and pick on somebody else who does feed their habit. OK, it's not quite evaporation but it's the next best thing!

If you're a consultant or coach, a HR leader or working in leadership development or talent management, or if, as a client told me last Friday, you are a guide for others, you may well be interested in psyberCoach. Following four years' development, psyberCoach is now online Have a look here...