How To Handle Difficult People in Life

Who is A ‘Difficult’ Person?

The world is full of people. We have to be around them for a major part of our day. There are all sorts of people. There can be as many kinds as the number of people itself. We get along well with some of them but we just do not with many of them. The reason may be anything. It may be because of us or because of the other person. Talking from our point of view, a difficult person is someone with whom we cannot get along for some reason. And when we actually get face to face with them, we don’t know how to handle them and the very strange situation we find ourselves in. So, in this blog we will try to explore how we can not only handle but turn difficult people into easy ones for ourself so that we become more open, flexible and progressive in our lives. 

Make Yourself ‘Easier’

Make Yourself ‘Easier’

A person may be difficult to handle mainly due to 3 reasons – Ourself, the difficult person himself or the situation. In all these three cases, the only thing we can change is ourself. This is because we cannot change the other person. If we try too hard to do it, we will either get disappointed or we will have a fight with that person. Actually nobody can change anybody for that matter. Similarly, there are certain situations which cannot be altered much. If we use force to change it, it may work for sometime but it becomes an ugly scenario where we mercilessly hurt people tremendously. Moreover, it makes us feel bad as we did not do our possible best. We do our possible best when we handle a situation  using our ability and not force. So, since we cannot change anything else, in the subsequent paragraphs we will see how to manage ourself so as to handle the difficult people in our lives better.

Need To Become Open & Flexible

Need To Become Open & Flexible

So, a difficult person in our lives has more to do with us than with that difficult person himself. This is because we are not open enough in our lives to make everyone look easy to us. We have a bunch of thoughts, biases, prejudices, conclusions and judgments about everything and everyone in the world. Due to this, someone is easy for us while someone is extremely difficult to handle. Our ultimate goal is and should be to become as open, flexible and accepting as we can become in our lifetime. But this cannot be done overnight and needs certain amount of willingness, strength and dedication. We will explore certain mental and physical tweaks & strategies that we can use to achieve openness in our lives through a particular process.

Problems & Solutions of Not Being Open : 

Irritable Looks (Case 1)

Irritable Looks

When we are not open & flexible in life, we have a lot of rigidness in us. There are many people & things that we don’t like. We may hate someone so much that we cannot even look at them. When this is our mental state, we cannot be more closed and rigid as a person. Let’s understand why we become like this. Being extremely closed signifies a lot of fear and lack of confidence inside us. We are either fearful of getting mentally, emotionally or physically hurt by people or we don’t want to show our vulnerable side to the world. We need to come out of this state anyhow because it will keep us very small & limited and will make our life very sad and tough at the same time. 

So, how do we come out of this rigidness? We need to let go off our past where we were hurt by people close to us. We need to forgive people so that we can move on with our lives. Of course, we cannot forget what had happened but we have to remember it not to feel bad but to ensure that we do not fall into the same situation ever again. It’s not about the person who hurt you but about you completely. He may have done wrong but why do you have to suffer for that wrong? You don’t need to feel guilty moving on as it’s your right to do so. Doing this will free you of all the fears you have sub-consciously trapped within yourself. You will become able to meet and gel with new people which will bring fresh energy and hope back into your life!

Problems & Solutions of Not Being Open : 

Irritable Conversations ( Case 2)

Irritable Conversations

The next problem we face when we are closed and rigid is that we may not feel like talking to certain people. This is because, may be we feel irritated with what they say and how they talk. May be they don’t know what to say and what not to bring up. So, how do you handle such people? 

See, people around us are always an asset to us, either in the right way or in the wrong way. If you like talking to someone, you will learn a lot from them. But even if you don’t like to talk to someone, you can learn a lot out of them. The first thing you will learn from them is how to go beyond your likes and dislikes. How to talk very naturally to people whom you don’t like or may not like. You will learn how you should not be the same to someone else. That you should always think before you talk and that you should not hurt people or irritate them with your words. You will also learn how not to get hurt by talks that you don’t want to hear. And, finally you will learn how to make people you don’t want to talk to, your friend. If you know that you have so much to learn and grow from someone you don’t like, you will never ‘not like’ them. And this is where you win, improve and grow.

Problems & Solutions of Not Being Open :

 Inevitable Fights ( Case 3)

Inevitable Fights

The next problem that we face when we are closed & rigid is that we may get involved in fights with people, verbally or physically. Unfortunately, this will happen even if you don’t want to get involved in any fights. This is because when we are not open enough, people try to take advantage of our situation. They will either drag us into a fight as they know we won’t answer back as we don’t want to fight. And if we answer them, we inevitably have gotten ourselves involved in the fight even more badly. When we are not open, unknowingly we become kind of a bi-polar personality who either remains absolutely dormant or gets completely hyper in their thinking and activities. And then fights are bound to happen, more likely with the people we find difficult to handle. 

So, what do we do in such situations? The first thing that we need to fix in our mind is not to get involved in any kind of fights because they are a complete waste of time, energy & efforts. They are even counter-productive as it makes you feel that you can solve everything through fights and that you don’t need to improve yourself and your real skills & abilities. So, fighting needs to be removed from the list of our choices first. 

Now, when we don’t want to get involved in fights, the other person will try even harder to get us. But this is where we don’t give-in by giving-up. We continue to talk gently to him/her because we know we are right as we don’t want any fights. This is our source of power. Sooner or later, the other person will get frustrated and give-up. He may turn violent but you just have to defend yourself instead of trying to hit him back. Believe me no human exists on this planet who won’t admire someone who doesn’t want to hurt  back a person trying to hurt him. Once, he realizes this, he won’t only give up fighting but will finally become your friend.

Conclusion

If we keep trying to fight the difficulty, it will sooner or later get us. But in face of the difficulty, if we are constantly trying to improve ourself and our skills, the difficulty will open itself and transform itself into an opportunity for us. The only thing we need is a little courage to face who we really are and the will to improve & move ahead of that space. 

We don’t have to try to change or fight the difficult person or the situation. We just have to do what we can do with ourselves. This makes things so much simpler and easier. We just have to learn to work with what we have and what we can change rather than trying too hard to do what is not in our hands. Once we transform the difficult people in our lives into easy ones for us, we have opened the gates of our progress and growth infinitely and forever. This is because man has no other way to grow other than by serving mankind and improving human-relations.

Strong Human Bonds