Don't you just love your boss? I do! Wait, I'm my own boss. What if you hate
your boss? How to deal with a boss you hate, today.
One of my most recent books
is called The Love Choice and in this book, I contributed a chapter where I
wrote an essay about love but here's the the take that I had. Every interaction we
have with another person is either going to be one or the other, either it's going
to be a love choice or a hate choice and I picked that word hate because
everybody hates the word hate and they don't want to be accused of actually
doing it but what if we really do hate somebody? Like that boss, you know, that's
driving you nuts or that person that just driving you crazy. Keep in context
for just a minute that your experience of this person has to do with that
choice. Is it a love choice or a hate choice and there's a really great way to
choose hate, okay. There's a three-step process and I share this in the book.
First you have to assume the worst, assume the worst about that person, since
you don't know, assume the worst, okay. Building on that, you're going to
practice pride and this comes to the fact that you know you're right, dig your
heels in and take that position and by definition because you're right, they're
wrong. Third step, think to destroy, use that creative power of your mind to come
up with ways to retaliate or hurt or destroy that person. Isn't that awesome?
Now we've got a method that we can actually choose hate, which of course you
would never do and I would never advocate that but I want you to know how
it's done so that we can be more intentional about the love choice. How
can we choose love especially someone who's driving us nuts? Step one, we're
going to do just the opposite of the hate choice, okay. We're over here, it was
assumed the worst. For the love choice, we're going to
assume the best since you don't know, just
assume that that person has the most righteous and pure of intentions.
You don't know so just take that position. Step two, practice humility cause really
even though you know you're right, there's probably a lot of places
where you aren't. Sometimes we forget this and life reminds us of it instantly
and it's not pleasant so just have the humility to think, maybe you know, I'm not
right and I'm open to other possibilities and a lot of conflicts
turn into who's right instead of what's right so we're going to abandon the who's
right thing and just get back to what's right, what are the principles that are
going to support success here and then step three is to use that same creative mind
and energy to think, to create and to build up and to enhance. I set that up
because the title of this video has to do with how you're going to deal with this
person that you hate, especially if it's somebody that you're working with or
who's in a position of authority over you. Notice that your own reaction to
them has something to do with this choice, with the love choice or the hate
choice and that alone is going to serve you really well as you start to
inventory your own thoughts and feelings about it. Having said that, how about I
share a few little strategies with you that work really well when we're dealing
with people who are very difficult. One of the episodes of my podcast, Live On
Purpose radio, that had the most downloads was called how to melt your
favorite jerk. I think the title probably got a lot of people's attention but we
all deal with this, right? People who are just kind of hard to deal with, how are
we going to get along with them or to handle those kind of people? So here's a
few tips. First of all, a review of a basic psychological principle called
confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is something that we all do, it's the
tendency of our own mind to look for and discover and even create evidence that
we are right, okay. It gets back to that pride being on the
hate choice because we know that we write but our mind is designed to look
for evidence that we are so once we take a position on something, our mind is
going to start serving up to us all of the evidence that we write about them.
I remember a person that Vicki and I both knew and this was one of those people,
you know who I'm talking about, just you know those people who were kind of hard
to deal with. She challenged me one day and said, "You don't really seem annoyed
by this guy. What's up?" And I responded to her by saying something that kind of
surprised her, I said, "He entertains me." Now think about what I'm saying here. I
had taken a position that this guy kind of entertained me. In taking that
position, I saw ample evidence for reasons to
smile, sometimes inside my own mind, about what he was doing as I thought, "Wow that
is a good one right?" He entertains me, it was a position that I took. What if I
took the position he annoys me? Then I'm going to find all the things that annoy me
about him. His behavior didn't change, my response to him changes because I've
taken a different position and your brain will serve you up with evidence
that you're right about whatever position you take, that's how we can use
our brain to our advantage instead of working against us. Think of your
emotional life and your reactions to people for just a minute as a prized
possession, a car for example. Picture yourself in that dream car, the one that
you would love to have, okay, it's brand-new, it's tricked out to the hill.
