Best Quotes from Coping With Difficult People by Robert M. Bramson with Page Numbers

If your life is free from hostile customers and co-workers, indecisive vacillating bosses, overagreeable (but do-nothing) subordinates... consider yourself extraordinarily lucky.

The purpose of this book is to show you how to identify, understand, and cope with the Difficult People who come into your life.

Their impact is large. They are responsible for absenteeism, significant losses in productivity, and lost customers or clients.

Difficult People are seen as problems by most of the people around them, not just those who are incompetent, overly sensitive, or weak.

The techniques for coping with the Difficult People... have been tried out and tested by many people who have found that they benefited.

Coping enables you and the Difficult Person to get on with the business at hand.

Coping methods work because they interfere with the 'successful' functioning of difficult behavior.

The coping methods described in this book are not designed to use people’s motives against them.

What makes purposive behavior ethical or evil is the intention of the doer.

Coping with the Difficult People in your life will never be enjoyable. But this book provides the means for doing it with more ease and greater success.

Hostility and aggression appear together so much it’s easy to think of them as either inseparable or interchangeable, but they are not.

Standing up to Sherman Tanks in the way I’ve described seems to work even when carried out in an uncertain, somewhat timid manner.

If you let yourself be pushed around by aggressive people, you simply fade into the scenery for them.

It is possible to be aggressive without being hostile and vice versa.

You have a right to say anything you want to about my work, but you don’t have a right to make me feel that I don’t amount to anything at all.

Although the executive committee only budgeted half of what was asked for, they did not do it as a kind of reluctant compromise.

When you stand up to a Sherman Tank, not having been able to overwhelm you, yet not feeling that you are a competitor, sees you now as worthy of respect.

Expect to feel distraught, angry, or awkward, but say something of a standing up nature anyway.

Coping with a person having a tantrum is chiefly a matter of helping him or her regain self-control.

The basic principle of standing up to someone without fighting lies behind successful coping with all Hostile-Aggressive people.

"Listening is a powerful interpersonal tool for connecting solidly with anyone, difficult or not."

"Complaining can be understood as the only kind of active behavior that seems possible to those who feel powerless to determine their own fate."

"It’s not that they don’t respond actively to confessions, especially when they are accompanied by an apology. It’s that they respond in a way that interferes with any practical resolution of the problem."

"The opportunity that this learned sequence gives to a wrongdoer is surely hard to resist."

"Each time Rex is called lazy without rebuttal, Sam is affirmed in his perception."

"However, I suggest that you are on shaky grounds if you try to convince Sam that you are right about Rex and that he is wrong."

"State your disagreement as soon as you can get it in."

"To feel put upon, one must have an image of the way things ought to be and a galling sense of injustice that they are not that way."

"Complainers have a strong sense of how others ought to behave; they feel genuine, if sometimes disguised, anger when those others do not conform."

"Complaining keeps them appearing blameless, innocent, and morally perfect, at least to themselves."

"Clams are silent, unresponsive people who won’t or can’t talk when you need conversation from them."

"Your major coping task is to get them to talk."

"To figure out what is meant in any particular situation, we go on to seek clues in the Clam’s other forms of nonverbal communication."

"It’s extremely unwise just to guess what is going on inside a Silent and Unresponsive person, because if your guess is wrong, you can create problems that didn’t exist before."

"When the Clam opens up, be attentive and watch your own impulse to gush."

"The only way to do that is to get that Clam to talk."

"Expect to feel like doing just this. We were all taught to ease embarrassing situations when we could."

"Open-ended questions are particularly effective when they are accompanied by a stance that I’ve heard characterized as the 'friendly, silent stare.'"

"Sometimes even more than you’ve bargained for, responses can lead to valuable discussions at a follow-up meeting."

"It looks as if we just can’t get anywhere with this right now. It’s an important issue to me and I just can’t let it drop."

Poor conditions cannot always be alleviated. The forces that maintain them may truthfully be overwhelming. Yet there are always choices, alternative ways of moving with or against the stream.

Even if the payoff is only in clarification, self-worth, and enthusiasm, it is enough.

Recognition of your own vulnerability to discouragement can help you avoid being drawn into an underlying purpose of negative behavior.

Negativists drag us down so easily because most of us have at least remnants of the strong emotions that once filled that well of deep disappointment.

