Dealing With A Difficult Person? Start Here:

Video Transcript

Hi, Mary Rafferty here.
In this video today I want to talk to you on the topic of dealing with difficult people. This is a very broad subject and there are so many variables that will influence how best to respond or deal with any particular situation where you’re experiencing another person as difficult. For example, it depends on whether it’s in the workplace, at home, your role in the conversation, the purpose of the conversation, etc. It’s impossible to cover all of those in this short video.
Instead I want to point out a couple of underlying principles that regardless of the situation or the person, these will hold true.

All of us have this box or this category in our minds, let’s call it the “difficult person” box and there are a few people in our environment, whether it’s at work, at home, in the community that all of us have parked in this category.
We’ve had a few encounters with them.
It has been difficult for whatever reason and we have then assigned them a place in this little room.
It would be lovely if we could put them in the room, mentally at least, turn the key and never have to deal or interact with them again. That would be fine if we have that choice and sometimes we do have that choice.
But in a lot of situations these are people we work with or they are people we live with. So we don’t have the choice to say “okay, I’m not going to talk to that person again…I’m not going to deal with them again”

So let me challenge you a little on this.

What if I was to say, actually there’s no such thing as a fixed category of difficult people?
Now I’m not trying to be Pollyanna-like about this.
Neither am I saying that there aren’t situations and times where everyone experiences someone else in their work or their home life or wherever, as very frustrating, very annoying and difficult to be around.
Perhaps they say things that are very hurtful.
Perhaps they say things that are very irritating. All of us have those experiences of a few other people in our environment. But having this very fixed category in our mind of the ‘difficult persons’ box that we assign the same people to, over and over again is really not very helpful.

Let me explain.

We like to think that our minds work a little bit like a camera. So there is a tree in the field. We take our camera, we snap, and then we have an accurate representation of the tree.
We imagine our minds are similar. We see a person out there, they are a ‘difficult person’ and we have captured an accurate image of this ‘difficult’ person and it’s a very fixed solid reality.
In fact, our mind is more like a virtual reality headset.
So we’re not actually experiencing the objective reality out there. Yes, it’s happening, but we’re creating our own internal experience of what’s happening outside us.

So you might wonder…virtual reality headset camera, so what?

Well, that has a number of significant positive implications for how you deal with difficult person or indeed any challenge in your life.
You see the more you can start to grasp that our experience is internally generated, that we live in in a thought-created reality, it just allows us to relax our grip on this very fixed, solid idea of this person being a ‘difficult’ person.
Yes, you’ll have memories of things that happened. You’ll have worries and concerns about something in the future, but the more you can start to see that that’s a transient and thought-generated noise that’s constantly going through our minds, the greater sense of ease, composure, sense of balance that you will have regardless of the behavior of the other person.

You’ll begin to see that if you’re in a more relaxed state of mind, if you’re less caught up in the noise in your head about that person, then you’re going to be different in those interactions.

You’re going to be more open and be less defensive.
You’re going to be less wary, less on edge.
You’re going to have greater sense of goodwill towards that person. That will impact on the interactions you have with them.
Secondly, for the time you’re not in that person’s presence you’ll be much less impacted. So often people say to me, you know, it’s that I’m worrying and thinking about this person when I’m at home in the evening. This person is taking up too much space in my head.
That’s not going to be happening as much.
Instead, you will begin to see that this is just all part of the continuous noise that everybody’s experiences about difficult situations in their lives. When you don’t take it on and take it all too seriously, it sort of disappears by itself.

You will find yourself less caught up worrying about their behavior or worrying about the next interaction or ruminating on the last interaction you’ve had with them.
You’re just going to be in a more resourceful, more open, more relaxed state of mind.
Because you are more resourceful, then you’re going to be having much more effective and useful thoughts and ideas about how to deal with the person in the way that gets the best outcome for whatever situation you’re in.

So the key takeaway from this video is that, yes, there are individuals out there who for one reason or another, all of us will find at some point in our lives very difficult.
We will fall into a groove of very negative thinking and a very negative story about that person and their behaviors.
That in turn will have a knock on effect on your own sense of wellbeing and composure, certainly when you are around that person.
It will also have a negative fallout in on the interactions with them and it leaves you feeling unresourceful and unresilient at a time when you most need to be in a good state of mind. So the first thing you need to do, is to step back and realise the extent to which you are getting caught up in this negative story. Only then can you access your own inner resourcefulness and resilience to best manage the situation.

You might find this blogpost here helpful also.

If there’s someone else you think might find it helpful, please share it using the social media buttons above or forward to a friend.

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Thanks for watching!