4 Things to Leave Behind When Dealing with Difficult People
We all come across difficult people in our daily lives. They can be intolerable but also unavoidable. How do we keep our calm and not let them ruin our day?
Here are the four things I have left behind to help me keep my cool.
1. Revenge
Revenge is a dish best-served cold. The best revenge is to not be like them. What happens when we fight fire with fire? We end up burning ourselves.
Revenge doesn’t give us peace because we end up being like them. What does do we achieve by giving what we thought was justice, but we end up being like them?
Instead, why don’t we lead by example? Why don’t we keep doing the right thing even when others don’t? Because that’s our duty and that’s how we can influence the world, by controlling what we can control and our reaction to things and events.
2. Gossip
I understand the satisfaction of the gossip. To degrade others so we feel better about ourselves. To satisfy our ego. But what good does that actually do?
If we don’t like what someone does, why don’t we confront them and do what we can in our control to fix the problem? That way, we can find a solution rather than complaining about it, which can never end.
It may improve our relationships with others. We may gain their respect by confronting them because it’s not always easy to speak up to shake the boat. It takes courage. And who knows, that person might be willing to help us find a solution because the first step to solving any problem with others is to communicate with them. By doing so, we end up helping them and ourselves.
3. The need to be right
To serve our ego, we may, time and time again, need to be right, or to prove that we’re right. As a result, someone else ends up being wrong, having their ideas and reality shattered.
Instead of breaking their bubble, why don’t we invite them to join ours? Why don’t we show them the way? It’s still their choice on where to go. Deep down, no one does wrong things knowingly. They only do things they thought were right for them.
4. Fear of being alone
When things haven’t changed and become too intolerable, it might be time to walk away.
Being left alone is scary. As a result, the fear has led some of us to settle for less. It made us desperate for love and relationship. Instead of waiting or attracting what we truly deserve, we settle for what’s good enough, such as a romantic relationship or a group of friendship that we’ve been with far too long to leave and start over. The longer we wait, the more we have wasted our life for the time we could have spent with others who lift us up.
Moreover, solitude has never been more important in this busy world. Without spending time with the self, how would we truly know ourselves? When would we discover ourselves without being influenced by others around us? How would we actually use our true self to attract other like-minded people?
At the end of the day, fear is just an irrational thought. As Leonardo DiCaprio said, if you can sit alone at a restaurant or in the cinema, you could do anything in life.
Use Empathy
However, we can’t spend our life alone. We’re all living on the same planet and people aren’t unavoidable. Besides, what good does it do if we spend all the time alone without contributing or impacting other people’s lives?
As mentioned above, no one does wrong things knowingly. There are always reasons behind why someone does things differently, which may cause some inconvenience to us. It’s easy for us to judge them when they don’t do things according to our values, in our way. It’s easy to complain about them behind their back to blow our steam. It’s not easy to put our ego down, switch perspective to understand and lead them.
Every encounter with difficult people presents us with an opportunity to become a better person. It’s up to us to choose and be the change we want to see in the world.
