Here’s how you can deal with difficult people

From co-workers, colleagues, friends and family, these challenging relationships may fill your life with undue stress and anxiety.

Jay tried to explain just how much damage a difficult person can cause in your life. (Source: Pexels)

Often in life, we are faced with a confusing situation. You may know a certain someone with whom your relationship is challenging. From co-workers, colleagues, friends and family, these challenging relationships may fill your life with undue stress and anxiety. How do you deal with unpleasantness?

Jay Johnson, a trainer specialising in communication and leadership development may have a solution for you. In his motivational TEDx talk, he explains how we often go about managing relationships the wrong way.

He says, “Only by elevating our understanding of behavior and acting through an internalized approach will we be able to master the conflicts created by dealing with difficult people.”

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Jay tries to explain just how much damage a difficult person can cause in your life. ”When we’re engaged with difficult people we’re in a heightened state of anxiety. Our systems start to shut down, we don’t think rationally, our metabolism slows, we can even get acne from having too much stress hormones put into the body. Is that a way that we want to live our lives? Conflict in the workplace has serious impacts and ultimately what it does is, it causes turnover absenteeism and it can even cause projects to fail.”

What are the measures you can take to deal with difficult people? Jay suggests separating the person from his behaviour. Easier said than done right?

”For so many difficult people, we label them ‘tough to deal with’, ‘difficult’, ‘bad’ but if we look at it and say I dislike this behavior that this person, this human being exhibits, it separates those two things for us. The label is no longer on them, it’s on the behavior and then we can carve that out and ask, is this the hill we want to die on? Is that behavior worth my heart attack and I would like to think that the answer to that is no.”

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