Dealing with difficult people

<body topmargin="0" leftmargin="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr> <td valign="top" colspan="2" height="110" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="16bf0f21egerdp.jpg"> <div> <b><img src="05b203c0.jpg" border="0" width="32" height="60" align="BOTTOM" hspace="0" vspace="0"></b><font size="5" color="#66334C" face="Arial"><b>   albernstein.com  PSYCHOLOGY THAT WORKS   </b></font><b>      |     </b><a href="index_htm.html" target="_top" title=" albernstein.com PSYCHOLOGY THAT WORK"><u><b>home</b></u></a></div> <div> <a href="id19.html" target="_top" title="The science of management"><u>The science of management</u></a>   |   <a href="id20.html" target="_top" title="The art of being managed"><u>The art of being managed</u></a>   |   <b>Dealing with difficult people</b>   |   <a href="id22.html" target="_top" title="STRESS"><u>STRESS</u></a></div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width="210" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="16af2f02egerdp.jpg"> <br> </td> <td valign="top" height="370" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="16df0f03.jpg"> <div> <i>Dealing with difficult people</i></div> <div> <b>Summary: Easy to say; hard to do, since most criticism </b><i><b>is</b></i><b> personal.</b></div> <div> <b>                                   DON’T TAKE THIS CRITICISM PERSONALLY</b></div> <div>                                                         Albert J. Bernstein, Ph. D.</div> <br> <div> Don’t take this criticism personally.  </div> <div> Easy to say, hard to do.  In fact, “don’t take it personally,”would rank near the top of my all time list of useless things to say to people.  It’s not because there’s anything wrong with the concept, it’s just that people who are taking things too personally are so seldom consciously aware of what they’re doing that the advice is perceived as just another personal attack.</div> <div> What does it mean to take things personally?  All of us have external things -- our children, our pets, our favorite sports teams, and our creations at work -- that we experience as if they were parts of our bodies.   Psychologically, we make little distinction between verbal disparagement of these things and physical attacks to our vital organs.  When it comes to criticism, we all take it personally.  It’s part of our psychological make up.  We’re hard-wired to defend what we do and what we love.</div> <div> That doesn’t mean we have to respond to every criticism with an instinctive kill-or-be-killed counter-attack.  Luckily, we have evolved brains that are capable of over-riding our primitive default settings.  We just have to remember to use them.  Here are some suggestions on how to keep from being seen as taking criticisms too personally:</div> <br> <div> <b>Stop and think before you say anything</b> -- This is good advice no matter what the situation.  When you feel attacked the first thing that pops into your head is seldom the most effective response.  If you make it a practice to wait twenty-four hours before you answer criticisms the people around you may be so surprised by your maturity and reasonableness that they will listen to you for a change.</div> <div> <b>Listen carefully</b> -- Every criticism contains useful information as well as an attack.  If you don’t hear anything useful at first, keep listening until you do.  </div> <div> <b>Ask for advice rather than giving answers</b> -- The explanations you think of will sound perfectly reasonable and at least 150% correct.  To you.  To other people they will sound like a misguided defense against a misperceived personal attack.  Most any explanation you choose will make you look even more wrong.  Trust me on this.  If, by sheer force of reason, your explanation actually succeeds in getting the criticism modified or withdrawn, it may feel like you’ve won, but it probably means that people have decided it’s easier to humor you than treat you like a rational human being. </div> <br> <div> <b>What if you have to criticize someone who takes things too personally?</b>  Structure the situation so that he or she doesn’t have to admit wrongdoing by accepting what you have to say. In Asia they’d call it allowing the person to save face.  Make it clear in your comments that you understand how a reasonable and honorable person might do what he or she did.  Direct your advice toward improving the situation rather than pointing out mistakes.  Focus on what you want to happen rather than what’s wrong with what has already happened.</div> <div> Come to think of it, this is a good way to present criticism to anyone, because you never know who’s going to take it personally.</div> <br> <br> <div> <b>Summary: In case you haven't noticed, the world is full of idiots.  Here are some ideas on how to deal with them.