Dealing with disruptive people

Hello!

Welcome to this live where we get to talk about how to deal with people that are disruptive in our spaces. Sometimes these are people that don't intentionally intend to inflict pain, and in some cases it's individuals who purposely go out of their way to inflict pain. 

Either way, it's important that we know how to deal with such people who try and have a go at who we are. This is because such situations often adversely impact the way we perceive ourselves and our ability to show up as the best versions of ourselves.

Because we'll most likely meet such characters wherever it is we go, it's crucial that we know how to handle having people trying to have a go at us. No matter how confident or authentic we are, we'll meet people who provoke us. What matters is how, with our confidence and authenticity, we can deal with it in a productive way because we have the tools and the strategies to do so. It's with this mindset that I decided to create this live in order to provide the correct strategies and solutions so that you can go into a situation knowing how you can handle yourselves. 

So to begin, let's address possible reasons that could lead people to behave the way they do. I am going to talk very generally about the kinds of behavior that people exhibit, both children and adults because realistically the two aren't very different.

We'll follow that up with a discussion on what we can do about these reasons. This is because it's important to understand why people behave the way they do so that we can approach them from a compassionate place. Often, when we have a lack of understanding it's easier for us to be sharp tongued and deal harshly with people. 

That doesn't actually help our end goal. Our end goal is for people to be understanding, for people to respect us, for people to be kind. This is especially important if we're role modeling for children, so we have to look at what could be going on in an individual's life. 

And to make things clear, these "reasons" we'll discuss are not excuses. We're not looking at what could be going on with these individuals so that they can get away with their actions. Provocateurs still need to be held accountable for their actions, but we'll also be able to better sympathize once we have the full picture.

There's a way that this situation may be handled badly and we actually end up enabling them to continue to treat people poorly, and that's not okay. Instead, as we open ourselves up to this awareness, we're better equipped to respond in the best possible way. Our response alters how people perceive us, but far more importantly than that, it's our response that will dictate what happens next. 

We see that over and over again in our lives wherein hurt people respond in a hurtful way to try and inflict pain on somebody else. And then they wonder why they continually get hurt. This turns into a continual cycle often addressed when we talk about the issue of bullying. 

We're talking bullying between children and bullying between adults. Bullying will never stop unless carefully addressed. If you approach it with an "eye for an eye" mindset and encourage the child or encourage an adult to inflict as much pain as the bully did in the first place then, like the saying goes "...the whole world will be blind." 

Standing up for yourself is not disrespecting another person. It's showing respect for yourself. So, we don't deal with the bully by becoming a bully. And that's why I think this message I'm going to share with you is incredibly important. Too often, unfortunately, especially when I hear parents talking to young kids or role models talking to young kids, I often hear them saying that if somebody hurts you, you can hurt them back. 

And I can promise you that the one reaction that will always occur if that is what you are teaching people is that they will always get hurt. The only way we stop hurt, is through kindness, and that is not an easy thing to do when people are being rude and disrespectful. But it's true, love heals the world. Sometimes people purposefully cause us pain, but it is essential that we do it, because it's the only way we break the cycle. 

So with that said, I'm going to now delve into why do those people have water people who have issues with between people disrespectfully, how have they come to think that this is okay. 

Behavior Well, there's a variety of things but we know a few things For starters, there are a few things that are common. And one thing is that we've learnt that buy your copies behavior. So, if a child has seen that if they keep pushing and pushing at all costs to get what I want and they get it, then they will copy that same behavior and throw a tantrum because they know they'll get the reward they want. I'll get the response in somebody else's behavior that I'm looking for. 

Now, from the child to the parent. The child will most likely even bully the parents just to get what they want; at the supermarket, to be allowed to use their iPad or gadgets, to get their friend to say it over whatever it might be that actually doesn't suit the parent, because they have learned that that works. 

They've learned that that behavior works because their parents cave in, or their role model caves or their teacher caves. Somebody caves in to their demands and so the more times that happens, children learn and adults learn that; if there is enough pressure applied to someone, I can get what I want. And if I picked the right person, then, at some point, that someone will back down, and I will get what I want. 

And so, that's one of the main reasons why things occur because people are so used to getting what they want, especially in an instantaneous world. They don't know how to go without things and so often, poor behavior is also because they don't know patience, they don't know or understand what it means to lack something. And because they don't understand what it means to lack something, they don't ever appreciate it as much as they should. 

