Ursula Markham - How to Deal With Difficult People

1 Explain the current situation as you perceive it. Be brief and keep to the point without allowing extraneous judgement to creep in.

2 Show that you understand the other person’s feelings and then express your own. You might say ‘I feel upset about this’ or ‘I realize that you are in a difficult position.’

3 Say what you want, making as few demands as possible and keeping them realistic. There is no sense in making demands which it is physically impossible for the other person to deliver. In such cases (unless it is completely inappropriate) you might have to be prepared to negotiate or to compromise.

4 Explain what the outcome is likely to be, stating the rewards if she complies or the punishment if not. (Perhaps, ‘I shall take my custom elsewhere.’)

If you are able to analyse your own behaviour and then use the guidelines in this chapter to help yourself work towards becoming a more assertive person, you will have taken a very big step towards dealing successfully with any difficult people in your life.

Difficult people don’t just have an effect on you for the length of time you are with them – they can spoil your whole day, week or month. An encounter with an expert difficult person can leave you feeling angry (with yourself as well as with him), hurt or frustrated. And you can be sure that he knows this all too well. Such people rely on having this effect on others; they do it because they know it works and helps them to manipulate other people, thus leaving them to go ahead with things in their own sweet way.

You have to realize one fact from the outset: you cannot change a difficult person just because you want to. With a few exceptions, difficult people are quite happy to be as they are. So, if you cannot change them, you need to learn a technique for dealing with them so that (i) you are not manipulated by them and (ii) you do not allow them to have a devastating effect on your own temper and behaviour.

The types I am going to discuss here are those who are perpetually presenting problems. Of course you can be difficult and so can I – but hopefully this is only on occasion. To deal with really difficult people you need first to understand them and then to work out a method of coping with them and their behaviour while maintaining your own temper and sanity. This applies whether you encounter them in your business or your personal life.

For the purposes of this chapter, I have divided difficult people into 13 basic types – although of course there will be others who fall somewhere between two personalities, exhibiting different behaviour according to the situation in which they find themselves.

There are some people who are so wrapped up in what they are doing that they never even pause to consider anyone else’s feelings or opinions. They are not necessarily deliberately negative – but they can irritate others enormously. A typical example is someone who always has the volume on the television turned up far too high and who is too thoughtless or unaware of other people to realize that this level of noise is causing them distress. If you ask this person to turn the volume down, she will probably do so immediately – but the next time she watches television she will forget and the volume will be just as high.

Janet is just such a person. She loves to chat and gossip and is one of those people who speak rapidly and without great variation in tone of voice. She also continues to talk even when the person she is talking to does everything possible to bring the conversation to an end. You might be trying to write a letter, read a book or even put on your jacket to leave – but Janet still goes on talking. Not only is this extremely irritating, it is pointless as people become so impatient that they mentally ‘switch off, so whatever it is that she wants to say, no one actually takes it in.

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