How to Deal with Frustrating People
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1. Keep perspective… People are struggling just like you.
Don’t lose your connection with humanity’s struggles. We make all these assumptions about people - “well, they’re just so stupid or there’s something wrong with them” - and we never know their real story. The person frustrating you might be dealing with difficulties and chaos you are unaware of.
2. Ask, “Have I been truly clear with people about what I think, want, and need?”
Most folks who you’re frustrated with…they often don’t know you. And whose fault is that? Is their fault? Are they just supposed to know everything going on in your life? We have to be accountable and ask ourselves, “Have I been truly and consistently clear about what I want and need from this person?”
3. Consider people’s confidence and competence before you judge.
Too often we get frustrated with people, thinking they are stupid or lazy, when the reality is they simply do not have the competence or confidence needed to do what we ask of them. They don’t have the training or information or experience, so we have to provide that. We can wear humanity’s hat again and say, “This person may not know how to do this. I might need to coach them through this and help them.”
4. Make dealing with others well and with patience part of your character development.
Part of one of the supreme virtues of having character is having patience with people. As soon as you start desiring to want to help people, to help them through their pains and struggles, to help them understand something and to inspire them to do better things… once that becomes the lens you’re looking through in the world, now you’re not frustrated with everyone. You’ve become more conscious.
It’s not your job to control every situation. This idea that we can control everything - that’s where we get frustrated. We’re frustrated because we’re lacking control. A new level of consciousness says, “this is a pretty big universe, there’s probably a lot of random stuff that’s going to happen that’s crazy that we cannot anticipate, so our job is to be as present and patient and loving as we can into every situation we enter, even when the stuff hits the fan, even when the kids are running around breaking up the house, even when the teenager comes in and mouths off, even when the employee’s a jerk, even when chaos strikes us.” The only thing you need to control is yourself. Your frustration and impatience is of your own creation. You have to own your reactions and choices in life.
How do you deal with frustrating people?
…People who drive you mad at work because you think that they’re so stupid…
…or people who are in your family, who keep challenging you and know how to press all the buttons on you to get you to freak out all the time…
…or, you’re just going through your day and you’re supposed to do something and you run into somebody in line who is rude to you…
…how do you deal with people who really draw your ire, who really frustrate you?
I guess first, before we get into judgment and the five steps of how to deal with those folks, you should ask, are you that person? Because if you are then all of this is going to be really funny, and will be very helpful for you to analyze who you are, how you treat people and what your interactions are like with others.
I’m guessing you probably aren’t the frustrating person, right?
Let’s assume that you are not the jerk.
You are not the frustrating person, that you have your angel wings on and you’re completely perfect because you would never frustrate anybody or do anything wrong. You have no dark side. You are absolutely pristine and perfect. Let’s just assume that you’re not the frustrated one :)
What can you do to deal with frustrating people?
1. Keep perspective… People are struggling just like you.
I would say the first thing is to
keep your perspective
as being a champion of humanity.
What happens often when we’re frustrated with other people is we’ve lost our connection with humanity in some way or another. We’re in a big hurry and we’ve forgotten that people have stories and realities that we don’t know about. You don’t know what’s going on in somebody’s day when they just pissed you off. They just did something and you think, oh well, they’re like this or they’re going like this… you don’t know.
Maybe you had a co-worker who was supposed to deliver something in the morning and they didn’t deliver it, and now you’re fired up and frustrated about them. But, you didn’t know that their child woke up in the morning and was throwing up all morning and they haven’t slept in the last nine hours. Sometimes you don’t know that somebody had a death in the family. Sometimes you don’t know that somebody on the way to work got some terrible news. Sometimes you don’t know the real frustrations and challenges that people are dealing with at their home, in their regular life with their family. You don’t know. You don’t know that this person, who you’re so angry with, you feel like you could just punch them in the face you’re so mad at them. You don’t know that they’re a victim of domestic violence at home.
