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May
19, 2003:
Dealing With Difficult People
Interview
with Dr. J. Mitchell Perry, CEO Of JM Perry Learning Technologies,
www.jmperry.com
Mike
Carruthers:
I'm sure you can think of at least one or two people in your life
who are difficult.
Dr.
J. Mitchell Perry:
The very first thing you want to do when you're dealing with
a difficult person, you always want to say to yourself, "OK,
how am I behaving around this person that is actually helping
this person be even more difficult?"
Human performance
expert Dr. J. Mitchell Perry says the perfect example of this
is when a person is being difficult, often the nicer you are,
the more difficult they get.
In reality,
difficult people will actually treat you better if you say,
"No." A difficult person is used to taking advantage
and if you're over nice, you're in effect enabling them to take
even more advantage of you. So what you want to do is simply
say, "Look if you want to abuse me, I'm now leaving."
At which point that person will very often back off and say
some form of, "OK. I'll be nice."
Dr. Perry
says avoid using the phrase "You should," because
difficult people usually get more difficult when told what they
should do. And difficult conversations often get more difficult
because people get polarized in their thinking which leaves
only two options.
Well,
the problem is once you get two options going on which is a
right-wrong, good-bad way to lose, all you know for sure is
that the difficulty is going to continue. So what you can do
is you can put them in a position where they have at least three
or more options, and it's that magical number of three--three
or more that calms down all kinds of polarization at which point
then you can often reach some kind of a solution.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net.
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."
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