We know the right path is to practice patience, especially when it’s hard. Patience is a quality of emotional equilibrium and neutrality. Neutrality is where you enjoy the highest creativity, where you see to most alternatives to reactivity.
Read MoreDriving Results With Others: Ask more Questions
Being right, often, can be both a blessing and a curse. This is a good time for asking questions—but be strategic. Our hastiness to be right or to dominate comes at a cost. We miss an opportunity to develop others, as well as ourselves.
Read MoreDriving Results With Others: Opportunities Are Everywhere
Because we will cross paths with people who challenge our thoughts and reactions our whole lives, it's important to learn how to work with them sooner rather than later. They teach us about ourselves and challenge us to be better people. We can take comfort in the fact that, with the right tools and strategies, we can learn to deal with challenging personalities in ways that are constructive and help move us and others forward.
Read MoreDealing With Challenging People: Owning Your Worth
People with challenging personalities get us to react to them by threatening our Ego. When we are belittled in some way—real or imagined—we feel destabilized. Vulnerable, our natural instinct is to strike back or lash out. This is one reason, but not the only reason, that it’s dangerous for our Ego to be in the driver’s seat.
Read MoreDriving Results With Others: 5 Principles
In 1995, author and science journalist Daniel Goleman wrote Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. The book was groundbreaking but remained on the fringe of business literature for several decades. Now, the concept of emotional intelligence is widely accepted as the practical application of an individual's ability to apply their knowledge of emotions to manage their own behavior and to influence others.
Read MoreDriving Results With Others: Going Beyond Worry
We have worries. We also have solutions. Our challenge is to trust that we can solve a problem with creativity and considered response instead of reactivity.
Read MoreDriving Results With Others: Emotions teach us
How we respond to another person is a direct reflection of our skill level in working with and through others. If we can gain awareness of our reactivity, we can gain focus on what to improve.
Read MoreDealing With Challenging People: More Strategies
7. Own Your Self Worth. You are equipped with everything you need to succeed, even if you haven’t been specifically trained for your job. When you feel attacked, check yourself for a response before a reaction.
8. Anger Means Danger. Emotions are contagious, like the flu. Encounters with anger (and that includes all its shades: irritation, frustration, annoyance, and the like) rarely end well for anyone involved. If someone is voicing their feelings, they are often looking for a place to park them. It’s ok to pause the conversation and come back to it later.
9. Go Beyond Worry. You have worries. You also have solutions. Your challenge is to trust that you can solve a problem with creativity and considered response instead of reactivity.
10. Find Patience. We know the right path is to practice patience, especially when it’s hard. Patience is a quality of emotional equilibrium and neutrality. Neutrality is where you enjoy the highest creativity, where you see to most alternatives to reactivity.
11. Maintain Inner Peace. Inner peace is a resource that is always available to us, even under the most intense life pressures. It starts with the breath.
12. Cultivate Perspective. The hurt feelings that come from remembering how we were slighted can run deep. When we feel intensity, it’s important to cultivate perspective.
13. Don’t compromise…yourself. There are times when you feel tremendous forces moving you in a particular direction, and you feel like giving in. Here, it’s time to understand which people need to be pleased and why—because it’s not going to be everyone.
14. Be your own guide. When you commit to a practice, you are developing muscle memory for a certain way of thinking. When challenged, your thinking will have had enough practice to help you perform better. Your practice could be faith, writing, journaling, meditation, yoga, exercise—anything with a deep focus. Practice helps you process much of the “static of life” and enables you to do amazing things. Make your practice, whatever it is, a primary focus of your day.
Why let someone else’s bad attitude ruin your day? The Little Book Of Dealing With Challenging People enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to handle all kinds of people—to make your life less stressful and a great deal easier.
Driving Results With Others: Anger Means Danger
When furious, get curious. If you think you are about to lose your patience because you are some shade of angry (frustrated, irritated or annoyed)—take a beat, slow down and turn the attention onto yourself.
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Photo by Jim Strasma
Dealing With Challenging People: A Word About People
Whether you want them to or not, these people find themselves in the fabric of your life and it’s up to you to find ways to manage the headaches, heartbreaks, chaos, and stress they create for you (and potentially others). The ideas found in this little online book can help you withstand those difficult relationships without going crazy or over-compromising.
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