Dissecting Difficult People

“It’s so weird,” she said. “Most of the time, he drives me absolutely batty. But sometimes he seems really nice. Like, he’s really great with his employees. It seems like they love him. But when he shows up to our leadership team meetings, he acts like such a know-it-all.”

I smiled. “Does he bug everyone on your leadership team?”

My client paused. “I think he annoys most of us. But no. Not everyone. One of my colleagues says he’s mostly a big softie. It seems like they work pretty well together, actually,” she added. “He pontificates all the time but it doesn’t bother her. She just interrupts and gets our meetings back on track.”

“What do you make of that?” I asked.

“She has a superpower for dealing with know-it-alls?” my client quipped.

Bingo.

My client’s colleague does have a superpower. But guess what? My client has it too. And so do you.

The superpower is simple: not taking other people’s behavior personally. It’s staying calm and balanced and remembering that the equipment works the same way in all of us. Thoughts come into our minds. Some of them stick around. We feel these thoughts. We act on these thoughts. Sometimes without even realizing it.

The woman who manages to work well with our know-it-all sees beyond his behavior. She doesn’t think about him much, or if she does, she knows his penchant for pontification is simply rooted in some misguided thinking, probably tinged with a whiff of “needing to prove oneself”. On some level, she intuitively knows that if she felt like she needed to prove how much she knew to her leadership team colleagues (or boss), she might act the same way. Because she isn’t bothered by this behavior, her compassion and humor and wisdom kicks in and helps her find ways to work with him.

My client and I talked about this for a while.

“What would happen if you saw this guy as simply having some insecure thinking that happens to manifest in him being a know-it-all sometimes?”

She thought for a minute. “I’m not sure. It certainly helps me understand him a bit better. I’m already feeling less judgemental and more curious.”

Curious is a pretty great place to be when it comes to “difficult” people. Sometimes (just sometimes) we realize that the difficulty wasn’t really in the other person, but in the way we were thinking about them.

The woman who knows how to deal with the know-it-all probably doesn’t have a whole lot of thinking about him. He’s in the room, but she’s connected to her wisdom, so she can sense when to interrupt and reorient. At some point, she might offer feedback about his impact on others. Maybe she already has. But bottom line: she has options that my client doesn’t have. Because she isn’t thinking about his behavior in a personal way. Therefore, annoyance and/or judgment isn’t blocking her flow of creative ideas on how to navigate the situation.

The next time you’re faced with your own difficult person, it can be helpful to take a peek inside. In what ways are you thinking about them? Is your thinking getting in the way of a new idea about how to work with them and/or improve your relationship?

It’s helpful to remember that your feelings of impatience or irritation are not coming from their behavior, but from your thinking about that behavior. Resting in that knowledge can be liberating.

Remembering where our feelings originate is the superpower we mentioned earlier. When we remember where our feelings of annoyance are coming from our thinking, a difficult person might start to look like…just a person. A person who happens to occasionally act on some insecure thinking. Just like all of us.

To infinity and beyond!