We understand that our parents aren't there for us 100% of the time, and that it's an unrealistic expectation. We understand that we have to fend for ourselves. We understand that there is a responsibility that we have to take for different things. There are actions that signify responsibility. 

But if we teach our children or if we teach children who'll someday become adults to think that everyone is on tap all the time to our every whim, then it's a problem. They don't learn. 

I get that we may not understand what not having something is and so we lack the resiliency and likely, we can lack the skills to be able to deal with that lack. Like hang on! I don't have what I want now but I've always had it! And that is really common. It's really common when you're dealing with people who have always been given everything, people who've never been said nor to or have only very scarcely heard it said. They've been given into a lot. 

Imagine that one day they meet someone like their boss, like another teacher at school if it if we're talking heads, like a step parent that has a firm hand and deals strongly with bad behaviors, that's going to set the kid up for life, and telling them that No means No, for example, that you don't always get what you want all the time, these kinds of things. There will be tension, because that is different, and there will be tension for as long as the child learns or the adult learns that either the person is going to break, and give them exactly what they want, again, or they're not going to break. 

And what happens when the person doesn't break is I get respect and gain a lot of respect for that person. And that's what we get with confident people. When people are confident and authentic, they are going to be proud and strong and stand in the fact of who they are. They won't retract when it comes to it. It's not that that confident person is going in there to inflict pain at all whatsoever. They're just telling them - No, it's not happening. And they know the benefit of why they're doing or what they're saying. 

And they're not changing because they know what their values and their goals are. They have their boundaries. And what's happening is the problematic person now encounters someone who's quite strict. In, who's quite fluid in where they're going and what they're doing. They're searching for those boundaries and when they find a person that has them, they love it, they adore it, they cling to it, because it gives us the capacity in our How to be loved. 

How to make sure we love the other person the way that we want to, and how to make people happy, whether we want to own up to it or not is exactly what everyone on the planet wants. It's the reason why people struggle to treat other people properly, is because they've encountered trauma. And so their way of dealing with things is not the same as it used to be. They develop a natural response to weed because of things that have happened to them, or two things that should have a natural response to things that have that should have never happened to them. 

Source: Pexels

Essentially, they're trying to operate in real life, and are struggling to communicate their emotions because typically the trauma has shut down their emotions. The trauma stops them from being able to communicate fully or makes them feel misunderstood. And so, until they learn what that looks like, or that feels like and how to deal with what's going on it becomes a toxic cycle. They feel like they're less. And so it's easier to pull other people down to also make them feel like they're less. 

Not taking care of ourselves is another reason why people behave inappropriately. People who always work hard and don't  get space, and enough rest and never actually take a break, instead filling it with something else, is one of the reasons behind people behaving inappropriately. It seems from no break's, and no ability to stop. 

Now for the ability to slow down. It can be incredibly scary when you stop and you realize - Shit, I don't like what I see if I slow it down. I'm going to have to look at these things, and I'm going to have to notice that there are some things in my life that I'm not too keen on. Although I need to sort my life out, right now I'm not prepared for it, so I'm going to keep running at a fast pace so that I don't have to deal with problems.

The problem arises when you mix a person like that with other people who've got their own stuff going on. They absolutely do not have time to comprehend, understand, or have compassion on the same level as others because they don't even have time to have compassion for themselves, because they're too frightened to stop, and to have some healing. Another thing that has happened is because people in general have a perception of where they really stand in life. 

Some people were saved because of their gender, because of their socio economic status, because of where they live that they are somehow better than other people and so this gives them this false sense of security that they can hide from things that they don't feel so great about. 

And the reality is that this perception is real to them. It is so real to them that they legitimately think that they are better. But what's happening is that they actually lack the awareness to see that they are magnifying one tiny aspect that doesn't necessarily give them true happiness in pursuit of minimizing other things that could otherwise be seen by people and brought to the surface. 

So there's a couple of ways that people can develop the wrong kind of behavior. It's also things like frustration as well, not knowing how to manage frustration, and not knowing how to manage emotions that results in people behaving inappropriately. And we've all been that person at some point in time, and that is the reason why we need to be kind when we're going to deal with people. 

It's not our first reaction to want to be kind, so we have to train ourselves to do it. As I was saying before, to stop paying, we have to have kindness. We literally have ongoing wars around the world that have been going on for more than 2000 years, and people already know how the walls work. One person causes pain, and one person in one family causes pain, another person in that family that they received the pain from causes the pain back to that family and it goes on and on and on and on and absolutely no surprise, it doesn't end. 

