Gill Hasson - How To Deal With Difficult People: Smart Tactics for Overcoming the Problem People in Your Life

This edition first published 2015

2015 Gill Hasson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hasson, Gill.

How to deal with difficult people : smart tactics for overcoming the problem people in your life / Gill Hasson.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-85708-567-2 (paperback)

1. Interpersonal conflict. 2. Conflict management. 3. Interpersonal relations.

4. Interpersonal communication. I. Title.

BF637.I48.H384 2015

158.2dc23

2014029780

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-857-08567-2 (pbk) ISBN 978-0-857-08571-9 (ebk)

ISBN 978-0-857-08572-6 (ebk)

Cover design: Wiley

Difficult people are everywhere.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, The single most important ingredient of success is knowing how to get along with people.

Of course, Roosevelt never met that difficult person at work that you have to deal with every day, did he? And he certainly didn't have your in-laws.

When people are nice to you, you can't help but feel good and be nice back. But when they're difficult, you're bound to be unhappy about it and react badly.

Why do other people get to us so easily?

The reason our happiness and well-being depend so much on our relationships is because humans are social beings; we seek and enjoy the company of other people, in particular other people who are easy to get along with and whom we like.

In fact, most of us would rather experience an unpleasant event watch our team lose, for example with someone who shares our negative opinions about the team than experience a pleasant event watching our team win in the company of those who are disagreeable and difficult.

But some people know exactly how to be difficult. They're the people who bring you down with their negativity, criticism or anger. They refuse to cooperate. They're irritating, frustrating and often infuriating. And if you respond to someone else's difficult behaviour with anger and blame, withdrawal or compliance, you may end up feeling guilty, stressed or depressed.

What to do? One obvious solution is to calmly walk away from them. This is easier said than done. (But not impossible: see Chapter 8.) While you can always walk away from a rude shop assistant or hang up on an irritating sales call, it's not so easy to cut yourself off from a parent, sibling, partner, colleague or friend.

A more practical approach to dealing with them is to start by understanding how and why other people can be so difficult. Chapter 1 will help you do just that. You'll see that difficult behaviour occurs on a continuum. At one end of the scale, difficult behaviour can be overt (hostile and aggressive); at the other end, it can be passive (uninvolved and inactive).

In the middle of this continuum is behaviour in others that can be the most difficult to deal with: passive aggressive. It is covert (dishonest and manipulative). In Chapter 1, we'll explore these patterns of behaviour in more detail.

However, knowing and understanding what's wrong with someone's behaviour doesn't change it. The thing is you can't directly change other people's behaviour; the only thing you can change is how you respond and deal with it.

In Chapter 2, we will look at the different ways you may currently deal with difficult people and help you to understand why you react to them in the way you do.

We consider the expectations and beliefs you may have about the ways other people should behave towards you. Perhaps you blame other people for making you respond or behave in particular ways.

You'll learn that other people can't make you do anything; they're not responsible for how you feel or respond. You are. So taking responsibility for your reactions to difficult people will help you better manage them. Why? Because if you can take responsibility for your responses then, like anything else that belongs to you, those responses are yours to manage: to influence and direct.

Having thought about how and why you and other people behave and respond to each other as you do, the next step is to learn skills, strategies and techniques to manage difficult people: to know what to say and what not to say. A good way to know what to say and what not to say to a difficult person is to start by listening to them. Really listening.

In Chapter 3, you'll learn what reflective listening skills are and how to use them to your advantage. As well as learning how to listen to other people, you'll learn to read other people; you'll learn how to actually see what other people's motives and intentions are.

By this point in the book, you'll certainly be ready to get on with dealing with difficult people. In the past, you may have thought that there was only one or two ways to do this: either grit your teeth and hope that they'll stop being so difficult, that things will improve, or get the difficult person to see just how difficult they're being.

Both of these approaches are unlikely to fix the problem. In the case of gritting your teeth and hoping things will improve they won't. In the case of getting them to see just how difficult they're being, that's unlikely too.

You need to deal with the difficult