Being Unstoppable: Mastering Conversations which impact the most difficult people
Difficult People Will Limit your Career and your Life…
…and you have not been equipped to deal with them. At some point in your career you will encounter these fine folks and none of your technical training will be relevant nor will any of your mainstream communications training. They will squash you and your “active listening” like a bug. In fact, very little of what you have been taught will come in handy at all.
They will stretch you to the limits of your emotional and intellectual capacity – and break you. Break you in the sense that you will stop being yourself around them.
And you will spend more and more time not being you until – not being you IS YOU! And you will predictably become resigned (pretending it doesn’t matter), avoiding, reactive, despondent, or forceful when dealing with them.
And you will spend incredible amounts of time in your own head thinking about these people, plotting against them, and playing out fantasies about taking them on. And some of you will spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about them.
“Coaching difficult people is the most critical skill for leaders to master”
Chris Argyris (Guru of Organizational Behaviour)
Here’s the good news: No one is designed to deal with them.
These are not “ordinary” people.
When you engage these people everything you know to be true about yourself vanishes and you are left fighting against your own physiology to act effectively. In some way you will be “triggered”, meaning that your capacity to reason will be hijacked by the emotional centres of you brain (the limbic system including the amygdala). In other words you are designed to:
1) cave in to their wishes,
2) hurl all you’ve got at them, or
3) lie down and play dead;
none of which works
So what’s the alternative?
First, you’ve got to understand that if you were witnessing another person dealing with a difficult person you would not have the same physiological response as if it were actually you. This would also be the case if someone were recounting their interaction with a difficult person. So what’s the difference then when it’s actually you. There is no REAL difference except that YOU decide there is.
Now, what if it were possible to:
distinguish and put to rest the triggers that activate you
be powerful and unflinching in the face of anyone’s conversation
say things that will derail their predictable speaking pattern and
generate a completely unexpected outcome from historically broken relationships?
What would that level of “unmessability” and power be worth? What would that kind of readily accessible skill make available for your career and your life? The opportunity of this one realm of organizational and personal performance is incalculable.
This talk will leave you with an opening for power well beyond what talking tips, formulas, active listening, and personality profiling can provide. It will leave you with a profound understanding of where you limit yourself in these conversations and present a pathway out; leaving you naturally invulnerable to these difficult people.
And once your unique triggers for these difficult people is actually identified, they will lose their grip – giving you a whole new ability to coach them and others around them and undo the havoc they have been wreaking.
