A lot of this depends on what relationship you have with the other person. If you are husband and wife, that is a very close relationship. If it is your work boss or a work employee under you, that is another type of relationship. It could be distant family, or just somebody on the street. There are all these different types of relationships, so there is not one technique that is going to fit for every situation.
If you see that a person has negative behaviors or characteristics, you have to try to guard against them affecting you. How much time you spend around that person, is one consideration. When you work with that person you don't have much choice. Unless you are the boss and you can assign them to work somewhere else, or you are the employee and you can volunteer for a different branch, etc. But sometimes you have no choice, you have to be with that boss or the other employee.
If it is your husband or wife, you already have made the choice, haven't you? So you have to be with that person a lot. As to allowing their negative behavior to affect you, that is also your choice. Whether it is your spouse, your workmate, your father, your mother, whomever. It is your choice whether you allow their negative stuff to affect you.
Yet oftentimes, no matter how strong we are, we get worn down. One time I was working with a road gang part time, but it turned out to be more than part time as it continued for a while. One person got sick, they wanted me for a while, another person would get sick, another person would go on holidays. And all of a sudden instead of just one or two months, which was how I usually worked with them, I worked six months straight. It was too much, it was way too much. I could hear their voices in my head when I was back on our little farm and the vocabulary they used was not what I wanted in my head. So I quit.
You have to make a decision for yourself. If you cannot resist the influence of the person who is affecting you in unbeneficial ways, then you may have to leave that relationship. That can be quitting a job, which is not that easy at times. Or it could be a divorce situation if it is really, really bad. It is a decision you have to make if they are affecting you too much in unbeneficial ways, because quite frankly, when you look at your life, when you die, you die alone. No matter what your relationships were, you are going to die alone.
According to Buddhism, you are going to die with your own Kamma. You are going to die with your own thoughts, and based on your Kamma and your thoughts you will get a rebirth. Imagine if I have stayed on the road gang for years and years. I would be swearing like the rest of them, I would be drinking beer every Friday afternoon and maybe getting drunk over every weekend. I would become like them because I would get so influenced by them at work.
So the degree of how much you are getting influenced and how much you want to prevent it in the future, that is your decision. Sometimes you simply have to walk away. If it is not too bad, then you have to practice more inner awareness, you have to practice more. When I was with the road gang, as much as possible, I would not get involved in group discussions, because when they talked as a group they used swear words in nearly every sentence. During lunchtime sometimes we were isolated, some people were at one end of the road, some were on the other. If I was just with one other guy, I could have a conversation with them and he would never swear. To a certain degree, I was able to control the situation when there were only two of us there, but when we were in a group, I did not have any control.
Sometimes you are able to prevent unbeneficial conversations arising depending on your own practice level, depending on your own inventiveness, as far as discussions go. If somebody is talking about something that is negative, and you don't want to hear it, can you bend the direction of the conversation? You get out of that for a while by talking about something else. That is part of the skillfulness of right speech. It can be greatly important stopping other people influencing you. By learning how to bend conversations in a beneficial way to lessen the negative impact it has on us.
So this is not a black and white situation, if you have a specific problem in your relationships, feel free to talk to us in the interviews.