Secrets of Dealing with Difficult People
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About this ebook
How To Create a Positive Change in Problem Situations at Home and Work.
➢ Eliminate your frustration and stress,
➢ Make it impossible for someone to "push your buttons",
➢ Gain cooperation from difficult people,
➢ Deal with negative behavior of all kinds,
➢ Succeed with people and problems in your workplace,
➢ Create dramatic positive changes in your relationships,
➢ Replace anxiety and uncertainty with strength and confidence,
➢ Become a more effective problem solver when dealing with difficult people,
➢ Enhance your interpersonal skills and your personal success!
Mark Lauderdale
Dr. Mark Lauderdale has been in the practice of Psychiatry and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada for over 25 years. He is experienced in a variety of therapies and is an innovator in success-oriented personal change methods including the guided self-therapy process called the Wellspring Method.
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Secrets of Dealing with Difficult People - Mark Lauderdale
Secrets of Dealing with Difficult People
How to Create a Positive Change in Problem Situations at Home and Work
Copyright Notice
This book is copyright 2013 with all rights reserved. It is illegal to copy, store in a retrieval system, distribute or create derivative works from this book, in whole or in part without permission of the author.
The information in this book is opinion only and should not be considered medical or professional advice. You are responsible for your own decisions and behavior and the author cannot be held responsible for any actions that you may choose to take as a result of reading this book.
For more information on the Wellspring Method as described in this book, please visit http://www.ShrinkinaBox.com.
Copyright 2013 by W. Mark Lauderdale, 2nd edition.
Published by WELLSPRING PERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS INC.
213 – 5325 Cordova Bay Rd, Victoria BC V8Y 2L3
This book is also available in a print edition at:
http://www.shrinkinabox.com/products
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: How Difficult People Control You
Chapter 2: How Difficult People Push Your Buttons
Chapter 3: How to Target the Problem Behavior
Chapter 4: How to Be Clear About What You Want
Chapter 5: How to Stay Calm and Be Confident
Chapter 6: How to Think Through Your Plan
Chapter 7: Your Decision to Create Change
Chapter 8: Things You Should Never Do
Chapter 9: Essential First Steps
Chapter 10: How to Handle Conflict, Complaints, Verbal Abuse and Noncollaboration
Chapter 11: How to Deal with Bullying, Harassment, Gossip, Office Politics and Controlling People
About the Author
Other Titles by this Author
References
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Chapter 1: How Difficult People Control You
Difficult people have a secret weapon.
They have an uncanny ability to throw us off our game, which means that all of your usual people skills can be rendered USELESS when a difficult person gets under your skin and causes you to react.
They don't do it on purpose ...usually.
In fact, most often they aren't even AWARE that they are doing it. But if you are going to succeed, you will need something more than a few good strategies up your sleeve... You will need emotional immunity!
But first, I need to give you some background.
Where Does Difficult Behavior Come From?
There are three main sources of difficult behavior:
a) Upbringing
It probably comes as no surprise to you that the behavior in others that we find irritating, inappropriate or difficult may have developed as a result of the person growing up in their particular family of origin.
Children who had temper tantrums and were not adequately trained to deal with their anger in more socially appropriate ways, grew up into teenagers who got their way through angry outbursts. Then, their behavior continued as part of their personality into adulthood, perhaps only unleashed by the disinhibiting effects of alcohol, or perhaps regularly used as a means of controlling others.
Similarly, being sick or having problems may have been an effective way for a child to get their way or receive needed attention and support. If the pattern continued, they became adults who frequently wanted special consideration. In addition, they may have subconsciously generated actual physical or emotional impairments in their lives to obtain ongoing sympathy and support.
Bossy kids tend to become controlling adults. Children who are insecure and fearful tend to become adults with anxiety, and so on…
Ok, so I’m probably not telling you anything that you don’t already know. You get the picture.
b) Stress
People who are stressed – when they are feeling worried, angry, frustrated, depressed, etc. – tend to become difficult.
This is because when we are under stress we become self-centered. We are wrapped up in our issues, our concerns, our problems, and we tend to lose sight of the bigger picture.
People who are stressed tend to lose their capacity for understanding, or even caring about, other people. It’s an attitude of, I can’t be bothered with your concerns because I have so many problems to deal with myself and I feel overwhelmed.
c) You
Yes, you may be the source of another person’s difficult behavior.
If you want someone to be extremely stubborn and uncooperative towards you, just be bossy and unfriendly towards them.
If you want someone to get angry at you, be rude or hostile towards them.
