Some difficult people really aren’t your problem. You encounter them occasionally, or maybe they aren’t difficult that often. Others might be tricky a lot of the time, and they might be your boss or your father or your own child. Not so easy to avoid.

The following Rules cover a variety of types of difficult people. Simply understanding the person can help. And there are some strategies you can use to make encounters with them easier. But you must recognise one key thing – you can’t change other people, as we saw in Rule 12. They will still be difficult in the situations that push their buttons. You might, if everything goes well, eventually train them to behave differently around you. For example, an emotional blackmailer might learn in time that their tactics are wasted on you, and stop bothering. But you cannot stop them being an emotional blackmailer underneath, and towards other people. Only they can do that.

This even applies, incidentally, to your own child. There’s as much nature as nurture there,²⁰ and a history you can’t alter. You can show them that their behaviour doesn’t work but, in the end, they’re the only one who can change it.

So, working this through logically, there’s only one person who you can change, and that’s yourself. If someone else’s behaviour makes you feel yucky, stressed, irritated, frustrated, upset – it’s your job, not theirs, to do something about it. Your reaction is your stuff.

Don’t tell me I’m being harsh because I’m not. I’m just stating a fact. Like it or not, and however much the other person isn’t helping, if you want to feel differently, it’s down to you to do something about it. It’s not easy – of course it isn’t, or you’d have done it already. But the first step to coping with difficult people is to grasp that if you don’t like the way you feel, change it.

And in answer to your next question, no, I can’t tell you how. They’re your feelings and I can’t change them. Got it? My advice is to start with a variation on one of the following and take it from there. Really, anything that works for you (and doesn’t harm anyone else) is good. So here are a few initial suggestions of things that help some people:

• Stop listening (not always an option but sometimes it helps – probably best to still look like you’re listening).
• Visualise the words going over your head.
• Think about how much worse it must be for the other person – I mean, would you like to feel constantly angry, or negative, or out of control?
• Practise responding constructively. If you can manage the interaction effectively, you’ll feel much better than if you can’t.