Are We Making Difficult People More Important Than They Deserve to Be‪?‬ Quotes from the Top of the Mind™

Quote: ""There are two ways to make someone important in our lives . . . we can either love them or hate them.” - Bill Crawford, Ph.D.

Comment: This perspective has come to me from the work I do with individuals and organizations around stress and dealing with difficult people. For example, it never seems to fail that in my presentations, when I ask the participants to describe the problems they encounter on a daily basis, many will speak to the challenges of dealing with a particular person. The stories they tell about these people are very convincing, and I have no doubt that the person or persons that they are describing are indeed hard to live and/or work with. And yet, I wonder if our tendency to focus so intently on these problematic individuals is truly serving us? In other words, by continually thinking about all the ways they drive us crazy and make us nuts, aren't we really making them more important and even more powerful than they really deserve to be?

To find the answer, after the participants have identified the difficult people who are "stressing them out," I ask . . . . "OK, on a scale of one to ten, how important do you want this person to be in your life?" Most people will then respond with "zero" and it is then that we begin to discuss the concept behind this week's quote. For you see, while I can certainly understand how we might experience difficult people as frustrating, stressful, problematic etc., I’m concerned that our tendency to hold them in our thoughts, and make them the focus of our conversations might be making this person much more powerful that we want them to be. This is especially true when we use phrases such as, "so and so just drives me crazy!" or "he or she just makes me so angry!" because in describing these problematic individuals in this way, we are actually giving them the power to "make us" feel a certain way or control us!

If you have determined that you no longer want this person (or people like them) to have that sort of power in your life, then you must be willing to take on that power yourself. In order to do this you must first, move from a vision of the problem (them, and how they have "made you feel") to the solution. In other words, if you have decided that you truly want them to have zero effect on how you feel, then you must create a vision of what this looks like and feels like in your mind before you can make it a reality in your life.

This means creating an image or imaginary movie where the difficult person is being their old predictable difficult self, and you are responding in a way that has you in control of your emotions and experience of life. You might choose to see them as frightened versus frightening, You might choose to smile, nod, and go on your way, you might choose to say something non-inflammatory such as "How interesting" and move into some aspect of your life that you enjoy.

Whatever you decide, you will be choosing to deal with them "on purpose" and in such a way that neither requires them to change nor makes them the focus of your life.

Of course, this new perspective will take practice. However, given that we are always practicing something (meaning that, up to this point, we have been unwittingly practicing giving them more power than we really want) then practicing reducing their ability to effect our lives while increasing our own power and influence would seem to be worth the effort.

Therefore, once you have decided what you want to practice with respect to difficult people, then you can begin to use them (to practice with) versus them using you or being able to “make you” feel one thing or another. And, given that any anything we practice will eventually become a skill, we can feel good in the knowledge that at some point in the future, we will be totally in charge of the effect others have on us and our lives. Not a bad skill to have, and even pass on to future generations, don't you think?