Chapter 9

To be effective with people you can’t stand, it is essential that you gain control over your attitude toward the problem people in your life. But how do you find the courage to stand your ground when you want to cry or to step forward in the face of determined opposition? How do you restrain yourself when you want to attack? How can you get an attitude adjustment when you need one, so that your reactions to difficult people are effective and, excuse the term, semiautomatic?

Your ability to be effective with the strategies in the rest of the book is directly proportional to your ability to master your attitude. In each subsequent chapter we will point out what attitudes to take to be successful with that particular difficult behavior. This chapter is about the process of how you change your reactions.

The answer is found in the mechanism that produced your attitude toward your problem people in the first place. Consider for a moment how quickly and automatically you react when the difficult behavior you can’t stand begins again. That type of stimulus-response mechanism is triggered in you over and over again each day, and most of the time its effects are benign. You know how a certain song, or picture, or fragrance can transport you to another time earlier in your life. Likewise, negative past events can produce fearful associations and phobic reactions to objects and experiences in the present. There are at least two factors that strengthen these stimulus-response mechanisms, repetition and intensity. And you can use these factors consciously to change your reactions to people you can’t stand!

The first step is to decide what you want. What attitude will help you get along with your difficult people? Do you want to be calm? Confident? Assertive? Relaxed? Caring? Patient? Determined? A combination of these? Give the resource a description name. If you name it, you can have it.

Now, try to find a time or place in your life where using that attitude comes naturally to you. If you think you lack the needed resource, get it from someone else. Modeling others is a skill you were born with. Remember all those things that your parents said or did that you vowed you would never say or do? Don’t you do some of those things anyway? What happened? You modeled those behaviors.

If you know some people who deal well with your problem people, seek them out and ask how they do it: what do they think, how do they view the problem people, and what kinds of things do they say to themselves. Become a resource detective, and find out what the internal state is that allows them to deal with your difficult people so differently from the way you do. Keep asking questions until it makes enough sense to you that you can mentally rehearse what you’ve found out. Walk through the situation with your difficult people using this new internal state until you’ve made it your own.

It doesn’t matter if the models you choose are people you know, or people you don’t know, whether they are movie stars or political figures. Your models don’t have to be any more real than characters from books or movies. All that matters is that you think the models have the attitudes or behaviors that you want to learn and use as resources.

Finally, you should make it a habit to positively replay the past and preplay the future in the safety of your mind’s eye. The more realistically you imagine responding in a different way and the more times you repeat the internal fantasy, the stronger the association gets.

An elderly patient, Marge, was having problems dealing with her overly aggressive boss. She frequently felt that he was being unfair to her, but she couldn’t find it within herself to take any action. So day after day, she listened to his tirades, swallowed her pride, and sometimes cried. As her frustration increased, Marge’s health deteriorated. She told us she needed to “be more assertive with her boss.”

We asked if there was anywhere in her life she was assertive. She couldn’t think of one. So we asked if she knew of anyone who could handle her boss. She said, “Katharine Hepburn! She wouldn’t take any guff from my boss!” We then asked Marge to imagine Katharine Hepburn sitting at her desk at the office, as the boss walks in. Not surprisingly, Katharine Hepburn had the right stuff. Marge watched, listened, and learned, and then she walked herself through the same scene as if she were Katharine Hepburn. She deepened her association by repeatedly imagining herself as Katharine Hepburn dealing with her boss.

The next week she reported what she termed “a 20 percent improvement.” She said she was a little more assertive with her boss, but what really shocked her was that at a restaurant where her meal was not cooked right, she sent it back. She said she had never done that before in her whole life, and then suddenly without even thinking, she had just done it.

Marge made a habit of replaying annoying past events. Anytime she was dissatisfied with an interaction with her boss, she would go back and imagine doing it with the attitude she would have liked to have. One month later she was absolutely delighted. Her boss began to throw one of his tantrums, and with only a moment’s hesitation, she told him that she wanted to be treated with respect, that she knew he was capable of it, and she expected it in the future. Then she turned around and walked out. Imagine her boss’s surprise!