Awesome okay and it's brand new and it's all yours and you're driving along in your
nice beautiful car, your prized possession and that boss that you hate is
standing right over there on the curb and he hails to you and says, "Oh hey, Paul.
Nice ride, dude" And I'm like, ew, it's him and then he says, "Hey, come on over
here for a second." Man, okay and I drive my nice pristine
automobile over there and I pull up right next to him and I
kill the engine and I open the window and we have a little conversation and he
says, "Paul, what a nice car you got there. Hey, you mind if I give it a spin?"
I'm like, "Serious?" "Yeah, can I take it for a ride?"
Fine, I take the keys out of the ignition and I open the door and I step out of
the car and I hand him the keys and he gets into the car and closes the door
and fires it up and he drives off right into a phone
pole and then he hops out, he's unhurt the car is totaled
and he waves back, oh, sorry. What is wrong with this story, people? First of
all, why are you giving him the keys, right? You would never do that, not with
someone you don't trust, with someone you hate, right? No, you wouldn't give him the
keys, you certainly wouldn't let him get in, fire the thing up and drive it into a
phone pole but remember we're not talking about a car talking, we're talking about your emotional
mind, we're talking about your psychology. Are you really going to turn over the keys
to someone else and let them drive you crazy right into a phone pole? Now don't
give him the keys. You keep control of this thing because you're the only
person who really can and you get to choose who you turn the keys over to so
if someone is making you mad, if someone is driving you crazy, you might want to
hang on to your keys a little tighter, you follow? Here's another little tool
that might help and this one has to do with a challenge. I like to put people up
to psychological challenges and consider this one for just minutes so is the
boss, right? We're going to kind of use that as the example but it could be anybody
that's driving you crazy or that you hate or that they're too controlling or
whatever, okay. Let's go back to the day you were hired. Now think about how much
they're paying you to do this job, you got that number? I don't care if it's an
hourly rate, a monthly or yearly salary, whatever. Think of the number, okay,
now go back to the day that they hired you. Instead
of that number or whatever the number they hired you at, cut it in half, cut
the number in half so if the number is 100, now we got 50. Would you take that
job for half of what they are paying you? Now some of you might, some of you might
not but just consider that that's the offer on the table, half and you're
like, oh well, I was kind of hoping for about twice that much or more and then
they come in with the next part of the offer, okay. They said, oh well, that's to
do the job, you get half of this, you get this much to do the job. Now we've got
this other money that we can offer you but here's the thing, your boss is an
idiot. We all know, we're all trying to deal with and tolerate this guy. He's an
idiot. We got to find some people who are willing to work with this guy because of
whatever reason, okay. He's the nephew of the founder, I don't know. So here's the
deal, you get this much for doing the job, we will double that, we will pay you
twice what we're willing to offer you just to deal with this guy but you have
to do it in a way that is pleasant and doesn't disrupt the work flow for other
people and allows you to still get your work done, we're not sure if you're up to
it, would you take it? Now this is just a mental experiment, you don't know even if
they tell you what all they're paying you for. What if that's actually the case?
What if half of your current wages are to deal with that guy, would you keep the
job or would you take a cut and pay just take calf of it to just do your job? You
might have different answers for that than other people might have, that's
not the issue. What I want you to connect with here is a different way of looking
at this that might help you to feel like you know what, I'm getting pretty pretty
well to deal with this guy and I'm doing a pretty good job too. See, it changes the
context and in changing the context, that changes how you feel. You've got a choice,
here you're going to be on the love side you're
going to be on the hate side and I think to choose love, it serves as well to do some
of these mental exercises that help us to establish a different position, maybe
one that's going toserve us well and get that brain working for us instead of
against us. Notice that all of the tricks that I shared with you today are not
going to change your boss. They might change you and that's even more important and
powerful. Thank you for subscribing.