Mary Schiller breaks down how difficult people trigger your emotions. Her core insight: your feelings come from your own thoughts, not from them. Step by step, she shows you how to notice this pattern and use it to build compassion in any relationship.
Hello there, I'm Mary Schiller, Success and Well-Being Specialist and author of The Joy Formula: The Simple Equation That Will Change Your Life. In this short video, I'm going to tell you how to deal with difficult people in 5 simple steps. So let's get started with step 1: Recognize that it's not about you. You know how when you're talking about a difficult person to someone else, And they take you aside and they say, "Honey, it's not about you. It's about them." Well, they're actually right, and here's why. That difficult person that you're thinking of right now, the one that came to mind when you saw the title of this video, they're only acting on what's going on in their own heads. So think about their behavior for a second. Something about it that really you don't like at all. Now, this isn't excusing their behavior, but it's explaining where it's coming from. It's not coming from anything that you're doing. It's not coming from anything that you're saying. It's coming from them reacting to what's going on in their own thoughts, and that's all. So I find this particularly freeing because I know if somebody's having a bad day, or maybe they've had a bad day for a lot of days in a row, or a lot of years in a row, that it's not about me. They're reacting to their own thinking in the moment, and that's all you need to really understand about that. And that leads me to step 2, which is: it is about you. Now, you may go, "Wait a minute, Mary, you just said it's not about me, it's about them, and now you're telling me that it is about me?" I think I can explain. So Just like that person is reacting to their own thinking, so are you. It's absolutely 100% impossible for someone else to make us feel a certain way. We might say, "Oh, my boss really hurt my feelings today," or, "My husband made me really mad when he did XYZ." But it's just not possible. It's not possible for another person to crawl inside our heads and create new thoughts and therefore new feelings. Because our feelings are only ever coming from our own thinking. They are not coming from another person. It would be as logical as me saying, "This pencil really hurt my feelings today." You know, it really got me mad when it just was sitting there and not doing anything until I picked it up and made it do something. That's how really logical it is to blame someone else for the way that we feel, because our feelings are never coming from them or what they're doing. They're only a reflection of our own thinking, which leads me to step 3: see that you're thinking. A lot of times we're told that we need to have a more positive outlook or we need to change our mindset. In this case, we're talking about difficult people, so where we might be told, you know, just think more positively about your boss and then everything will be fine and you'll feel better. That's not what I'm saying at all. The only thing I'm asking for you to see is that you're thinking and that your thinking causes the feelings that you're going through. So in other words, I don't want you to try to change your thinking because it's not possible to do that. I don't know anyone who has control control over their thoughts. I don't know anyone who has control over what they think next or what thoughts come in what order. The mind just doesn't work that way. But if you can see just that you're thinking and that your thinking is what's creating your experience and your feelings, that's all you really need to see. That leads me to step 4: experiment with your thinking. So, for example, as you're sitting here listening to me right now or watching me on video, think about the person who is difficult in your life. What feelings come up for you? Do you start to feel angry or anxious or upset? Well, that's a pretty good clue that it's not the person causing those feelings in you. It's your thoughts. And you can test this out with lots of different things. That the actual person doesn't need to be in the room unless they're hiding behind the door or something for you to start to feel anxious. And that's because all of what you're experiencing is coming from your own thoughts. And again, to reiterate, I don't want you to try to change your thinking. I just want you to notice that this is what is going on and experiment with it. That leads us to step 5. Start seeing others in the same way. When you start seeing others in the same way, that they're experiencing their thoughts and feelings and not anything coming at them from the outside, you'll start to see people with a lot more compassion. People that once seemed very, very difficult won't quite look the same to you in this light. I can tell you for myself that there are people in my life who I considered problems for years and years, decades even. And once I started to see that, you know, even if they did something that society didn't accept or that we've deemed, you know, not nice behavior and that we don't condone, I could still see why it was coming from their own thinking and not from something that I was doing. I wasn't creating something that they were reacting to. They were always reacting to their thought in the moment. So you'll start to see this in other people, and you'll start to see all of these difficult people in your life— hopefully there aren't too many— with a lot more compassion and understanding. And you'll also start to see yourself that way, because you're not your thinking, and they are not their thinking. We are much bigger than the thoughts that go through our heads. And once we can see this in ourselves, we begin to see it in others as well, and the whole world can open up to us in terms of the relationships we develop and, and repairs that can be made in these relationships that once seemed irreparable. I hope this has been helpful for you. Please find me online at www.thedailyprinciples.com and www.joyformulabook.com. Thanks for watching. Bye now.
