00:00 

Hi there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 163, "Difficult People." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:19 

Alright, well hello there, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. If you are coming back, so glad you're here, and I'm I'm guessing that this means you're finding some things here that are helpful for you, and I love that. I hope that I'm able to share ideas and concepts and tools that are helping you to move forward in your life and helping you to figure things out for yourself. This is one of the things that I really really love about life coaching, is moving into this space of being here at the crossroads of difficult times in people's lives and helping them to figure things out and helping them move into the space that they really want to move into. I love that so much. If you're brand new, welcome to the podcast! I hope that you'll look around find some podcasts that are intriguing for you, and go back and listen to past ones, as well. That can be helpful to help you see things and understand things. Really my goal as a life coach is to help move you into greater awareness of what is going on in your life, of how you are engaging with your life, and of how you can engage in a way that will create more the results that you want to create. And we do this by helping you become aware of your thoughts and of what's going on in your brain, because our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings create our actions, and then our actions create the end results that we get in our life. So whatever you are living right now, the result you are living in that Is has a direct link back to the thoughts that you're thinking in your life. And this is the premise of a lot of what I coach people on and what I teach here on the podcast, so I'm glad you're here. 

01:56 

We're just going to jump in today. We're talking about difficult people. Now, I'm sure that all of you are like, "oh, I got a few of those in my life." Right? We all do. You know who I'm talking about. But let me clarify first...who I am not talking about are people who are emotionally or physically abusive. Now, that's a whole another category that we're not going to touch today. We're just going to talk about those people that are super annoying, those people that really bug you, those people that you just are around and you're like, "they're toxic, they're horrible." Now, not toxic because they're emotionally or physically abusive, but because of the thoughts and the feelings that you have when you're around them. We think that that people are toxic. We think that people are difficult. So we're talking about the run-of-the-mill ordinary people who are just difficult or who seem or feel to be unlovable to us. Okay, you have a few people in mind. Great. 

02:54 

Here's your first thought of the day: there are no difficult people. What? Let me explain this and you're going to love this. You're just going to be like, "oh, don't tell me this kind of stuff. I don't want to hear it." But today you want to hear it. Okay? People are just people. People will always have quirks and habits and ideas that will be different than ours. That's the nature of humanity. We're all different. These things do not make them difficult, because people are not difficult. People are people. It is our thoughts about these people that make it seem that they are difficult. Right? And we start labeling it that it's their problem that they are difficult ,when really it is our problem. 

03:43 

Let me explain this. Okay? Everyone is lovable. Every single person on the planet is lovable. If we struggle to love someone, if I struggle to love someone, that is my struggle. It is not because of them. It is my thoughts about them that make them unlovable. Generally, we have a lot of "shoulds" attached to how people "should" behave. We call this our manual, our list of expectations for other people. Wouldn't it be great if we just had a manual we could give to somebody we meet and say, "oh, by the way, here's all the things I expect of you. How you should behave if you want to be my friend or you want to be my date or my boyfriend," or whatever. So nice to just have a manual. We could tell them all the ways they need to live. All the things they need to do to make us happy. All the things they need to do to make them not be difficult, to make them be easy to live with. And then when people don't live up to the manual, guess what? We don't like it. We don't like it. So we do not have manuals, and, thank goodness, we don't. Because that is going to move us into a space of trying to control other people, which is not what we want to be doing here in our lives. We want to be relinquishing the control that we want to have and sometimes that we feel what we do have over other people. A huge part of what we want to do is learn to let go of  that control. Okay? 

05:12 

So when we feel uncomfortable around someone, we will label them as difficult. It's not that they are doing something wrong or that they're doing or that they are being difficult. It's that...what's going on in my head? I start getting all judge-y about their behavior. I start thinking that they should be different than they are. If they would change this behavior, they would be easy for me to get along with, easy for me to like, easy for me to love. And when it's tough for us to manage our own thoughts around someone, we tend to label them as difficult. Isn't this fascinating? So cool. When we feel uncomfortable around them because I'm being judge-y, I'm putting all of these shoulds. I'm putting all these expectations on them. I say it's their problem because they're difficult. 

