Train your people filter

Everyone loves working in a harmonious work environment. But there will undoubtedly be times when people at work (colleagues, customers, vendors or business partners) will seriously cheese you off.

We all know of difficult people that make working with them a chore. You might find them incredibly rude or unnecessarily demanding and the interaction with them could ruin your otherwise good day. Trying to see their point of view may not produce any results either.

Is it really worth you losing your cool over them?

A while back, I was ranting to some friends over the dinner table about someone at work, notorious for being difficult, who got under my skin. One of my friends turned round and said “Is this person important? If not, then you need to train your people filter”. I asked him to elaborate and he further asked me “Is the person that is causing you grief someone who has any power to influence your future in any way? Is the working relationship with the person of actual value to you?”. These questions helped me put things into perspective.

If the answer is yes then you could either try and keep your distance/limit your interaction with them or you could try and shape their attitude by steering conversations to more pleasant topics. The latter might be worth attempting especially if the person affecting you works with you and their negativity is a daily thing.

However, if the answer to the two questions is “no” then you probably shouldn’t care too much and you should not stress over it. In other words, train yourself to filter out difficult people.

Most often than not, people’s difficult behaviour has nothing to do with you anyway.

If they are having trouble accepting that they were passed on for a promotion and instead of self-reflecting on the reasons why they decide to make life a misery for their co-workers that’s not on you. If customers are having problems at home and take it out on you, their service / product provider, it’s not on you either.

So don’t take it to heart and instead of letting their unacceptable behaviour frustrate, annoy or anger you think of how insignificant they or the situation really is, smile, take a deep breath, count silently to 10 and let them be.