And this is what happens in cyber bullying. This is a sign of three people. The way we need to deal with these people is with love, because what they are missing, what they have a deficit of is self love, they don't love themselves. They don't love themselves, either to learn things so they can come to love themselves, they don't have the capacity to forgive who they are, or some of the choices that they made. 

They haven't figured out how to tell people, or show people around them that they're going to live this life regardless and so the frustration that they feel is sometimes taken out on other people. And we all know what this is like. And in the times where we feel the crappiest, we don't want anybody to hurt us, we want somebody to hug us, so yes it's not natural. But we need to think about what we do without. 

Often when people are in this heightened state of emotion and they want to be angry and it would have been incredibly rude. The best way to respond to them firstly is Thank you. Why thank you, because sometimes we have people say these horrible things to us, they might say to us, - You know, you are incredibly Southern person Julia, I think it could be a bit of a bitch rah rah, you know what, to me, I'm thinking to myself you know what these are things I've heard before, and I can be stubborn and I can be this but what I don't want as a conversation with this person, because what this person wants is power. 

They want power over me and my power as a self aware person is, I know who I am. And my power is also that I can choose whether I want to enter into that power struggle conversation or not. And so I need to decide, am I going to be a powerful person who causes just as much pain back or am I going to be an incredibly powerful person who gifts someone with what they don't deserve because I understand there's a bigger picture that applies? And so that's why Thank you is important. 

Don't be nasty. So cause you're bitch, some call You're an asshole this that or the other, you say thank you. And you put a full stop. And that's it. Because this stops the power struggle this stops people wanting to fight with you. In a heightened state, it's most probable that the person that you say thank you to is going to be like, - they know that I'm right, because to them it's still about being powerful, but what they haven't realized is that they've lost. They've lost because they didn't get a power struggle with you and that's what they wanted. And you've gained because you've said thank you and stopped. 

You have now accepted in your own language that that conversation is over and done with. So you found it. And you've left it. And you're off to do something else. So that's one thing that you can do. 

The second thing you can do is when someone says something and you know that they have said something that's honestly true about you is that you acknowledge that. And then you leave it there. So for example, someone says to me, you know, you can be a real bitch sometimes. I can say yeah, I know that I can. What can be said after that. If you know that if you have that self-awareness, what can be said after that. 

The secret is in the person who's receiving that comment is to not want to go the next step further and then say, but what do you know about yourself. And that can be really hard because sometimes people. And this has happened to you before, sometimes people have a go at your beliefs they have a go at your hair color, your freckles they have a go at your body shape they have a go at your agenda. Have a go at every single identity and you feel incredibly threatened Bob, and would be very natural to pick on 123456 axes avoid any of this, but instead, you pull back and you just say yeah now I can be better sometimes. 

Then if I say well why do you do that. Well, when you have a conversation but chances are most of the time people don't want that conversation because they know at some point in time. They have to give something similar to what you gave. And so yet again the conversation will be stopped. So you're acknowledging what is true, because there's no fear in that because people find out the truth. And you know to be true well there's no surprise. There's nothing to be humiliated or embarrassed about, it's just reality so what yeah I'll get cranky sometimes.

The other way to respond to people who are really really rude, is to ask a question. And that question is, what have you achieved. Now, as a full warning, some people when they get the iuck really don't like it. Why don't you be asked one of my Cosmo Okay. Are you okay. Are you okay, this kind of mentality back at uni think, Oh, man. 

But it's important that you stick to the reasons as to why you say the chair okay and that your mind yourself that a person that is bullying or that person has got a bad attitude or seems to be in an incredibly bad mood. There is a reason behind that, like 99.9% of the time there is a reason behind that. There are very few psychopaths and sociopaths in the world. The vast majority of the people have a reason for the way they feel. So when you say it okay just be prepared for that. 

What will first happen might be what I call secondary behavior whereas they're kind of shooting themselves like - is this person actually being genuine, or are they asking me, or, or what, and so they are rude again back. But sometimes they might just answer you. If the route again back and I say, Okay, what are you asking me this stupid chip or something like that. Then you can say to them - Exactly I feel because you know, everyone has a tough day like I've noticed your tone of voices be different. You seem to be pretty frustrated. And I don't really get it. Well that's for the more confident you get the more you'll be able to say something back. 