06:12 

Let me give you an example. Several years ago something had happened with my former husband, and I was up in arms. Oh, this just cracks me up as I look back at now. I was so irritated and so frustrated. I was so annoyed at how difficult he was being. I had these expectations of how he should be showing up as a former spouse and guess what? He wasn't doing them, you know, and my fault, because I didn't print out my manual and give it to him, right? Had I done that, things would have gone easier, but he was not living up to my expectations. And so as I take these kinds of things to my life coach, and as she was coaching me, she just called me out and she's like "what about his behavior is surprising to you?" And I was like "well, nothing really because this is kind of how he's always behaved. This is what's always happened," and she says "then why are you surprised? Why are you upset? You know it's gonna happen." And I realized that I had this manual for him of how I thought he should be behaving, and when he didn't I was getting into this space of "oh my gosh. Can you believe he's doing this?" Well, of course I can believe he's doing that .That's how he's always done it. Why was I surprised now? It's no heinous crime, I'm just, you know when you've been married and divorced, you you seem to have a lot of little things that you're just like "Oh, of course, right." And I was still in that space. I probably still am sometimes. But this this is how he always showed up in the course of our 24 years of marriage. He always showed up this way. So why was I all of a sudden being so surprised and shocked that he was? No, like, that's me. That wasn't him. He was behaving the way he always had. He was consistent with his behavior. There were no surprises except that I was choosing to be surprised by his consistent behavior. 

08:14 

So the first step was that I had to recognize and accept that that situation, all the drama in that, was because of me. It was about my feigned surprise about what was going on. It didn't have anything to do with him. He was being consistent. Right? So when we start getting ourselves around people and we start thinking, "oh, this person's just so difficult." Bomb. Stop. Right there. First step: recognize and accept that other people being difficult is about you. It is not about them. It has to do with the difficulty of you managing your thoughts about how they should behave. Okay, so there we go. That's a huge truth that a lot of you are like, "la la la la la, I don't wanna hear that." Guess what? I'm gonna make you listen to it today. Ha ha ha. Because I want you to understand you are not at the mercy of other people. You don't have to sit back and be uncomfortable and hate being around other people. You can choose to leave, for one, or you can choose to manage your thoughts and decide that, you know what? Realize that of course they're gonna behave that way. They always behave that way. Or why shouldn't they behave that way? They're an adult. They get to choose how they want to live. I get to manage my thoughts around their behavior and around the expectations that I have around their behavior. So this is the first and biggest thing that I want us all to understand about difficult people. They're not difficult. It's my brain, my reaction to my thoughts, the emotions that are created by my thoughts, that is creating the discomfort that makes me want to blame them for my discomfort. We cannot blame other people because I feel uncomfortable. Okay? 

10:13 

So here we go. So how do we get to the point where we manage our thoughts? I'm gonna give you one really big one that is gonna cover a lot of territory. There's a lot of other things we can do, and I've talked about them in other podcasts about how to identify your thoughts and how to trade out unhelpful thoughts for more helpful ones. We've talked about that and a lot of others, but today I just wanna talk about one way to manage our thoughts around difficult people because it's so applicable here. And this is it right here: recognize that they are human. And, of course, they are going to struggle. Of course, they are going to have quirks and habits and behaviors that are different than ours. They are human and they are going through struggles. They have gone through struggles. Their struggle shows up differently than yours because it stems from different places. I can look at other women who are divorced and I can get all judge-y about how they're managing it. But what is important for me to understand is that they may be going through similar struggles such as a divorce, but it's  going to show up completely differently for them. Completely different for them because their situation was different, their whole background, the way that they were raised, their thoughts, their beliefs, their ideas about marriage and divorce and communication, all that is going to be different. So how their struggle about their divorce shows up is going to be very differently different than how my struggle has shown up with my divorce. So, really stepping into a place where I recognize that they are human and everything about them is going to be different than me. 

12:06 

So, of course there's going to be some conflict. There's going to be places where we don't see eye to eye. Now what we're not seeking to do here is to give all behavior a free pass. Because, yeah, sometimes people just have bad behavior. There we go, judge-y, right? People have behavior that is not socially acceptable, okay? We're not trying to give all that a free pass, but what we're also trying to say is "listen, they're adults. They get to behave how they want to behave. And I cannot control that, nor do I want to control behavior of all the people." Right? That would be an exhausting job, be controlling behavior of all the people. We don't want to do that. What I want to do is manage and control myself. 

