How to deal with impossible people
I will be the first to admit that I can get frustrated pretty easily.
A few months ago I’d be quick to to tell you I hated the guy who cut me off in traffic or that I hated the cashier who gave me attitude at the grocery store.
Louis C.K. (one of my favorite comedians) has a great bit about how we “immediately jump to the top shelf” with our words and I couldn’t agree more. So many times I jump right to hate when its far from appropriate.
Most, if not all, of the people I say that I hate truly mean nothing to me and its taken me until recently to realize that. So I’ve developed a new strategy that I’d like to share with you:
Learn to “nothing” people
I firmly believe that we as humans love to judge people in absolute terms. We want the decision to be binary and only one of two outcomes. We love to love and to some extent love to hate. We want to say that in absolute certainty an individual is our friend or our foe. It is the grey area in between good and bad that we struggle with. We want to know with full certainty that the person we are judging is playing for our team or against us; but sadly it just isn’t that simple.
So let me repeat again:
Learn to “nothing” people
“Nothing”-ing people involves attaching absolutely no value them. You do not love them, you do not hate them, they are simply there. They are simply background actors in your game of life. Your brain does not devote memory to their memories.
So take a minute and think about all those people in your life that you say that you hate, if I had to guess I’d say that a lot of these people in your life fall into this new category of nothing. You don’t really hate them at all.
What is best of all is that once you move people in your hate category to nothing; you free up space for the great things in life.
Give it a shot.
, underdogs & roads less traveled