We make all these assumptions about people - “well, they’re just so stupid or there’s something wrong with them” - and we never know their real story.
As soon as you lose your patience with people you lose your connection with humanity. You lose that understanding that stuff happens in people’s lives. And maybe right now they’ve had a lot of chaos. And your life is going along smooth, or maybe you’re having a lot of chaos and all of a sudden your chaos and your smoothness or whatever interacts and it feels like its going to explode in this great amount of frustration.
You forget that people have things going on. As busy, as stress-filled as you are, other people have that too. As freaked out, as a heavy plate of responsibilities as you have, other people have that too, and if you don’t believe that then you’ve gotten to a place where you’ve allowed your intellect to grow your ego to such a level that you can’t connect with humanity anymore.
I know that sounds flippant to say, but what happens for so many people is they do that, especially folks who are “intellectuals”, people who feel like they’re very evolved, enlightened, supremely conscious.
What ends up happening for them is sometimes they have lost that real connection with humanity because they think they’re so special versus other people.
Here’s the ultimate challenge with folks who do have an ego like that, or who do feel so much more supremely special than other people, where “other people just don’t understand how much they frustrate me.”…. They become very caged in their life. It’s like watching an animal that’s caged that gets resigned because it’s been wild and free at some point and now it’s resigned in the back of the cage, curled up angry and frustrated and pointing at people. They don’t understand me.
The folks who often say, “Other people don’t understand me,” are the same people who rarely ever raise their hand and ask for help.
They’re the folks who easily get frustrated, annoyed or resigned from other people and now, when they need help or when they want to progress their life, because they’ve drawn away from people, who they believe to be stupid, because they’ve drawn away from others who they believe other people can’t understand them, because they believe other people can’t understand them…they don’t ask for help. They don’t collaborate. They don’t socialize and create the very influence, relationships and networks that are necessary for them to grow to the next level in their life and in their business.
So you have to think about that for a moment. Have you gotten so disconnected from other people that you’re often frustrated with them because you forgot that you don’t understand their story?
You don’t know what they’re going through, just like you’re frustrated and saying, ‘well they don’t know what I’m going through.’ Everybody else feels that way.
Once you understand the reality of humanity is a bunch of human beings walking around with a sign at the top of their head that says, “Please understand me. Please be patient with me. Please help…” then you stop getting so frustrated with people and you realize that we’re all struggling.
We’re all doing the best that we can. We all have big dreams, goals and desires and being connected to humanity is learning to be patient with people again.
2. Ask, “Have I been truly clear with people about what I think, want, and need?”
I would say the second thing to take into consideration if you’re constantly frustrated with people is CLARITY.
Do people really know what you desire,
what you think, what you want,
what you’re doing, what you dream of?
Because, most folks who you’re frustrated with…they often don’t know you.
And whose fault is that? Is their fault? Are they just supposed to know everything going on in your life?
What happens is we forget that a lot of folks who we are frustrated with, they don’t have clarity about what they’re supposed to be doing or what we specifically need, want or desire from them, how when and where.
We totally forget that we’re frustrated but they don’t know…
Your wife might not know how to please you.
Your husband might not know what you need.
Your friends might not know what you deeply desire in your own heart, because maybe you haven’t really communicated yet.
Maybe you mention it one time. Maybe you left a hint one time. Maybe you sat them down one, two, three or four times and told them, but people, to have real clarity need to have real conversations. They need real structure to those conversations, to be helped and their hands held to help them know what they need to do for you.
A lot of people don’t do this well. Many of you know I’m a High Performance coach by trade; I train people and have trained more people on the topic of High Performance than possibly anybody else alive today on the planet. I can tell you, working with some high-level high performers that they often assume their teams know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. These senior level senior leader positions, CEO level, the C-suite of major fortune 500 companies, who are my clients, will often look at someone on their team and they’re like, 'why aren’t they doing this?’ Then I ask, well, do they have clarity around that? They say, 'of course they do.’
Tell me, how would they have clarity around that?