That is neutral, that's asking them where they're at. And that's helpful for them too. So we're confident that you are, you get that opportunity to then say to them - well actually I noticed that you're feeling this way and I whenever I felt angry or frustrated or short tempered that it was because someone else was going on. So you don't have to tell me what that something else is but if you want to, you can. I'm here. I'd rather you tell me then you get angry at me. 

And now what you've left a person with is an opportunity for them to either take the opportunity or not and if they don't that is purely their choice. It's purely their choice. 

Another way of dealing with people that are incredibly angry or rude or disrespectful, and this will very likely still be suitable maybe more for parents or people in a leadership role, is that, when someone is really weird, sit on ice. It's also really good in relationships as well so that's really very good you know I'm just going to leave you for a minute. And you give them physical space. 

You create a boundary of physical space when they're behaving like that. You give them the time of day for them to think. And it's not like you put them in the naughty corner, it's just showing them that you're lucky that you can stay with yourself, and I'm going to go over here. Now sometimes people will follow you with this belief I'll follow you and I will want to get in your face attitude. And it's important to stay really strong and say - it's okay we'll be here but, as you know, I'm not gonna be talking to you. 

It's important that through all of this communication that we have with people that have been angry and rude and disrespectful, that we make sure that we keep them in our intentions. We keep in mind that like 15 more times recording this thing to go around around in circles. And that we ensure that through dealing with people that are disrespectful we need to look after number one and number one is ourselves, and we don't look after number one by hurting somebody else because they're going to want to do it back to us. 

So we look after our number one by removing ourselves from a toxic situation. That does not mean ignoring, it means saying, and stating the situation is okay for me. And I'm going, or this behavior is not acceptable, and I'm going to let you think about that, I'm going to come back in five minutes, and then maybe you'll be ready to talk, but right now we're not communicating when your wife is. It's important to remember as well some people's way of communicating, how they feel when they're very angry and rude and disrespectful will be swearing. And we running away. Running away is them choosing not to deal with it. But in their way, it's them choosing to deal with it. So it's important, I know for myself. 

My way of managing things so that I'm not angry with people is to walk away, but that's I don't always have that capacity to walk away from every situation, when you're teaching account. And so I learned that very early on in my teaching career before I got into coaching that you can't just walk away from people no matter how damn rude they are and how much you don't deserve the rudeness you can't just walk away from them, so you have to come up with different ways of dealing with things. Probably the most important way of dealing with rude and disrespectful people is to show humanity. 

So okay, you're going to be rude, but I don't need to experience this weirdness. I need you to look in my face. So, you are going to leave me no choice. That 'what to do about this if you keep going with this you're going to leave me with no choice about what to do about this'. And if it's in a workplace, then you report it, if it's in public with somebody else you can go to the police. There's a variety of different options that you have, one of them can be, "You know, this is how it's going to be well then I'm going. That's it in a relationship, don't try to make us become friends by treating me like this. That's not gonna work. You're gonna have to find someone who's interested in that, because it's not going to work for me." In stating things plain as day. 

This however takes time and it takes confidence, and in all honesty, people don't have the capacity to say it with confidence, until they lock themselves, and this is the problem that underpins all negative interactions with people, but particularly bullying. When we talk about bullying in society we talk about how other people are hurt by what people have done and said, either they've physically touched them they've repeatedly done things online. They've said things to their face that intimidated them, they've harassed them. And the reality is that, no conflict person does that there's no intention to do that at all whatsoever. 

The confident people will challenge someone who is misbehaving on what they are doing. They will use awareness, as a tool on somebody else. And sometimes the responses from other people is that they feel confronted because you've just said to them, you know, how is this going to help in getting what you want by treating me like this? What's your endgame here, what's the point of this? 

And when we create that awareness or we say hey you know I am still going to be calling to you even though you're being an asshole, or you're being bitch I'm still gonna be kind to you because I know that you're not like this, for no reason at all. It's a really key thing. One of the things that will really stand out to me with talking to two young, young people is saying to them. You must remember saying to someone you must have really low self confidence to attack someone twice your age. You must have really low self confidence to attack someone who has less public credibility than you. 