She told us that what had helped her the most from this little stretch of the imagination was the self-esteem Katharine Hepburn seemed to have. Hepburn had the self-respect to elegantly stand up to Marge’s boss! Marge said that after watching this mental movie, her boss looked smaller, somehow. That shift in perception helped her see his ranting and raving in a new light. She realized for the first time how insecure he must be to treat her like that and that it had next to nothing to do with her personally.

The way you look at a situation will dramatically affect your attitude. Have you ever had a dream in which something is chasing you, and then at some moment in the dream, your perspective shifts and you are no longer running, but instead you are watching yourself running? There are two different perspectives here. One is the experience of watching, of seeing through your own eyes, and that’s called association. The other, in which you experience yourself from a third-party perspective, is called dissociation. You remember memories and experiences this way too. You can be inside the memory, reliving it by seeing through your own eyes and feeling the experience from the inside as if you are there again. Or you can dissociate from the memory, watching it from a distance, while having thoughts and feelings about it.

We recommend that you dissociate yourself from unpleasant memories and start learning from them. There are a number of dissociation techniques that you can use to step away from unpleasant events or difficult people and adjust your point of view:

• You can compare your difficult people problems to more difficult times in your life or imaginary worst-case scenarios. How does dealing with these people compare to losing a leg, a loved one, or your mind completely?

• You can mentally go beyond the problem and project yourself to a future time, when the problem could not possibly matter anymore. We call this the Alan Kirschner technique, named after Rick Kirschner’s dad, because Alan used this technique repeatedly in order to keep his perspective while Rick was growing up. In challenging times, and even in a crisis, Alan would say to himself, “100 years from now, what difference will it make?”

• You can mentally edit the memory as if you were editing a film. Try this with a memory. Recall your last unpleasant encounter with your most difficult person, and watch it on a movie screen in your mind, from the last row in the theater. Make the memory smaller or further away. Remove the color from the image, and make it black and white and see if that reduces its intensity! Play it backward. Cut and reedit the memory into a new sequence. Trade it with your friends.

• Through rigorous self-discipline, you can develop a part of you that serves as an impartial and dispassionate observer, regardless of circumstance. Right now, see yourself reading this book, noting your feelings and thoughts.

• You can reframe the problem and change the meaning of the experience. Teresa was waiting for a bus in front of a hospital. Suddenly a drunken man staggered up to her, and with beer bottle in hand, he began telling her his story. His daughter had been in a motorcycle accident and had lost her legs. He blamed himself for the accident because he was the one who bought the bike for her. Now, he declared, he was going to drink himself to death. Teresa yelled at him: “Hey! You just be glad your daughter has a head on her shoulders, that she can think and speak, and her two arms still work. And right now she is going to need a father who can be there for her and be strong, not some drunk lying face down in the gutter.” Tears came to his eyes. Without saying another word, he kissed her hand, dropped his beer bottle, and ran into the hospital.

• You can compare dealing with your difficult person to something worse. Rick Brinkman’s mother, Simone, always kept the book Mengele on her bookshelf. This was a book about the infamous Nazi doctor who experimented on twins at Auschwitz. Simone was a twin at Auschwitz and just missed meeting Mengele personally, a chilling thought that helped her keep her perspective in trying times and difficult situations. All she had to do was pull out the book and read a page or two and, just like that, the present circumstances wouldn’t seem so bad.

The picture remains the same, but the frame changes. With a new frame, the picture takes on new meaning. Teresa showed the drunken father another way of interpreting the same situation. Realizing his daughter’s best interests and recognizing a better way to express his love, the father acted consistently with this new point of view.

Let’s try reinterpreting the behavior of difficult people. Every difficult person that crosses your path, when placed in a positive frame of reference, presents you with the golden opportunity to develop your communication skills. The skills you practice with one person who isn’t that important to you may be just the skills you need to save a marriage or a relationship that is more dear to you. In this way your difficult person has helped you save it. If you look at it that way, you will immediately feel better.

Have you ever stopped to listen to the way you talk to yourself with that voice inside your head? Ever said to yourself, “What a jerk! I can’t believe this is happening to me!” or “I don’t get paid for this kind of abuse!? How do those thoughts affect your attitude and your behavior? Do those thoughts help or hinder you?

