Dealing With Difficult People Who Push Your Buttons: Three No-Fluff Tips THAT WORK (and a Bonus Perspective Shift)
I got a phone call recently from someone asking me to help them process through a situation with a difficult person. We know who these people are, right?
The ones who push our buttons…get under our skin…get on our VERY LAST NERVE. The person who, when they call or text, you roll your eyes, wondering what they want now. I’d bet, even hearing me say this, someone comes to mind. Yes?
Yeah. Me too. Me too! People are difficult, amirite? 🤨
Let me share three personally tested and well-used tips that are game-changers in helping you deal with people who push your buttons. And I’ll share a Perspective Shift 🤯 that will be worth waiting around for. Some of these insights are loosely based on the wonderful book, The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz. If you haven’t read that book, it’s a wonderful guide, and I really encourage you to check it out:
The Four Agreement book
by Don Miguel Ruiz
Ok, let’s dig in: The first tip I have for dealing with difficult people: Don’t make assumptions.
Assumptions are where we get into trouble. Here’s how it works: The person who gets under our skin makes a comment about the paperwork on our desk. We assume they’re judging us. And then, we believe our assumption: they ARE judging us! HOW DARE THEY. Maybe they should worry about their own desk – it’s not exactly The Container Store over there. 😤
Then we act on our belief. We’re short with them for the rest of the day. Or we make a passive aggressive comment about how if Sheila in HR would only get back to me in a timely manner, I could make some progress on this desk. Or we hold a grudge. We nurse the hurt. We tell six of our friends how awful this person is. Who are they, the QUEEN OF CLEAN?? 👑
Note that sequence: We make an assumption —> then we form a belief around the assumption —> then we act on our belief.
And THAT’s when we find ourselves with messes that we have to clean up later.
Essentially what’s happening is, we are importing our lens onto what they say. 👓
Our lens may be past hurts: We’ve felt judged before.
Or it may be defensiveness: It’s not my fault my desk is messy! John sat here during a webinar and left his crap all over the place!
Or, perhaps we’re projecting the judgment we feel about how we’re keeping our desk onto someone else—it’s beneath my standards for how I want my desk to look, but I’ve been too overwhelmed to straighten it, and I felt attacked when they mentioned the paperwork that’s sitting there in a pile. Whether they are actually judging me is not the point. I’m judging me. I’m feeling self-conscious. And so, I’m projecting.
Here’s one more example: Someone says, “No, you don’t have to bring anything to the party,” and your next thought is, “Do they really mean that? Or will they get pissy if I show up empty-handed?” Catch it: you’re assuming they aren’t being honest.
Is that true? They aren’t being honest? Can we know with 100% certainty that they aren’t being honest?
👉 Here’s the better approach: If they say you don’t have to bring anything to the party, assume they mean you don’t have to bring anything to the party.
Let them say what they mean and mean what they say. Let their yes be yes, and their no be no. Without second-guessing. Without assuming. Without working so hard to figure out what they really meant.
💫 And here’s a bonus tip: It would help if you begin to be a person who means what they say and says what they mean. If you’re more clear in your speech, without hidden messages and cues that you’re hoping others pick up on, it’ll help you to believe others’ words as well. It’s so freeing! No guessing! No assuming! No drama! That level of clarity will be a gift to all of your relationships.
Tip #2 for dealing with difficult people: Let adults be adults. Let’s really work on not controlling other people. You have to look closely here 🔎 —sometimes our controlling nature shows up in sneaky ways. It can look like us talking to other people to get them to influence this person to do what you want them to do, or inserting your opinion when not asked, or being sarcastic to get your point across without saying it directly. It can look like pulling back from helping or supporting others when you don’t like what they do, or peppering people with questions, or being quietly stubborn and digging in your heels.
Coaching tip: It is worthwhile to ask yourself honestly, and reflect: In what ways do I attempt to control others?
This is the thing I shared with the person on the call: Imagine you walk into someone’s house and they have painted their kitchen Pepto-Bismol Pink. 🌸 Imagine your feelings about that color as you see it in your mind’s eye. (It’s literally hurting my eyes to think about it.)