12:51 

Now giving grace to others to show up with all of their battle scars, with all of their coping mechanisms, with all of their unawareness about these things. This helps me to show up how I really want to show up. If you're a lot like me, and I imagine you've got a lot of things in common because you're here, we seek to be loving and kind people, compassionate people, forgiving and patient. We really try to be good Christlike people. So realizing that under that, this is what I can control. I can control whether I show up that way. I can't control their behavior, but what I need to realize is that under it all, guess what? That other person is probably also trying to show up the best way that they know how. They're probably also trying to show up loving and kind and compassionate and patient and forgiving. They're probably trying to do that, but their perspective and their experiences have led them to it in a very different way. So it's going to show up different. They're going to see different things. What if how they are showing up with all of their background soap opera that we all have, that their drama-filled life is the best that they know how? What if they are giving their absolute best and we're standing over there judging and we're standing over there just going "oh my gosh they are so difficult. They're so frustrating. They're so annoying," and they're doing the very best they know how. 

14:37 

Here's some questions to start asking ourselves about these "difficult people." Right? I'm putting that in air quotes these days because now that we're at this point in the in the podcast, here's some questions. What do you know about this person's background? Really, what do you know? Were they abused? Were they ever abandoned as a child, either physically or emotionally? Were they abused emotionally, or physically, or spiritually? Why do they respond so strongly to what they do? How do we know that even? How do we know why they respond that way? Why did they shut down when they do? What are their greatest fears? And what are their struggles? What are what demons are they fighting right now? And where did all of this behavior originate? Where did their fears originate? And how could these coping mechanisms that they're engaging in right now, this behavior, how could it have helped them to survive some of the difficult things and the challenges that they've been through in their life? What are they trying to avoid or create with what they're doing? And what are they battling right now? Like, look, just ask yourself these questions about anybody in your life. I even think about these with my kids and I'm like, "Oh, I don't really know the answer to most of those." And I'm, you know, with most of my kids, I know them pretty well. But I don't know the answer to a lot of these. And how easy is it for me to stand by and to judge people as being difficult, when I have no idea the answer to a lot of those questions. 

16:36 

Look how much we don't know. If I truly was capable of understanding the background of other people, why they're triggered when they're triggered, and why they respond the way they do, I would probably be so overcome with compassion that I couldn't help but offer them grace. We don't know about people. We think we do. We like to look and we like to make judgments and our primitive brain likes to fill in the gaps. It just does, but it does not fill in the gaps with truth. It fills in the gaps with whatever is going to fit. So we have to be very cautious about where our brain goes and how what we allow our brain to think and what we believe that our brain is telling us. What if God gave you the gift to see where all of their behaviors and coping mechanisms came from? What if He opened our eyes to see these "difficult people" as He sees them? I think it would be overwhelming, to be honest with you. But I think, you know, I've heard this phrase so often in my life, if we could see people the way that God sees them, honestly, what if we could? Would we label them as "difficult?" I don't think we would. 

18:15 

But the thing is, we don't get to see that. We don't get to see all the struggles and all the challenges that these people have been working through, and how they've learned to manage them and how they've learned to survive. So what if we could learn then to offer grace even when we don't know the whole backstory? How would that feel different to you? If you could show up compassionate and kind and accepting and tolerant, giving them this grace that we're talking about, would you still want to label them as difficult? Fascinating to think about, right? So fascinating. I love that idea. I think that grace is one of the most beautiful concepts that we overlook. I think it opens doors for our hearts to grow and for us as people to step into our greatest possibility, if we can learn to have grace for other people. 

19:33 

Okay, so let's move on to this last piece. The other piece that I want us to consider when we when we talk about dealing with difficult people, right? People who have a life. I do want us to understand that you are a human being who is deserving of being treated with human respect. No one should belittle you. No one should demean you. No one should mock you or despise you. Those are not appropriate. We do not want to let anyone treat us with this kind of behavior. But here's the thing, we also cannot control whether other people choose to move into these spaces of behavior or not. We can't control the other people. What we can control is whether we choose to stay in that space or to move away from that space. So here's the most important thing to understand about boundaries: they are about us. They're not about the other people. Okay? I think for a long time people would you throw out the term boundaries and say, "oh I'm setting a boundary. You can't talk to me that way." Okay? Yeah, they can. They can do whatever they want to do. The boundaries are not about controlling other people's behavior. We're not seeking to change their behavior. What we're doing is clarifying what we will do, clarifying my own behavior, how I will act when other people treat us a certain way or engage in a certain behavior. So I'm not trying to dictate and tell another person how they should behave. What I'm seeking to do is say, "listen, you can behave that way if you want to. If you do, this is what I will, this is how I will respond." Okay? 

