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.

Continue reading “How to Deal With Difficult People”