By Stefan Falk
A common theme in my work with clients is their complaints about the people they can’t relate to and don’t want to work with. I understand why. When we face people we perceive as being “difficult” to work with and relate to, our natural tendency is to shy away and, if possible, change contexts. Hence, few things can demotivate us as much as when we need to engage in interactions or meetings with difficult people.
But the world is filled with “difficult” people. So, if you want to grow and shape your destiny, you must master the art of transforming difficult situations with difficult people into productive ones.
There are two types of difficult people. The first I call truly difficult people. These people have low energy, are inward looking, display negative attitudes toward everything, are incapable of focusing on anything except what is impossible, and are fundamentally unable to adopt a more positive outlook on themselves and their contexts. Here my principle is simple: Life is too short to deal with these types of people.
The other type of difficult people are insecure people. Given their insecurity, they can be difficult to deal with since they are extremely risk averse and unproductive. They see risks everywhere. Some of them can also be downright nasty or display abusive behaviors. But insecure people should not demotivate you. On the contrary, they can fuel your motivation to help them. Reducing their insecurity can be the key to unlocking their potential and increasing their well-being.
To help an insecure person excites me, especially when I see the person start to take charge and shape his or her own destiny by focusing on the unlimited opportunities that our personal and professional lives offer.
When you face what you believe is a difficult person, step one is to activate your detective mindset. Take your feelings and needs out of the equation. Think about the person the way you think of unfamiliar gym equipment. Once you’ve mastered it, it will be of great service to you. Another useful approach when dealing with a difficult person, someone I instinctively dislike or find it hard to establish a productive dialogue with, is to remind myself that the person is someone’s child. Using this perspective, I then ask myself if I would like someone to have similar thoughts about my own son, Ramses. Of course not! This approach not only helps me disassociate myself from my negativity; it enables my sympathy to kick in.
Be deliberate in how you plan and execute your interactions with these people going forward and try to learn from them. For this, you can use the Daily Goals method: define a desired outcome, devise tactics to achieve it, evaluate the extent to which they worked, and then repeat them, focusing on what you need to change as a result of your evaluation.
I’ve had clients who completely changed their attitudes toward people they did not want to work with after using this approach for just two weeks. Most tell me that it helped them improve relationships in other parts of their lives as well.
Here are some additional techniques you can use. Make sure you include them in your tactics when you define your daily goal of dealing with someone difficult.
Have difficult or challenging meetings walking outside
If you have a challenging meeting with an insecure or otherwise difficult person coming up, it might be a good idea to meet outdoors. Why? So you have an excuse to avoid eye contact!
It can be more difficult to process your thoughts when you are talking to someone face-to-face. That’s because you tend to look at their facial expressions to gauge their reactions. Because your mind is trying to carry out two processes at the same time, you think more slowly, which is not good if the conversation is challenging.
So, think about walking side by side instead. You will most likely think better. And if not, at least you’ll get some fresh air and exercise.
Walking and talking isn’t the only trick you can take advantage of. Here are four others. The last three come from the extraordinary book Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do, by the social and cognitive psychologist John Bargh.
Have your meeting after sundown
I picked up this trick many years ago from the late Peter Jonsson, the world-renowned psychotraumatologist and crisis management expert. The underlying logic is that human beings have poor night vision, which subconsciously makes us feel vulnerable when it is dark. When we feel vulnerable, one of our key strategies to reduce our sense of vulnerability is to be close to other people. So, chances are that if it is dark, the person you are meeting with will be less inclined to be critical and oppositional, and more focused on contributing to a good and productive atmosphere.
Give the person something hot to drink
Physical warmth or coldness affects whether we experience social warmth or coldness. Experiments show that people who held a hot cup of coffee—even for a few seconds—and then read a description of a person liked that person more than people who had held a cup of iced coffee before reading the same description. So, have hot coffee or tea ready in time for the meeting.
Make sure the person sits on a soft, comfortable chair
Sitting comfortably seems to have a similar effect to drinking something hot. When people sit on a hard or uncomfortable chair and are asked to assess another person, they tend to view that person less favorably than when they are sitting on a soft one. Furthermore, people sitting on hard chairs tend to be tougher in negotiations and discussions than people sitting in soft chairs.
Start the meeting with small talk about the weather if the weather is bad
The weather subconsciously affects our outlook on life. If it is a sunny day, we tend to enjoy greater life satisfaction. If it is rainy, not so much. So, if you have the difficult meeting on a bad-weather day, what to do? Well, experiments show that when people are asked about the weather, its negative impacts on their outlook seems to be blunted. Talking about the weather makes people aware of their feelings about it, so they are less likely to allow it to affect their attitudes.
Excerpted from Intrinsic Motivation: Learn to Love Your Work and Succeed as Never Before by Stefan Falk. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
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