From time to time, we all come across people who are difficult to be with. We can find certain people abrasive, hard to communicate with, unreasonable. Maybe we just feel a bit awkward and uncomfortable about a particular person. Often, we can avoid such people. But what if this is not an option? We might have a new colleague with whom we need to collaborate, or someone in the family might have married a person we find hard to be around. What can we do for dealing With Difficult People?
Most people’s initial response would probably be to blame the other person and perhaps try to change them. But the fact is that external situations – and especially other people – can almost never be changed, and a more fruitful – albeit more challenging – approach is to look inwards and change ourselves.
This does not mean accommodating a genuinely unreasonable situation. But asking a few simple questions of ourselves, and having the courage to answer honestly, can change everything.
An especially pertinent question to ask about someone who upsets you is ‘Why does this person upset me so much?’ The answer can be very revealing, not least of all because it usually tells you something about yourself. Often, people annoy or upset you because they somehow bring to your attention something about yourself that you don’t like; they are like mirrors, revealing things about yourself that you might prefer not to think about.
Nobody likes a bearer of bad news, but the news can be helpful. It is useful to think of difficult people as messengers, people sent to help us improve, to challenge us, to make us think more deeply about the way we are. So often, we can go through life on a kind of ‘autopilot,’ not really thinking much about situations, just reacting; a difficult person can shake us out of this reflexive and reactionary kind of complacency. Like a man rhythmically banging a nail with a hammer, he might not be very conscious of what he is doing until the hammer misses the nail and strikes his finger. It’s painful, but it does focus the mind.
As always, the problem lies within ourselves. Not everyone finds this person difficult, so what is it that I find so challenging? What does it say about me?
We often say someone is ‘pressing my buttons.’ But why are we programmed in such a way that we have these ‘buttons’ to press? Is it right that we should react in such a way? Can we change the response?
Rarely is a situation so bad that nothing of value can be drawn from. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, that ‘between stimulus and response is a gap, and in this gap lies all our freedom.’ Frankl is saying that we have the reaction to our situation, however dreadful, is always our own responsibility. How we react to other people – however annoying or difficult they might be – is down to us.
It is possible that the difficult person is difficult because of who they are. But far more likely is the possibility that the situation is revealing something about yourself which is difficult to face. Can anything be done about this? Is it time to change the only thing you really can change – yourself?
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
