Excerpt

Preface

This book is concerned with understanding more about how you come across to others, and understanding more about who you are as a person. It is also concerned with self-improvement making changes that will help make your interactions with others significantly better. Changes that will bring you more peace, comfort, and joy in your life. Specifically you will learn how what you do and say makes a difference in what someone else thinks and feels about you. In the process you will also learn a great deal about the difficult people in your life. As we noted in our signature book, Understanding and Working with Difficult People,

People we see as difficult often see us as difficult.

Another truth is that all of us are occasionally difficult or seen as difficult by others. This may simply be a matter of different perspectives, i.e. how we each look at the world, or it may mean that we have some inner work to do and some adjustments to make if we want to come across to others in an more positive, kinder manner.

This book will take a look at difficult behavior from a slightly different perspective. While you can learn about difficult behavior in general from this book, the focus is on what types of behaviors you might exhibit that could cause distress in others and how those same behaviors in others might cause you perturbation. We will delve into this in some detail, and you may be surprised at where some of the emphases lie. Much of what causes angst between people is due to fundamental differences in their makeup and how they look at the world. Try to keep an open mind because some of the questions we ask and some of the topics we introduce may surprise you quite a bit.

I sincerely hope that this book will be of significant value to you. I write not only to help others to learn, but to learn myself. Personally I have not yet met a perfect person, and I am certainly not perfect myself. I believe we are all on a path in which self-knowledge and self-learning are critical. I hope this book may play a small role in helping you along your path.

After reading many books about difficult people and working with people in many different guises from educator, to counselor, to mentor, to executive and personnel coach, I have realized more and more that difficultness is in the eyes of the beholders. (Yes, I meant that awkward plural because difficult does work both ways more often than not.) So the terminology difficult person or difficult people is for convenience only. I do not like to use labels and hence when I work with people I focus on behaviors not whether they are difficult or not. While you may feel you have a very difficult person in your life, the truth is, there are things they do that get under your skin. By focusing on specific behaviors you will much more likely be able to be successful with them. Focusing on them as a difficult person is a much harder task.

You will find that in this book I will discuss common behavior patterns that tend to cause angst between people. If you personally identify with some of these behaviors, and it would be very unlikely that you wouldnt as they cover a wide range of how we humans perceive the world and how we interact with each other, then those are little red flags to alert you to personal considerations that MAY affect another adversely. Nothing is written in cement

Perceptions ARE everything

when interacting with others.


Are you a Difficult Person?

This is an excellent question to ask, especially if you want to know more about how you are coming across to the world. There are no easy answers and luckily it is not necessarily black and white.

We are all Difficult

Often difficultism is a matter of differences in personalities between people, or the way we do things differently and hence appear difficult from anothers perspective. Understanding how you come across to others and how what you do and say is perceived is very important to becoming less difficult, or as I like to think of it, toward becoming a kinder, gentler person. This book will take a close look at how we can affect other people negatively and why.

What we really want to know

We want to look at difficult behaviors (or behaviors that may be seen as difficult by others) and determine whether we exhibit any of these. And we want to understand why/how those behaviors might impact another person in a negative way. When we gain this type of understanding about ourselves, we will gain the ability to make adjustments if we wish.

Important: we will also gain a great deal of understanding about how others impact us, which will also help give us personal Self-control in difficult circumstances.

While looking at how much angst one causes others might be relevant from a certain perspective, what we want to learn is how we come across to others and how we can improve ourselves so that we dont cause others distress.

In any case, my aim is to give you a very good perspective of the types of behaviors that people typically find difficult. Then we will briefly look at some skills we can learn to help us not be so difficult, or, better yet, to become kinder, gentler, more understanding, and more compassionate in our lives.

Okay, we do have a test (scale, questionnaire).

Thought you were going to get off easy?

Be prepared: this is not scientific, it has not been tested, it certainly has no validity or reliability according to acceptable standards or norms (at least not yet), and yes, I did just make it up.

Questions were devised relative to my own extensive research into the difficult people literature, my general and very broad education, and my own personal experience as an educator, coach, counselor, and human being.

This instruments sole purpose is to detail the types of behaviors that can be perceived as causing angst in others, i.e. what behaviors you (or others) may exhibit that others MIGHT see as difficult. If you want a personal perspective only, you can take this test and receive a number/score which puts you on some hypothetical scale of difficultness (see our figures later in this Chapter for a point of reference).