Working With Difficult People

Difficult –

Adjective

1. Needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand.

2. Characterized by or causing hardships or problems.

3. (of a person) Not easy to please or satisfy.

Do you have coworkers, friends, or even family members who you feel are difficult?

I personally have a roommate that I find to be difficult at times. Let’s say this roommate's name is Charlie. A difficult situation I have with this roommate is that they like to ask where we're going or doing during the day. Even though most of the time we just go for car rides with the baby or drop him off at his grandma’s house, I don’t feel like I need to share this with Charlie. I prefer to live a private life and don’t like sharing all the details of my day to day. So, to me it feels like Charlie is prying into my life when I don’t really want to share. When I saw this class, "Working With Difficult People", I thought, "Hey, maybe I could learn how to work better with Charlie by taking this class". I decided to take initiative and signed myself up.

Before I took the "Working With Difficult People" class, I heard about how "True Colors" represents differing personality types. I had actually heard that Charlie has taken this "True Colors" test. These colors represent important aspects of your personality categorized as orange, gold, green, and blue.

After taking the "True Colors" test, I found out that my top colors are tied up between gold and blue, my second color is green, off by one point, and orange came in last. I feel like this is pretty accurate for me. My gold shows up as me liking to plan ahead, being useful and having my own security. My blue shows up as me liking to be able to contribute, having one-on-one time, and as long as you express your thoughts/feeling with me, I give that back. My green shows up as me liking to have understanding, living life by my own standards and thriving in my independence.

Now that I know my colors and Charlie's main color, maybe I could figure out why I sometimes have a difficult time living with them. Charlie's main color is gold, and mine is also gold? It seems that Charlie takes on the other aspects of gold that aren't as influential in my own life. They like to have order and rules; preferring that things get taken care of ASAP when asking for help. I prefer to put it into my schedule and plan for it. Maybe Charlie isn't so difficult after all, just different.

We're all different people, so does that make us all difficult? Yes, it can mean we're all difficult, to a certain extent and to certain people. For example, an orange person may be a difficult person for a gold person to get along with since orange is so spontaneous and risk taking, while gold is organized and structured. Different personalities with different perspectives.

If we want to get along with a difficult person in our life we need to embrace the differences in that person. Its different that I like a private life, while Charlie likes to know what's going on in their surroundings, thriving best with structure. It's even more different with my fiancé, who's main color is orange, who likes to just wake up and decide what they want to do each day without any planning ahead.

People are just.. Different.