And I'm sorry. It doesn't mean we then go and we tell them how to get that confidence because they don't want to. If they're at the point where they're at. But we can say that to them we can say to them, you must have incredibly low confidence to be wanting to inflict pain on someone who's older than you, younger than you have worse circumstances than you. I'm really sorry, I'm genuinely sorry that this is how you make yourself feel better. I'm sorry that this is how you are trying to get attention because you're not getting it when you need it. So, it may come off as smart RC. But when your intention is genuine people will see it when you communicate that, even if they are incredibly angry. 

And you just need to be prepared for that secondary behavior, which is the lash out that if there's cheats that all the kinds of language that's going to come out in response to how they will feel when you've called them on the facts that they don't feel great inside. But if you have an opportunity to see that same person again on a regular basis, you'll find that they also recognize that you are correct. And there is a journey that they can go on to learn about themselves and to feel happy about themselves. And you've just taught it to them. And so in a way you've given them a gift on how to deal with people that are negative. 

Some of the strategies I've talked about what will tend to find is that our energy will drop, and we will feel shitty. Even if we respond with kindness, we will feel shitty. And we might then find that our relationships with other people around us that are loving towards us become a bit shitty because we take on that crappy energy from other people. And so we need to make sure before we go from a shitty event to an event with somebody else who actually cares about us, that we have what I call "cushion time". 

And that cushion time is not literally with the cushion. But it's time where we are by ourselves to change our headspace. It might be taking a walk, it could be listening to music, it could be going for a drink. It could be doing an errand. It could be writing what we're grateful for. 

It could be having a laugh. I've done that before I've got on a Pinterest and had a little look all the funny things that are on Pinterest all the humorous jokes and memes that exists on Pinterest as a way of getting my heart from feeling heavy and angry, upset that someone could treat me with such disrespect to being light hearted again, because we don't want to carry the pain inflicted by somebody else into our loving relationships that we have with others, because that's when bullying and other people's low self esteem affects way too many people than it needs to. 

So that's something to be mindful of, the last thing I want to say before we finish this live is that, if you are watching this video and you know there is a growth journey for you to go on with your own self love, so that you can build awareness of who you are, so that you accept the things that you feel uncomfortable about and so that you can truly have bold confidence, then do it. Because you know that you've experienced situations where people have had a go at you and made you feel like rubbish and you didn't know what to do. You didn't know how to respond, or you've responded and you wanted to learn how to respond better. And that's part of your personal development goals. 

Maybe they're private and you haven't shared them with anyone else before, but you want to share them with me, I encourage you to. Because if you recognize that this is a journey that you've got to go on, then that's great. What that means is when you are interacting with other people around you, they're going to see the way that you deal with people that are complicated, and that are lacking in self love. And they will see how to also treat them. Don't try to bring people with low self love even lower. 

We have the capacity to have lots of people walking around the earth with good self love, good confidence and great awareness. And what that means is we can all connect with each other better. We can have more peace. Not just inner peace, but black social community peace with each other. And that is how we actually eliminate bullying. It's not by doing bullying campaigns. It's not by teaching people "how to spot bullying," it's not that. It's by teaching people how to love themselves. And it's by ensuring that when we deal with people who are difficult, we don't inflict pain. 

We teach them a lesson. We make sure they understand that things are okay but we don't need to teach people a lesson by causing more pain when they are already in pain. Because if we do that we can only expect that we ourselves, are also going to consistently feel pain. And so, if by nothing else we can only think selfishly about ourselves. We need to think selfishly about the fact that we will never stop experiencing pain, or we want to inflict pain on other people for the pain that they gave to us. And all we need to do is look around the world at all the different wars that have occurred. 

The Middle East is a classic example of how history has told us for not just hundreds of years but thousands of years, that this shit is real. If we want to look closer at heart, we just need to look into America, and how many people kill each other more every single day. We just need to look into the fact that they don't even want to get rid of their gun laws because having retribution for somebody hurting somebody else is more important than human life. Willing to look very closely needs us to see that people respond with pain more than they respond with love, you will wonder why such should happen in society, it is humans making that choice, it is us making that choice. And the way in which we're going to respond? We need to respond in the way in which we want to experience life. If we want to experience love in our life we respond with love, if we want to experience pain in life we respond with pain. 

And then we will get exactly what we asked for hope this has been helpful please do share this with anyone you think is going to get a lot out of this and if you have any questions please pop them in and, uh, well I'm cruising back through and seeing any questions coming in here I'll make sure I'll get them answered. And if it's something universal that I feel that everyone will work through, i'll do another live on that topic as well. Thanks so much for listening!