Controlling others, even in the subtle ways that we can do, is like getting a paint brush and a gallon of gorgeously rich Ashwood Moss and coming over, uninvited, and painting their kitchen. We wouldn’t do that, right? We might have our feelings about their Pepto Bismol Pink kitchen (and their obviously poor taste), but hey, it’s their kitchen. I don’t have to live there. So let them paint their kitchen. What color they paint their kitchen is THEIR business. Our job is to focus on our own work. It’s to take my next best step. It’s to attend to my unfinished business. When I get busy taking care of my own stuff, I don’t have time to worry about your kitchen, and I can put my judgments to rest.
Finally, tip #3 for dealing with people who push our buttons: Don’t take offense.
Honey, listen, I say this with love: It’s not about you. It’s not about you! Even if they make it about you, or your messy desk, it’s not about you. You can let their comment roll of your back and move on.
It’s like this: If you’re wearing a solid blue shirt 👕, and I walk by and say, “Hey, nice shirt. I like polka-dots,” you’ll go, “That’s weird. I’m wearing blue because everyone knows it looks incredible with my eyes.” And you’ll shrug and go about your day.
What you won’t do is spend the next eight hours wondering I meant, and if I’m judging your blue shirt, and asking six friends if they get that your shirt is blue, and then losing sleep at night, wondering what I meant by polka dots? No, you’d move on. Because it’s not a big deal. If she doesn’t know patterns vs. color, that’s on her. Next! That’s how we handle other people. We recognize that what they say or do is a reflection of them, not us. We are careful not to center ourselves in their stories. It’s not about us! How freeing!
Let me leave you with one final incredibly helpful perspective shift 🤯 to help you deal with messy people who get your dander up.
If I’m doing my own work, and allowing people and events to teach me, and being open to that process, then I have to recognize when there are things lurking in my shadow. These are difficult things I’m not willing to take a look at, or things I don’t want to own, or name, or admit that they’re true. It can be scary. But with support, we can unpack these one by one, and doing so will set us free.
Here’s the thing: if a person I interact with regularly and continually gets under my skin and lives rent-free in my head, they are either doing something I wish I could do, but can’t give myself freedom to do, or they represent something unresolved in me that I haven’t fully made peace with yet.
Let me repeat that.
If a person I interact with regularly and continually gets under my skin and lives rent-free in my head, they are either doing something I wish I could do, but can’t give myself freedom to do, or they represent something unresolved in me that I haven’t fully made peace with yet.
Let me tell you about the moment this became crystal clear for me.
I had a work orientation some years back, at which time some new people who were joining the organization were introduced to the team. As the newbies stood at the front of the room, my eyes and ears were drawn to one person in particular: a woman near the end of the line, who was the self-appointed star of the show. She spoke up, she volunteered information, she engaged the audience…she owned the room.
I disliked her immediately.
I had thoughts like these: How dare she? Read the room, lady, geez. You’re new here – how about taking the temperature of the room a bit, and settle in. Stop calling attention to yourself. It’s annoying.
After lunch we were assigned to small groups. And I thought, If she’s in my group, I’ll die. And when they handed out the assignments, she was IN MY SMALL GROUP. 😑
How charming. 😒
And in that setting, too, she continued to annoy me. Coming up with ideas, and sharing them, and taking up space. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT.
I’m wondering if you can see from a mile away what it took me months to spot: 👉 The reason I struggled with her behavior was because she’s doing things I could NEVER allow myself to do.
Speak up? Draw attention? Stand out? OWN A ROOM?
Heck no. Better to stay small, to acclimate, to find my place, to find my people. To stay safe.
(Hi, My name is Christi, and I’m an Enneagram 6️⃣ 😆).
And it became so clear to me: my problem isn’t with her! It’s with me! I’m not free to show up in this way, and so I can’t allow her to show up in this way.
Whew. 🤯
And now that I know that’s true, I can work with it. Now that I’ve named it, I can heal it. And I did—we became good friends! And I learned how to check my own insecurities, and deal with those, so I could let myself – and others – shine.
My friends, thanks for reading. Thank you for being an essential part of my little community at Perennial. I’d love your engagement – leave a comment, follow this blog, share it with friends. Reach to me at www.perennialcoaching.com – I’d absolutely love to hear from you. And if you want help investigating your own shadows or sneaky control tactics, we can do that work too. ☺️
Come on in. Let’s journey together.