To a Negativist, however, these forces are absolute, immutable barriers, rather than obstacles that one just might go around, through, or over.

Small wonder that they become irritated with you when you persist in thinking that something might yet be done to save the situation.

You should not try to persuade Negativists to admit that they are wrong. First of all, they may not be.

Use Negativism constructively. Recognizing that you don’t have to explain them away, you can listen to them as useful cautions, aspects of the situation that need careful attention.

Be prepared to take appropriate action by yourself, even if the group remains under the Negativist’s spell.

Beware of eliciting negativistic responses from highly analytical people by asking them to act before they feel ready.

Balloons seek the admiration and respect of others by acting like experts when they are not.

If you should find yourself in Clyde’s position, your own sense of being an expert aroused, here are some actions that may help.

The presence of a real expert suddenly brings to full awareness the shakiness of the ground on which the phony has been walking.

The best way to let them know that you comprehend what they say is to listen attentively to them.

Their certainty that their theories, facts, and procedures are correct makes sane a world otherwise too unpredictable to contemplate.

By consciously choosing to cope, you maintain your self-integrity.

It is frequently useful to respond to a Bulldozer’s pronouncements with something like the following: 'Let me think it over for a while.'

The most important gain from paraphrasing is that it defends you against a flood of expert verbiage.

You must, must do your own homework.

Not all experts are Know-It-Alls.

"To make it worse, often there seems to be nothing to do and no way to fight."

"Stallers are super-helpful, indecisive people who postpone decisions that might distress someone."

"The terrible conflict faced by Stallers is this: 'However I decide, someone will not like it.'"

"Stallers hint and beat around the bush as a compromise between being honest and not hurting anyone."

"Their primary desire to be helpful is what differentiates Indecisive Stallers from another type of Difficult Person..."

"To handle this conflict, Stallers have learned to converse in a way tangential to the real issues."

"Stallers experience a strong internal pressure to be honest."

"Once the underlying issues are out in the open, you are in a position to help Stallers solve their problem with the decision."

"You can help almost anyone who is faced with a dilemma by asking him or her to describe the problem in as much relevant detail as possible."

"Listening for language that seems indirect, evasive, or justifying can provide clues as to where to focus your attention."

"Stop wishing they were different."

"The behavior of human beings is highly interactional."

"Your goal is a detached and distanced view of that Difficult Person."

"Understanding can help."

"It’s just not me he does this to—he’s that way with everyone."

"Blaming isn’t changing."

"To the extent that you are trying to wish your tormenting frog into a prince, you will be less able to minimize that terrible behavior."

"Gaining and maintaining understanding is devilishly hard."

"Giving up the wish is a letting-go process."

"No one is under a moral obligation to remain in the vicinity of another person whose behavior is demoralizing."

Anyone’s behavior is so broadly based and so deep that no single explanatory scheme now available can make usable sense of it all.

The uniqueness in each of us lies in the way we combine these thinking styles to think about whatever it is that we think about.

Understanding your thinking style and that of the Difficult Person you are confronted with can help you cope in these specific ways.

Different situations call for different ways of thinking and acting.

The main concern of Pragmatists is getting on with the job.

What can be done right now is all that one can be sure about.

It helps to know in advance where you’re going to find the going most difficult.

Acknowledging your own predominant styles, with their strengths and liabilities helps in a number of ways.

The same qualities that make Indecisive A’s occasionally overanalytical also make them very responsive to any 'structuring' you can apply to the situation.

For best results, you should adapt them to fit with your own preferred styles of thinking.

Those whom you experience as Difficult People will undoubtedly bring out the worst in you.

In the workaday world, the blows we receive most frequently are psychological.

The threat is not usually physical, although it might be, of course.

Defensive strategies are not initially consciously employed.

The more you know about what motivates a person, the more you know about what may threaten him or her.

Defensive strategies have the quality of getting you out of short-run trouble, but at some long-run cost.

An ounce of prevention is indeed worth a pound of cure.

By making an appointment with your boss you indicate that you, and what you want to talk about, are important.

It pays to follow up any complaint or suggestion with an inquiry about what’s happened.

The evidence is substantial that this anticipation of success can help to pull you along past self-doubts, uncertainty, or unforeseen problems.