How To Deal With Certain Difficult People

This is another quote that I found on Pinterest, and I chose it because it reminds us to be discerning when dealing with difficult people. In other words, we always want to ensure that we are responding to both people and situations in a way that is congruent with their level of importance in our lives.

Unfortunately, many people don’t make this distinction, and tend to react to any difficult person with resentment and/or anger. This is unfortunately what road rage is all about… some person we don’t know and will probably never see again has behaved in a way that we don’t like, and we reacted by cursing them out and calling them all sorts of names. Or, some clerk or “customer service” person treats us with what we perceive as a lack of respect, and we fly off the handle.

For those of you who follow my “Life from the Top of the Mind” philosophy, you know that this reaction comes from the lower 20% of the brain (the brainstem), and is accompanied by a release of stress chemicals, such as adrenaline and cortisol. Sadly, this can have a detrimental effect on our health in the form of high blood pressure and increased risk of heart attack and stroke.

What we have done in these situations is let someone with the significance of a speed bump become a roadblock. Sure, they may be acting in a way that we don’t like, but do we really want to make them so important in our life that we allow them to throw us into the reactive brain and threaten our health?

In my seminars, when participants are describing their reaction to bad drivers or similar difficult people, I often ask them, “On a scale from 0 to 10, how important do you want these people to be in your life?” Invariably, the answer is almost always “0!!!!!!!” Makes sense. However, if we are letting them make us angry or respond in a way that dumps stress chemicals into our body, aren’t we making them way more important than we want?

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that we dismiss all difficult people in our life as unimportant, or pretend that what they do or say doesn’t matter. There are people that we may want to engage with in a way that gives them the opportunity to change their negative behavior for the good of the family, business, or relationship. However, if we react to all difficult people in a way that throws us into the brainstem, not only will we be exhausted from all the stress hormones we are dumping into our body, we will not be able to summon the skills and wisdom necessary to deal with those “important” difficult people in our lives.

Therefore, I suggest that we become more discerning with the difficult people and situations we encounter, and first determine whether they are significant enough to warrant our time and attention. If so, great! I have information in my book, “Life from the Top of the Mind,” that teaches readers how to engage others so that they shift from their resistant brain to their receptive brain in a way that they can actually hear and understand what we are wanting them to know.

If certain people are not important in our lives, let’s make sure that we don’t allow them to affect our health and peace of mind. Let’s deal with them as we would a speed bump. We notice it and adjust our driving accordingly. We don’t however make them a roadblock, or let them throw us off track.