Just as what you think has an effect on what you say, so does what you say to yourself influence what you think. When you change the way you talk to yourself about a problem, you change the way you think about it at the same time. We recommend that you take charge over the things you say to yourself. Become conscious of the things you tell yourself, and substitute positive, supportive thoughts for negative ones. As you listen to your internal dialogue, make sure that your language helps you to get where you want to go.

You must learn to speak purposefully to yourself to change your attitude for the better. You can develop a few quick-draw mental comments that help you to keep your sense of humor and perspective around difficulties. For example, here are some great things to say to yourself, with brief explanations of how they are true:

• “I go for what I want, and I want what I get.” The branch that bends with the snow lives to see another winter, but the branch that resists the snow breaks. When you resist (struggle with, try to change, limit, inhibit, withdraw from) your difficult people, it’s usually you that breaks.

Don’t get us wrong. We are not saying that you shouldn’t do something about the situation. But as soon as you accept the situation for what it is, you can begin to access your resources and act constructively to influence difficult people’s behavior. It is what it is, it ain’t what it ain’t, and that’s the way it is. Only by accepting the situation can you begin to take aim at a worthwhile outcome.

• “Somewhere in this experience is an opportunity.” Perhaps every dark cloud has a silver lining. But everyone knows that gold, silver, and diamonds are found in muddy water, dirt, and rocks. You just have to look for them, or at least be willing to see them when they present themselves. Opportunities work the same way.

• “Any experience I can learn from is a good one.” What you learn from dealing with difficult people will develop your character, make you stronger, and help you in many other areas of your life. Learning means getting feedback instead of failure out of an experience. When you look at the cause-and-effect relationship between what you did and what you got, you can learn what is working and what is not.

• “I can be flexible.” If what you are doing isn’t working, your behavior comes with an ironclad guarantee: it doesn’t work! Anything else you try that doesn’t have that guarantee will have a greater chance of succeeding than something that is guaranteed not to work. Experiment! Try novel approaches. Be outrageous. Do the last thing you would ever think to do first!

• “I know that anything is possible.” They told Tom Edison that electric light wasn’t possible, and a lightbulb switched on in his head. They said that if human beings were meant to fly, they would have wings, and now the flight attendant pins them on our kids’ jackets. The people who believe that anything is possible are the ones who get the breakthroughs. So think about it: if people can fly and you can turn on a light, then it must be possible to deal with your difficult people. Someone may be doing it successfully right now! If you haven’t gotten the result that you want, remember that it’s better to hit the light switch than to curse the darkness.

• “Oh well.” Whether you like the situation or dislike it, your opinion of it won’t really change much of anything, except the way that you feel. So instead of making a big deal out of facts that you don’t like, you might as well take a deep breath and say “Oh well” and drop your opinion. Let it go, and then go on from there.

• “All things must pass.” When you are struggling to deal with difficult people, you may sometimes feel like it will never end. But the feeling that this situation will go on forever is naught but an illusion. Just think for a moment about how old you are and about all you’ve been through. Can you believe how fast all that time went by? This time with your difficult people will also pass. If you look into the future with that knowledge, you may gain perspective and make the whole process easier on yourself.

• “This used to bother me. That’s all behind me now.” Speaking of the past, why not start talking about your reaction to the difficult people as if the situation is already behind you? Whether you’re talking to yourself or talking to others, use the past tense, so you can stop being tense in the present.

• “In God we trust.” According to the ancient proverb, all things work together for good. It is possible that something wonderful is emerging from your present situation and that you haven’t seen it yet. Just as the stars hang in the sky and the seasons have their cycle, there is a big picture at work in your life also, and in time all will be revealed. The pain you’ve been experiencing may be only the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Hang in there. Or let go. In due season, everything will be revealed and resolved.

All the tools we’ve described in this chapter are available to you whenever you have need of them. You can adjust your reactions and your interpretation of events at any time. Remember, an occasional attitude adjustment frees you from the stress and leads to success as you bring out the best in people at their worst.

To be more effective with all kinds of difficult behaviors, to prevent yourself from winding up in the danger zone, and to change your attitude when all else fails.