Dealing with difficult people

So who's your difficult person at work? A colleague or co-worker? A boss? An employee? A client?

Difficult people push all your buttons, pull your strings and yank on your chain.

But the real problem with difficult people is that, when you're around them, you likely feel helpless, powerless or unsafe.

And that equates to feeling frustrated, angry or afraid.

As a result, you may use one or more of these usual (but ineffective) strategies:

• attack
• appease
• avoid*

Ultimately, it's less about what your difficult people do and more about how you respond!

In order for you to create an emotionally safe workplace, it's critical that you feel safe. So the next few posts will deal with what you can do to feel safer at work.

Each post will provide you with tools to reduce your frustration, stress and powerlessness and help restore your ability to choose what you do and feel more in control. Topics will include -

• ending gossip and office politics - once and for all
• creating healthy boundaries
• saying no - and meaning it
• giving yourself breathing room
• listening to understand and connect
  
• creating therapeutic alliance
• helping and rescuing - the crucial difference
• focusing on questions instead of answers
  
• discovering and using your needs profile - a decision-making tool
  
• creating solutions that are win-win
• changing corporate culture - one person at a time

Let me know what you most want to learn, and that's where we'll start. What you want matters!

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*I prefer these over the more familiar "fight, fright, flight" and "aggressive, passive-aggressive, passive," because they're actions, not just descriptors.

What makes you feel emotionally unsafe?

A friend of mine follows my parenting blog. She's also an agency worker. So one day she said to me, "Why don't you write a blog for agency workers? They need this as much as parents do!"

And then my sister, an assistant professor in the Department of Nursing at University of Hartford, CT, introduced me to the term 'horizontal violence' and said, "Why don't you write this blog for nurses, too?"

As a helping professional, you may need ongoing support and encouragement more than anyone, because you do so much for so many - with so little. But you can get so caught up helping others that it may not occur to you (or you simply may not have the time) to ask for help when you need it.

So where to start? What's the biggest challenge you face that I know something about?

Emotional safety.

In all the workshops, seminars and consulting I've done, frontline workers said they felt unsafe - with clients, with co-workers, with bosses. And if you're in a helping profession, you know what I'm talking about.

So here's what I do want to do in this blog:

• I want to focus on solutions.
• I want to write posts that you can read in 2-3 minutes a week.
• I want to provide you with simple but powerful tools to help you create the emotional safety you need to do the critical work of helping others.
  
• I want to offer ongoing support and dialogue.
  
• And I want to give you an opportunity to comment, ask questions and be heard.

And here's what I don't want to do:

• I don't want to create an academic discussion around oppression, vicarious trauma, horizontal violence, etc. Others, much more qualified than I am, are already doing that very capably, so I'll stick to what I know.
  
• I don't want to explore the whys and wherefores - "How did we get into this mess in the first place?" - or focus on the problem.
  
• And I certainly don't want to provide you with sound bites that are trite and have no real value.

But I need your input for this to work. So tell me: What makes you feel unsafe at work? What creates or contributes to an emotionally unsafe work environment for you or others?

You can have your say here. And you can help create more emotional safety in your workplace - regardless of what anyone else is doing.

Take a minute to leave a comment - anonymously, if you want - and let's see what we can do together!