Difficult people will come and go in your life, no matter what you do. There’s no getting away from them. Nonetheless, don’t let them discourage you. Instead, learn from encounters with them, and you’ll be more robust and wiser than before you met them.
The first step toward gathering the lessons stimulated by difficult folks is to stop and think before you respond to their antics. When they misbehave, don’t take the bait.
Often, difficult people want to elicit a negative response and argue with you. Or they wish to dominate you. If you give in and argue, you’ve lost the battle and learned nothing. On the other hand, if you let them win by backing down, you’ve also failed, and they will continue to bully you. When you stop to think when hard-to-handle individuals act up, you have time to consider how to react. The challenge is to rise above them, taking a more balanced, mature approach.
Old, painful interactions never need to go to waste. Instead, you can learn from them by reflecting on them months or even years after they happen. Sometimes it’s easiest to glean wisdom from difficult relationships later because you are not so emotional about them anymore. You also have more knowledge to help you understand them.
Questions to consider about painful-to-deal-with individuals include:
• “Why did I react as I did?”
• “How can I apply my learning to future relationships?”
• “Was I difficult too?”
Your response to a difficult person’s actions reveals a lot about you. It can highlight areas of your psyche that require healing. Sometimes, difficult people are only hard-to-handle because they stimulate old wounds and point out weaknesses. As such, they can nudge you toward self-development.
Once you note a valuable life lesson from an encounter with someone difficult, you can apply it to future relationships. Thus, you can work at becoming more secure, confident, and resilient.
You can also consider whether you were a difficult person. Untangle the memory of a complicated relationship from the past, and you might find you contributed to problems, albeit by mistake. Take your wisdom forward, and you can ensure you handle new relationships better than you did in the past.
