How to Deal With Difficult People

How Your Analytical Brain Can Help You Cope With Poisonous Influences

People. They can be your most influential cheerleaders or they can be the biggest roadblock in your path to finding true wealth, achieving a sort of happiness, and living the life you deserve. Unfortunately, if you’ve chosen to take life by the horns and really go for it, you’re going to have to learn how to interact, manage, navigate around, and ignore people.

I’ve always had a good instinct for people—I can read them in minutes and pinpoint what kind of person they are shortly after meeting them. Are they friendly, eager, productive, lazy, positive, a downer? My instincts are rarely wrong and people don’t often change of their own accord. Unfortunately, as easy as it is for me to near-instantly figure out if I’m going to like a person or not, I never had the skillset to effectively manage my relationship with any of those folks.

In my personal life problem people repeatedly got in my face, annoyed me, or hung around when I didn’t want them to. I found myself in hundreds of uncomfortable situations and conversation from which I didn’t know how to extricate myself. In my professional life, those problem people were often in positions over me and through ignorance, malice, or just bald indifference made my life difficult.

My first response was simply to clam up and wait for the interaction to pass. When that failed or when I didn’t feel I had the mental resources to even manage indifferent silence, avoidance was my tool of choice. Stay home. Call out sick. Beg off.

But you’re not going to get far in life by avoiding every uncomfortable interaction. Fortunately, I found an amazing resource that gave me the power to identify personality types and tactics I now use regularly to deal directly with each of those problem individuals in my life.

Gill Hasson’s How to Deal with Difficult People

How to Deal with Difficult People, by the best-selling author of Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence, is short—188 pages. But it’s packed with solid info based on psychological research, tools you can use to analyze yourself, and tips for dealing directly with various types of problem people.

Analyze the Individual

The first step toward taking control of your interactions with the negative people in your life, as Hasson notes, is to treat each one as an individual. Somebody once said that people (with a small ‘p’) are great but put them in a crowd and you’ve got a bunch of morons. You can’t judge each individual you come into contact with based solely by the groups with which they associate.

Every person is an individual with their own mind, attitude, experiences, and emotional baggage. In order to successful ‘handle’ these folks, you need to analyze each one.

Oh! The People You’ll Meet

Thankfully, Hasson gives you detailed character sketches of the most common problem people including:

• The Prima Donna
• Passive Aggressive Grumps
• The Victim
• Negative Ned

And many more.

I was shocked during reading this how easy it was to spot these types of people in my own life and how powerful understanding the motivations behind each type of behavior was.

Minimize or Eliminate their Influence

Once you’ve identified the individual’s personality type, Hasson gives you skills you can use to minimize the negative influence these difficult people inject into your life. By using active listening, empathy, increased confidence, negotiation, assertiveness, and even my old pal avoidance, you can mitigate the impact of these problem people on your personal and professional life.

However, Hasson ensures that the reader knows choosing the right to use in any given situation is key because each personality you’re confronted with will respond to those different tools in their own way. For example, if you stand up to a passively aggressive person, they may back down. However, if you stand up to an openly aggressive actor, you’re likely only enraging them further. Furthermore, if you show empathy to an insecure individual, they may become a powerful ally. On the other hand, empathy is what victim personalities thrive on—like emotional leeches sucking the life out of you!

Check Yourself

However, the most eye-opening portions of this book are the ones that force you to analyze yourself and your reactions to these types of people. Indeed, by reacting in certain ways when confronted with each of these problem personality types, you may be:

• Enflaming the situation
• Surrendering power to that person
• Allowing them to assume you agree or are okay with what they’re saying or doing
• Coming off in a negative light in their perspective

You Too Can Learn to Deal With Difficult People

As an introvert, dealing with difficult people is not something you want to do. However, if you’re truly dedicated to changing your life, building your income stream, and living a wealthy life (both emotionally and financially) then the quicker you learn how to identify, categorize, and mitigate the negative influences of these problem personality types in your life, the more successful you’ll be.

An Added Bonus!

Don’t like to read! Here’s a video interview in which Hasson explains the core of her book. It’s part of Imperial Enterprise Labs “How To” Talk Series.

How To Deal With Difficult People with Gill Hasson from Imperial Enterprise Lab on Vimeo.