How To Deal with Difficult People!

How to make it simple.

- I. M. Soni

One curious fact of life is that we have to rub shoulders with prickly people who raise our hackles. Someday, it may so happen that you run into such people one after another which ruins your day as they go about as tension on two legs!

There are times when you feel that almost everyone is against you. There are, similarly, times when you are yourself on the end of your nerves, and others feel that you are a prickly person.

This means that our balance of temper depends upon others. Just as others depend on us. Such situations are more common than we suppose and make life uneasy, if not miserable.

This is natural because of our expectations. If their conduct is objectionable, offensive, critical or condemning, we will feel hurt and set brooding about it.

Before we seriously think about dealing with such people, we must accept a basic principle of living - we can do nothing about the way people are. There is a staggering variety in human nature. For example, one person is jovial and euphoric while another is dysphoric and gloomy. Like the leopard, neither can change spots!

The only way out is to be practical and realistic. The more matter-of-fact we are about it the more likely we are to deal with and cope up with such individuals. Thus, one way is to pay more attention to them as well as to our own actions.

Suppose you have a moody, unpredictable colleague, you never know how he or she would act or react. This in itself gives us a vital clue – be prepared about his or her unpredictability. You will eventually get used to the mode of the person’s behaviour and his or her unpredictability turns into predictability. That person too would realise that you are more biased towards swings in his or her behaviour. Thus, negative turns into a positive.