Bob Sutton shares strategies for dealing with rude or abusive people: forgiveness, kindness, temporal distancing, and emotional detachment. He uses stories from Phil's Coffee, an Air Force Academy cadet, and a Stanford administrator to show how these approaches reduce your own distress.
Chapters
Another sort of approach is when somebody is treating you like dirt, get some empathy for them. Even if they don't deserve it, start feeling sorry for them, sympathy for the devil. Somebody at Google, this was years ago, described me how when somebody's nasty, I think of them as a guy with a bad user interface and a good operating system, so sort of Google-ish stuff. And if you look at research on forgiveness, what you're doing in that situation is even if the asshole doesn't deserve it, by forgiving them, what happens is, there's a lot of evidence that when you forgive people, you ruminate less about it, like it bothers you less, so even if it's not helping them, it's helping you. Rise above it, this is the Michelle Obama, when they go low, we go high. So if we go back to revisit Phil's Coffee, this was about a year and a half ago, I had some conversations with Jacob Jabber, he's the CEO of Phil's Coffee, his father was Phil himself, and so I said to Jacob, what do you do with asshole customers? And he said, our philosophy, and we'll see if this gets past the censors, our philosophy is be nice to them, fuck them, but be nice to them. And then, and then we did some subsequent interviews with some of the folks at Phil's Coffee, and what they, they had this whole philosophy which was, when they're nasty, you kill them with kindness. And the reason you do it is, first of all, they pride themselves in giving good service, but it's also this feeling of sort of superiority that you won't stoop to their level. So that's another method you can use. Then, this is one that's especially evidence-based. There's very good evidence that, especially a series of 6 or 7 lab studies from UC Berkeley about a year ago, that when people have something upsetting, they break up with their partner, they fail an exam, and when they respond to it by saying, "Gee, a year from now when I look back at this, a month from now, a week," rather than focusing on how upset they are now, they'll have less anxiety, less depression, and less sadness. So if you can look back from the future rather than now, that helps. And to go back to military academies, one of the more interesting emails I got was from a guy who wrote me, he was describing how he got through the Air Force Academy. So he said, you know, I'm a, again, first-year sort of cadet, and he said, they'd be screaming at me, and he said he'd do two things. The first thing's really interesting, 'cause it's really subtle. He said, I would look at the person's eyebrow rather than their face, because then I just sort of focus on the eyebrow, then I wouldn't get the whole thing of performance. And the other thing I would do is imagine it was 3 years later, I was in my plane and I was flying. And really this wasn't much to get through. And to me this is a really good example of temporal distancing, 'cause he was imagining being in the future looking back to what he was experiencing now. Finally, this one is really interesting because an unnamed Stanford administrator told me about this. In general, a lot of these strategies I'm talking about are what psychologists call emotional detachment, ways when you've got somebody who is being nasty, attacking you, upsetting, to sort of seem like you're watching a movie unfold in front of you rather than being part of the scene. So to emotionally detach. So this is one of my favorite ones. So this is an administrator I know well, And he describes how he deals with the assholes at a certain university we're all sitting in right now. And he's somebody I know who is especially skilled at it, and here's what he does. And it's kind of amazing that I don't use this strategy, and I'm not capable of using it, so maybe it'll work for you, it doesn't seem to work for me. He imagines that he's a doctor who studies assholism, and what he does when he has somebody who's acting like a jerk in front of him is he tells himself how lucky he is to have such an amazing specimen of this behavior and to have it happen in close-up. And it's sort of like adding to your stamp or your bug collection, sort of. And it works, and this person who some of us in the room know well, he's very good with assholes.
