Hi everybody, welcome to your move where we help you make better decisions and live with fewer regrets. I'm Andy Stanley and I'll be your guide. And today we're talking about those people. We try to avoid them. We don't always know what to do with them and we try real hard not to become like them. That's right. Today we are talking about mean people and what to do about them. So do you know any mean people? Stick around.

So today is part one of a two-part series entitled,

Mean People and What to Do About Them. Mean people and what to do about them.

I thought about entitling this series bad people and what to do about them, but we hesitate

to call anybody bad. We say things like this. He's really not a bad person. And that's what we say.

He's really not a bad person. He just does bad things like a lot, which I think that's what it means to be a bad person. So we're not going to do a bad person, we're going to do mean person, we're going to stick with mean people, mean people, and specifically, what should we do about the mean people in our lives? And by mean, I mean, mean. These are the unpleasant people. These are the deceptive people.

These are the people that control us with time or money or with our children. These are the users.

They're just unkind. It may be that person that when you see them coming, you just don't want to

interact with them because, well, they're just, there's just no other way to say it. They're just mean.

And to be clear, this isn't to say that we're not often mean. I mean, all of us have been mean at some point. In fact, there's somebody maybe who's going to see or hear this message, and unfortunately, we're going to come to mind. But generally, what we talk about when we're together

is how to live a life in such a way

and to live our lives in such a way

that we're not the mean people. So we're not discounting the fact that from time to time we can be mean and certainly have the potential to be perhaps as mean as the meanest person we've ever met. But this, these two messages are going to focus on how to respond to and how to react to the mean people

in our lives. Now, the reason this is so important is this, is if you don't have a plan and

if I don't have a plan, if we're not prepared and honestly, as we're going to see, if we're not

somewhat proactive, here's what happens, and we've all experienced this.

The mean people, the mean people in our lives,

ultimately they gain a measure of control over our lives.

And before we know it, we're actually acting like they do.

And it feels in the moment as if we have no choice.

In fact, if somebody were to hear your story, or when you tell your story and you talk about how you've reacted to or responded to the person that, you know, is mean to you, the person that hears your story is like, well, who could blame you? It's almost like it's like you have no choice. And the reason it feels like we have no choice is this, that mean people, and we don't think in these terms when we're in the relationship,

but mean people, without even meaning to, they just keep us off balance. We're just always off

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