21:30 

Now most boundaries do not have to be set out in advance. We don't walk around Target telling every person that we pass, "hey, it's not okay for you to hit me and if you do, I'm gonna file a complaint." I mean, we don't do that because there's so many basic societal rules that we know and most people live by that. But even in most of our closest relationships, we don't necessarily have to set clear boundaries on things. Okay, but if someone speaks to us in a way that we don't feel is appropriate, we can calmly and clearly state that "I don't like to be spoken to that way. And if that continues, then I'm going to leave." See, I'm not trying to control their behavior. I'm saying, "listen, I don't like this. You can continue to do it, but if you do, this is the consequence. I will leave." We're not telling them they can't speak to us that way. We're not trying to control their behavior. We are controlling ourselves within the situation. We are establishing consequences for the behavior, not telling another adult how to behave. People are going to treat us really the way that we expect to be treated most of the time. And the way that we teach them how to treat us. And sometimes we teach them how to do that by setting that kind of a boundary, by saying, "hey look, you know what, you may have grown up calling people names in your family. That probably works for your family. It doesn't work for me. So if you call me names, I'm going to leave. I'm not going to want to engage in this relationship." Okay? So boundaries are a really important part to understand. We're not giving a free pass to people to treat us however they want. We're not giving people a free pass to engage in whatever behavior. Okay? 

23:35 

What we're doing is offering grace, first of all. Recognizing that most people are doing the best they can. And then we just are all coming at it from such a different space. And we've all learned different coping mechanisms, and some of us have good tools and some of us have crappy tools. We just don't know where people are, we have no idea. A little bit of grace goes a long way. 

24:03 

Okay, one last thought before we move on here. I just want to share with you the idea that "difficult" is an adjective or it's a describing word. And when we start adjectiving people, yes, I did just use that noun as a verb, when we start adjectiving people or labeling people, we start judging them based on that adjective. So when we call someone a "difficult person" the adjective "difficult" all of a sudden sets up warning lights and signs in our brain to go "whoa whoa whoa, let's stand back. Let's take a look." We want to move out of adjectiving people. Okay? Because as soon as we step into the judgment of others, we are focusing on them and not on us. And learning to deal with "difficult people" is about focusing on us, and not them. It's ultimately about learning to see our own thoughts and judgments about other people, and learning to manage our own minds around those thoughts and around the discomfort that those thoughts create for us. Isn't this brilliant stuff? This this middle-aged growing up stuff is freaking amazing. I love it so much. I love it. I love moving into this space where I can see things that were completely unavailable to me in my younger years. Such a brilliant space of life. My friends, this life coaching gig is so amazing. I work with my coach every week. Sometimes I work with two coaches a week, usually I do actually, because the brilliance of having somebody else help me to see where my holes are, where my thinking is flawed, where my brain is lying to me, helps me so much. It really helps me move into the space that I really want to move into and to start becoming the kind of person that I really want to become. The awareness is the biggest piece that I as a life coach can help to give you. And I hope that you, through today's podcast, were able to create a little bit of awareness of your own behavior and see things that maybe you didn't see before and see where you can start making some adjustments to start becoming more the kind of person that you want to be. Okay? 

26:41 

We do not have to live our whole lives struggling, struggling, struggling in misery. I mean, life is a struggle, that, okay? But we do not need to take the regular pain of life and add suffering on top of it. This is what I do as a life coach. I help you learn how to live life more cleanly by taking out the suffering by cleaning up your thoughts, helping you get to a space that you can show up the loving kind, compassionate, forgiving person that you really want to be. And there's no need to struggle for the next 20, 30, 40 years living not knowing how to help yourself. An investment in time and energy and money right now in life coaching could make the next 20, 30, 40 years of your life that much more sweeter and that much more beautiful. This is what life coaching is about. I am such a fan of life coaching because of what it's done for me and because I get to help other people move through this process as well. I love it so much and I hope that you'll give it a try at some point. I hope that when you feel like you're working well in this but you want to move your life to the next level, one-on-one coaching is a brilliant option to help you do that. 

28:08 

Okay my friends, look, I got a little emotional a couple of times today. Isn't that great? I love that. I've been working on feeling more emotions, so I'm glad that I'm moving into this space. Alright, I love you. Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for letting me be a part of your life. I feel very honored and very blessed and I wish you all the best today and I will talk to you next week. See ya. 

28:38 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.