</b></div> <div align="LEFT"></div> <div> <b>IDIOTS</b></div> <div>                                                           Albert J. Bernstein, Ph.D.</div> <br> <div> The world is full of idiots.  Of course, you don't need me to tell you that.  Look around.  They're everywhere--in the next cubicle at work, on the highways as you drive home, and probably hiding out in your own house as well.  Just think how easy your life would be if the people around you would just use their heads for once and do what they're supposed to do.  </div> <div> Dream on.  While you're at it you might want to think about what you'll do when you win the lottery.</div> <div> The rest of us have an existential question to ponder.  How do we do our jobs and live our lives in a world where most of the people are idiots who cant be counted on to do what they should?  Your answer to this question will, in large part, determine how effective you are in your job and how happy you are in your life.  Here are some options to consider:</div> <br> <div> <b>Get mad</b> -- The idiots certainly deserve it.  If it weren't for (put the name of your favorite idiot here) your life would be so much easier and more productive.  Of course if it weren't for gravity, you could fly, too.  </div> <div> <b>Get even</b> -- The advantage of this strategy is its utter simplicity.  You don't have to be very smart to use it, in fact, chimpanzees are quite capable of grasping the concept.  What they miss is the law of physics that states “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”’  The psychology can be stated in this simple equation:  Get mad, get even, get retaliation.  </div> <div> <b>Help the poor fools by explaining what they're doing wrong</b> -- This is how people get even without admitting it to themselves.  Some may actually believe they are doing a kindness by showing people the error of their ways.  There is a special place in the afterlife reserved for the holier than thou, and it's a lot warmer than they expect.</div> <div> <b>Nag</b> --  People <i>may</i> change in response to nagging, but they seldom change in the way you want.  Keep trying; you may be able to convince yourself that you've done everything you can, but since the fools just wont listen, whatever happens to them is their own damn fault.  </div> <div> <b>Go on Oprah and talk about your favorite idiot --</b> You can also call in and tell Rush;  I'm sure they'll be interested.  Other people who cant do anything may sympathize as well.  Remember, the more you repeat the story, the better it gets.</div> <div> <b>don't say anything to the idiots themselves but think about them all the time</b> -- This is the way people create stress related physical symptoms for themselves.  The idiots around you wont listen, but maybe your doctor will.  </div> <div> <b>Give up because you cant do anything anyway</b> -- Depression strikes someone every ten seconds.  The minute you give up, the next victim could be you.</div> <div> <b>Learn how to share the planet with the competency-challenged </b> --You are never going  to make idiots into smart, responsible people like you.  The best you can hope for is to keep control of your own life and not give it to them by letting their problems push your buttons.</div> <div> Can you imagine how miserable life would be if every idiot had the power to make you miserable?</div> <br> <div> Summary: Control freaks are more afraid of you than you are of them.</div> <div>                                                        <b>CONTROL FREAKS</b></div> <div>                                                       Albert J. Bernstein, Ph. D.</div> <br> <div> Why are some people obsessed with control?  Do they think they have the only brain on the planet? Why do they insist that everything be done their way even when you can<i> show</i> them that your way works just as well?  Or better.  What is it with these control freaks?</div> <div>   </div> <div> Control freaks see themselves as overburdened with the task of protecting an ungrateful world from mistakes.  They are seldom aware of the abject terror at the heart of their obsession.</div> <div> Imagine a dog inside an electric fence.  After he touches it once or twice, you can turn off the power, because he wont go near it again.  This is the way people with control problems deal with their fear of making mistakes.  Somewhere in the dim past perhaps they were burned badly, but now they never get close enough to their fear to see if the power is still on.  They   spend their lives keeping themselves and others away from the fence.  </div> <div> The strategy is self-defeating.  Unconfronted fears mutate in the darkness beyond the fence like alien fungi.  Gradually they take over more and more of the person's daylight world.  The safe area becomes narrower, and the only way to keep back the creatures of the night is with more control and more distance from the awful possibility of fear.