What I find over and over again is
they’re frustrated with their people,
but they themselves have failed to clearly communicate.
So you have to hold the mirror up once more and say, “ Well, are my people frustrated with me because I haven’t clearly communicated? I’m frustrated with them, but maybe they don’t really know what they need to do and maybe I haven’t been as clear as I need to be.”
3. Consider people’s confidence and competence before you judge.
The third thing we have to consider is that maybe folks – even if they do have clarity, and we’re frustrated with them all the time because we’re like, 'they should know this or I told them this’ – who don’t do something we needed them to do… we have to take into consideration that people often lack either competence or confidence.
This is not a value judgment to other people. I lack those things too in lots of areas of my life, as do you.
See, a lot of people don’t know HOW to do something. So we’re frustrated with them, and we beat them and say, 'just do this,’ but they don’t know how.
They don’t know where to begin.
They don’t have the knowledge, the skills, the abilities, the competencies and the capabilities to actually be able to support what you want, to give you what you desire, what you’ve told them you need.
So sometimes we have to take back and put that hat on in humanity again and say, “They may not know how to do this. I might need to coach them through this and help them.”
Yeah, is that frustrating? It can be.
4. Make dealing with others well and with patience part of your character development.
Maybe you can change your perspective about your role in life. I think that part of being frustrated with people on a continual basis, if this is reality for you, is also loosing that part that we used to talk about in the early days of personal development, that we talked about in the old literary classics. We don’t hear the phrase or the word very often anymore, but do you remember the old thing called ‘character development’?
Part of one of the supreme virtues of having character is having patience with people. There’s a part of character that also says, 'you know what, I need not only have patience with people, I need to help people.’ Part of real character is turning yourself from someone who’s frustrated with people all the time into more of a servant, into someone who can help people all the time.
As soon as you start desiring to want to help people, to help them through their pains and struggles, to help them understand something and to inspire them to do better things… once that becomes the lens you’re looking through in the world, now you’re not frustrated with everyone.
Now everyone isn’t an idiot. Now everyone isn’t bad or some other value judgment. But instead you’re now like, 'they’re frustrated and challenged with this too or they don’t know how to do this or they don’t have the competency or capability, let me help them.’
It brings a supreme amount of patience that you’ll have in your life and perspective about the reality of other people.
I can tell you it’s supremely rare for me to get frustrated with people.
I don’t honk at people in traffic.
I don’t scream at my staff members or holler at my family members.
I don’t belittle my employees, my teams, the people I serve, my partners or my audiences because I know we’re all on a rough path here.
Life is not easy, and once you realize that and you can accept that life isn’t easy then you start to gain more human heart and you start to understand there’s no reason for you to be upset with people, because everyone is doing their best.
I would say that the fifth thing that you can consider if you’re always frustrated with people is to accept a higher level of consciousness in your life that says this it’s not your job to control everybody.
It’s not your job to control every situation. This idea that we can control everything - that’s where we get frustrated. We’re frustrated because we’re lacking control.
A level of consciousness says 'this is a pretty big universe, there’s probably a lot of random stuff that’s going to happen that’s crazy that we cannot anticipate, so our job is to be as present and patient and loving as we can into every situation we enter, even when the stuff hits the fan, even when the kids are running around breaking up the house, even when the teenager comes in and mouths off, even when the employee’s a jerk, even when chaos strikes us.’
If we stay centered and loving, and we can do that over and over and over again wearing humanity’s hat saying, “I understand people are also dealing with things I don’t know about. I understand people might not know what they’re supposed to do. I understand people might not know how to do what they’re supposed to do. I understand my role as a person of character is to have patience and a servant heart to help people. And, I understand that I can’t control everything so I’m going to do the best that I can…”
…If we can rise to that level of consciousness than we can more easily have what we call “The Charged Life.”
Like this? Please share it. Let’s all be a little more kind and patient with one another.
Complement with Brendon’s book THE MOTIVATION MANIFESTO.
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