People you can’t stand: they’re those difficult people who are either not doing things you want them to do or doing things you do not want them to do—and you don’t know what to do about them. Well, you don’t have to be their victim anymore! While you can’t change difficult people, you can communicate with them in such a way that they change themselves. It’s a matter of knowing how to get through to them when they’re behaving badly.
This book will help you to identify and assemble elements of effective communication. In that sense, communication with problem people is similar to making a phone call. You have to dial all the numbers in the correct order if you want to get through. Leave out just one digit (only 10 percent of the whole number if you include the area code), and your call will not go through. Dial the area code as an afterthought, and your call will get through to the wrong party. But it is possible to learn the number, dial it correctly, and completely transform your interactions with the people you can’t stand!
Unfortunately, there will always be a few difficult people who, no matter what you do, refuse to answer the phone and take your call. In those rare instances, you can switch metaphors and think of dealing with people you can’t stand as making a trip to the communication gym. Difficult people will help you work out your communication muscles and develop your communication stamina. In turn, this may be the very strength you’ll need, at some later time and place, to preserve a more valuable relationship.
We will direct your attention to five key areas for solving your people problems:
1. First, we’ll examine the forces that compel people to be difficult in such a variety of ways. Where one person starts yelling, another shuts down and says nothing, while yet another starts sniping. These fascinating differences are indicators of differing behavioral intentions that have been thwarted. Once you understand these differences, you’ll be less inclined to personalize difficult behavior.
2. Then we’ll examine essential communication skills that turn conflict into cooperation, emotion into reason, and hidden agendas into honest dialogue. The good news is that you use these essential skills already in your dealings with people that you get along with. The bad news is that, when dealing with problem people, the failure to use these skills is a big part of the problem. We’re going to make the process of communication explicit, so you can begin to use these skills when you most need them with people at their worst.
3. Next, we’ll focus on specific strategies for dealing with the 10 (+ 3) most difficult behaviors of the people you can’t stand. You’ll learn exactly what you can do to get people to stop whining, attacking, blowing up, and breaking promises.
4. Increasingly, we define our relationships with others using the phone and e-mail. We hope you make the most out of these tools to avoid conflict and build cooperation instead.
5. Toward the end of the book, we will address the subject of what to do when you can’t stand yourself. By that time, you will probably have recognized yourself in some of the descriptions of problem people. Chapter 23 will help you identify and alter your own difficult behavior, which will help you because the less difficult you are, the fewer the number of difficult people you’ll have to deal with.
We recommend that you read Chapters 1 through 9, then turn directly to the chapter that deals with your difficult person.
Before you read on, allow us to introduce ourselves and tell you how we came to write this book.
We’re Rick and Rick, best friends, business partners, and Naturopathic physicians. (Although our profession was born in the United States over a hundred years ago, you may have never heard of it until now.*) We became friends while med students, but our friendship blossomed when a physician and surgeon from an area hospital became our mentor. With his guidance and encouragement, we studied health from an attitudinal point of view. We hoped to determine the principles of mental and emotional health and to find out how these principles might be used to prevent or heal physical illness. Time and again, we found that when people clarify their values, work to fulfill their goals, and learn effective communication and relaxation skills, they feel better. And as their mental and emotional health improves, many of their specific physical symptoms disappear. Since the word physician means “teacher,” we began sharing these ideas through seminars and workshops.
In 1982, a mental health organization asked us to create a program on how to deal with difficult people. That marked the official beginning of the research project that has culminated in this book, and in the process, we changed the way we define what we do. We now view all our work as a kind of continuing education in people.
For over two decades, we’ve been learning about people’s hopes and fears, how people build their lives or destroy them, how people communicate, what makes people difficult, and how best to deal with people at their worst. We’ve written this book to pass that information along to you. We’ve presented these ideas to enthusiastic response in seminars, on tape, and in print to over a million people. It is our hope and belief that the ideas in this book will make a meaningful and lasting difference in the quality of your life.
Dr. Rick Brinkman and Dr. Rick Kirschner
* Following conventional premedical education, a Naturopathic doctor (N.D.) is trained as a holistic primary care physician in a four-year medical school. Naturopathic physicians learn the same scientific research, diagnostic, and clinical skills as conventional doctors (M.D.s), but the education emphasizes health restoration, wellness, and disease prevention rather than symptom management through drug treatments and removal of troublesome body parts. Students are required to take four years of clinical nutrition (compared with a few weeks for conventional doctors), and they receive training in counseling skills, so that they can guide patients in making lifestyle changes, and training in natural therapies that enhance and utilize innate healing forces for the treatment of the disease. To learn more, go to the website for the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP) at www.naturopathic.org.