</div> <div> If you ask them about it they'll just say they're doing their job.</div> <br> <div> So what do you do if you have to work for one of these poor, frightened people?  </div> <div> Getting mad and calling them control freaks will make the situation worse.  They will see your behavior as clear evidence that they must watch you even more closely, because you're the one with the problem, not them.</div> <div> Forget trying to talk them out of it, too.  Even seasoned therapists have trouble convincing the control obsessed that their behavior might be causing more problems than it's solving.  (Between you and me, at least part of our difficulty lies in the fact that it's always hardest to cure people who have the same neuroses as we do.)</div> <div> The answer to working with control freaks lies in negotiation, not recrimination.  Every task has an end product -- whatever it is that needs to be done -- and a process -- the actual behaviors through which the end product is achieved.  Negotiate to deliver a very specific product at a very specific time.  If you hand over the goods, there is less motivation to quibble about how you got them.  Not that the control-obsessed person wont try.   Treat attempts to control the process as requests to change the end product, which any business person would have to agree would reopen the whole negotiation.   If the end product is not affected, why change the process?  Needless to say you have to have some history of delivering the goods for a strategy like this to work.  </div> <div> Bottom line is: If you do what you say, when you say you'll do it, the control freak will go and bother somebody less reliable.</div> <br> <div> By the way, if you are wondering whether or not you might be a control freak, there is a sure test.  If, once every day, you cant publicly acknowledge how somebody else's way of doing something important was better than yours, start looking for that invisible electric fence around your mind.  A mistake every day keeps the fear away.</div> <br> <div> <b>HANDLING ANGRY CUSTOMERS</b></div> <div>                                                     Albert J. Bernstein, Ph. D.</div> <br> <div> One angry customer can spoil your whole day -- unless you have a working knowledge of neurophysiology.  </div> <div> Angry people are using the walnut-sized part of the brain that hasn't changed since the age of dinosaurs instead of the more intelligent hardware that has evolved over the past hundred million years.  The dinosaur in them can bring out the dinosaur in you, which leads to the Godzilla-meets-Rodan effect, in which there is considerable sound and fury, but very little constructive reasoning.</div> <br> <div> The secret of dealing effectively with angry customers is to stay out of your dinosaur brain long enough to get them out of theirs.  Here's how:</div> <br> <div> <b>ASK FOR A MINUTE TO STOP AND THINK:</b> This will have a calming effect on you and the customer.  No one will get angrier at you for asking for time to think things over.</div> <br> <div> <b>KNOW YOUR GOAL:</b> The dinosaur's rules are simple -- if attacked, fight back or run away.  Either response will make the situation worse.  Try instead to help your customer calm down and use the part of the brain that can reason.  Remember, you cant help a person and get her back at the same time.</div> <br> <div> <b>IF THE OTHER PERSON IS YELLING, don't DO ANYTHING UNTIL YOU GET HIM OR HER TO STOP: </b>Just keeping your own voice soft may do the trick.  Saying “Please speak more slowly.  I’d like to help,” works particularly well on the phone.  Have you ever tried to yell slowly?</div> <div> On the phone remember the “Uh-huh” rule.  We usually respond with “Uh-huh” when the other person takes a breath.  If you go three breaths without saying “Uh-huh” the other person will stop and ask, “Are you there?”  Following this technique will allow you to interrupt without saying a word.</div> <br> <div> <b>DO NOT EXPLAIN!</b>  Explanations are all too often a disguised form of fighting back or running away.  The typical explanation boils down to: “If you know all the facts, you will see that I am right and you are wrong.”  You cannot be right and effective at the same time.  don't even try.</div> <br> <div> <b>LET THE CUSTOMER KNOW YOU HEAR: </b>Before you try to solve the problem, let the customer know that you understand why he or she is upset.  This will save you from having to hear it again.</div> <br> <div> <b>ASK, “WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO DO?”  </b>This question is usually the last thing an angry person expects.  Hell have to stop and think to answer.  This is exactly what you want.</div> <div> <b>NEGOTIATE: </b>It's a lot easier when the customer is using the part of her brain you can negotiate with.</div> <div> P.S.  These techniques also work on angry people who are not customers.  Even spouses.</div> <br> <br> </td> </tr></table></body>