“Difficult people are not harmless. The impact of slowing productivity or creating unhappy customers and vendors is immeasurable, unknowable and often a company’s biggest cost, said Ms. Harrison of CareerTrack, paraphrasing W. Edwards Deming, a management consultant.
Yet, some scholars say, the problem is not the difficult people themselves. It is you.”
this is from today’s NY Times on difficult people………….
Knowing your own responses to a ‘difficult person’, knowing where you FEEL the difficulty in your own body, begins to open the door to how to DEAL with such people. Most of us react, often blindly, often triggered by experiences from our own personal past. We don’t take the time to take in the information about this person, about how we feel when we are with them, about where in ourselves we are feeling that way, and about where/how we might make an adjustment. When we can gain control over our own responses, we can begin to shape a change in the interaction, and maybe the interaction is no longer so “difficult”.