How to have a meeting with a difficult person? Any difficult people in anybody's lives? If you watch this video to the end, I'm gonna share with you 1 brilliant question that a mentor told me or shared with me on how to deal with difficult people along with 4 specific ways or lenses that you might listen with that will totally change your experience of dealing with difficult people.
I'm Chad Littlefield, let's get into it. Just in case you're new to the channel and you just really needed to deal with difficult people and you jumped on YouTube and are searching and trying to figure out how to do this, a little bit of context, my co-founder and I, Will, wrote a book called "Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter" and I think, probably for you, even if someone's really frustrating, really difficult, really challenging to deal with, your intention at some level is probably to create a conversation that matters, right? It's probably to cut through the crap and have the conversation that needs to be had even if it's tough.
And so, the tools that I'm gonna share with you here will really help. The first thing that I want to unpack with you is a metaphor that a genius student of mine shared with me that really shifted my perspective on conversation in general and maybe a lot less angry and frustrated when I'm dealing with difficult people, and that is this. So, the context that I just learned, I was just teaching this class, we were all with Will actually and we were all sitting in a circle and it was the first class on how to create conversations that matter.
It was a dialogue facilitation course. We wanted to train people through experience and so the first thing we did was open up the conversation and say, "What is truth? You've got 90 minutes.
Go. " Discuss, just literally have a conversation. What is truth?
Big truth, little truth, what is truth? And it's amazing where the conversations would go and what would come out. There's one student who's an exchange student from China and he said, "Here's how I think of truth.
The big T truth, absolute truth is like a statue in the middle of the road right now. And so, we're all sitting in a circle here, but imagine the lights were off and it was pitch black. There is a statue there in the middle of the room and it has an absolute formation and it has some way that it is, but none of us can actually see it.
And even if the lights were on, we would only see one angle of it. So, that's absolute truth. This really hard to access absolute truth.
And so, the best thing we can do while being in conversation is like taking a glow stick, I cracked a glow stick here and I threw it across the room and just for a brief moment, you got to had a glimpse or perspective from one angle and the more that people share their personal truths and toss those glow sticks, the better sense you have of what shape that statue is. And the different angles that people think, the different perspectives that people have, the more truth gets illuminated, which like. .
. who is this brilliant student, right? It's a really amazing idea and the reason it was so helpful for me is oftentimes, when I'm in a conversation with a difficult person, all I'm thinking about is how annoying or difficult or frustrating they are.
I totally am not realizing at all that they're tossing glow sticks, right? They're giving us clues to some reality that they see. They're giving us hints and when we often don't listen because we put them in a box of difficult person.
Now, don't get me wrong, I've dealt with some very, very difficult people in my work. In fact, in every single organization that I go in and work with, I've noticed that there are 5 states of mind that show up every chance. .
. they're both cultural and individual. And so, you know, the most people fit into the buckets of critics, consumers or contributors, right?
People who are comfortable pointing out what's wrong, uninterested in doing anything about it. Consumers are people who are just happy and are cruising through, passively scrolling through life, don't want to stick their head up for fear of getting cut off. Contributors are people who don't see themselves as victims of their world, victims of their experience.
They get to change and create a dent in the universe that they're living in. And then on the pole on the either spectrum, you got curmudgeons and these are probably people you clicked on this video for. These are the "difficult" people.
The thing is though, curmudgeons. . .
and all of these words I'm saying are states of mind, not traits of people, right? And so, you can imagine that curmudgeon ones was like a 5 year old who like just wanted to play with whatever toy was in front of them. This is not a fixed trait, none of these are fixed traits of people and so for me, to deal with difficult people, I first want to show and flood them with so much empathy that it's impossible that they don't feel seen, heard and understood.
If a difficult person does not feel seen, heard and understood, they will flare their nasty horns and it'll become much more difficult to deal with them, right? Whereas if you can really empathize, you really understand the world as they see it, you don't need to agree with it, you don't need to like it but you just need to understand it and actually sit with it i. e.
listen to their glow sticks, ask them for more glow sticks, right? Pick up on more of those bits and hints of truth until you've got enough of a picture that you're actually on the same page with that person. Again, you haven't sunk to their level, you just see them as they are.
I know that that's a little bit philosophical so I'm gonna give you 2 really concrete ways to get more glow sticks. The first one is this question that a mentor shared with me, it's only 2 words: what else? "What else?
" "What else? " We can play this game all day, right? Difficult person is difficult.
Now, if you're not sinking into their world so much, you can ask that question with a level of objectivity and just listen, right? You're just hearing what they're saying, you're not like reacting, you're not getting all like, you're not. .
. you're insides aren't turning around. You're just simply asking what else and hearing what they're saying.
Now, the next step beyond that question are a few ways specifically that you can listen. I would argue that at 1 level, at the most basic level that 95% of the time, this is the only level that we actually listen at. It's listening for the facts.
It's like the cop shows up to your window side door and he's like, "Ma'am, you know why I pulled you over? " or you're getting interrogated or just the facts. Give me the facts.
Give me the facts. Give me the facts. That's all that somebody's interested in that moment.
You're just listening for the content in what's somebody saying, literally the words coming out of their mouth. And when you listen for just that, you've all seen the metaphor of like, the tip of the iceberg. You're listening for like the tip of the tip of the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg when you're only listening for the words that people are saying or the facts.
So, one level beyond that would be listening to the music behind the words. This might not translate to English super well but listening to music behind the words is like, if I'm holding up this number right, I could ask you like, "How many fingers am I holding up? " And you would say 5 and that would be the facts.
But if I also asked you like, "what do you see here? " You could say, "I see 5 fingers or I see some space in between ,"and you could describe all the stuff that's behind that. So, the music behind the words is all the things that they're not saying but you're picking up on, right?
So, it's the unstated feelings, it's the. . .
a little bit more of the context that that person sharing, the perspective they're coming from, what they want to have happened, etc. So, music behind the words, that's. .
. I'm gonna leave that intentionally ambiguous, right? So, there's listen for more than just the words.
3rd level, way deep. If someone- if you asked somebody like, "Hey, how was your day today? " And you listen at this level, you will hear a totally different glow stick.
You will hear a totally different conversation and that is listen for the backgrounds, the fears, people's aspirations, what they actually care about, what they want in life, what they're concerned about right now, what's really important to them, what frustrates them etc. When you can listen to the background, the fears and aspirations, and reflect back that to them, that is gonna get much closer to empathy and dealing with difficult people. Now, all of that said, your difficult person is different than my difficult people and so you have to navigate around that.
I will say should you choose to pick out the audio book or the real book of this, by the end of this read, you will be a master in dealing with difficult people. Hopefully in this video, you picked up some brilliant tips that help make your next difficult conversation a little bit better. I'm Chad, have an awesome day.