If you want them to become incredibly stupid, just micromanage them. Give them instructions for every little thing and you’ll train them to not know how to do anything for themselves.
Now, I realize that you couldn’t possibly be guilty of these behaviors, but it is possible that you have engaged in milder forms – not smiling enough, not including someone, not being very understanding, being critical, not complimenting or praising other people, and so on.
It’s also very likely that at one time or another you were one of those people who was stressed and you treated someone else in a less than pleasant way.
Who me? Yes, you. In fact, we’ve all done it.
And we have all had the experience of triggering negative responses in other people and becoming the ungrateful recipient of difficult behavior from people who are normally easy to get along with.
Interpersonal Conditioning
We are social creatures.
And we have more social connectivity than you might think. The process of socialization
is the result of a series of learned associations and conditioned responses.
Around 1900, Ivan Pavlov, a Russian behavioral scientist, described the phenomenon of classical conditioning
. You are probably familiar with one of his experiments in which he rang a bell every time dinner was placed in front of his hungry dog, which then began salivating. After a few repetitions, Dr. Pavlov discovered that the bell alone could cause the dog to salivate. That is, the salivation behavior had become conditioned
to the sound of the bell.
As we grow up, we, too, are conditioned to automatically respond to certain social cues. For most of us, when our parents were angry we felt afraid and we may have tried to escape or to hide.
When our teachers or parents told us what to do, we usually did it. If we were picked on at school we either developed a pattern of fear and avoidance or anger and aggression.
All of these behaviors became conditioned, automatic, like a reflex, so that as adults we react in habitual conditioned ways to other people’s behavior.
So, if someone is yelling at you, you most likely experience an automatic feeling of anxiety or fear, or perhaps anger. It’s all very specific and very individual depending on your own particular background of conditioning.
The number of conditioned or automatic
responses we could describe is almost endless, but if you take a look at your own life, you’ll probably be able to identify a few.
What all this means is that in every human interaction, there’s a great deal of automatic responding going on.
This automatic communication is either nonverbal
(communication expressed through body language) or paraverbal
(communication that takes place via the tone, pitch and pacing of our voices rather than through the words we use. It is HOW we say something, not WHAT we say).
The important thing to realize is that most of this nonverbal and paraverbal communication is taking place UNCONSCIOUSLY - totally outside of our awareness!
Human interaction, then, is a lot like dancing. When you’re dancing a waltz, for example, you are dancing with your partner in a certain way. The better you learn the steps the more conditioned, and effortlessly automatic, they become.
Unless you move to another culture where the conditioning is different, it all flows smoothly when you interact with someone. You understand
each other. You communicate with each other. You get
the other person.
This is what I call the interpersonal dance
… and, without knowing it, we are dancing to its rhythm every day of our lives.
The Difficult People Tango
Unfortunately, there’s a dark side to this interpersonal dance.
When someone behaves in a certain way that pushes our buttons
, we react automatically and negatively. We experience a negative emotion such as anger, frustration or anxiety. We feel stressed.
Just think about the difficult person you are dealing with and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
There’s just something about them or something they do that triggers us. It feels unpleasant and our automatic reaction is to act on those negative feelings with some kind of negative response.
In general, we either fight back in some way (either directly or indirectly) or we try to avoid future encounters with that individual.
Ok, but what if, in a similar way, the other person also has an automatic reaction to YOUR behavior?
Well, we’ve got a nice vicious circle going now, don’t we?
I am certain that you have seen this negative circular pattern happening in your life on occasion. What you may not realize is that these negative circular interactions are occurring many times a week, and for some of us, many times a day!
Just ask yourself, How often have I ever been rude, nasty or unkind to someone and received a positive response in return?
Almost never, right?
99% of the time what you get in return is an automatic negative response. It’s conditioned, it’s habitual, and it’s unconscious!
Furthermore, how often did YOU ever respond positively to a person who behaved badly towards you? My guess is… NOT VERY OFTEN!
This is the reason that difficult people are so difficult. We unconsciously become drawn into negative downward spirals with them.
It’s rather like the hypnotist’s stage show I saw many years ago in which I witnessed the antics of the people who were given post-hypnotic suggestions.
One man was told under hypnosis that whenever he heard the word junk
he was to proudly announce, I love my car
. Another man was given the suggestion that whenever he heard the word car
he would rise out of his chair and shout, It’s a piece of JUNK!
and they were both sent back to their seats in the audience.
As you can imagine, every so often during the show when the word junk
was mentioned, the first man would stand up and exclaim, I LOVE MY CAR!
Then the other man would