Dealing with People You Can't Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst

Summary

This read is a brilliant resource for dealing with bad behaviour. I've had this book for over a decade now and I often refer to it as and when needed.

I've often since found it useful to refer back to it when needing to deal with different types of difficult personalities. This has been especially useful in putting it into practice at work, but also in my personal life.

More specifically, this book helps you identify 10 troublesome character behaviours and provides the listening skills and communication techniques to successfully deal with each of them by first making you understand how these difficult people think, their fears and why they act in the way they do. It explains how nine "take-charge" skills that turn conflict into cooperation can be developed by reducing the differences between people. It provides tips on how to change destructive behaviours in others but also to identify such behaviours within ourselves and learn how to improve! I highly recommend it to anyone struggling to understand and deal with an unreasonable boss, a moaning employee, a moody secretary or an angry customer.

On the downside the techniques presented for some of the 10 characters are somewhat limited to 3 or 4 potential strategies only. Therefore, if you are struggling to deal with such people it might be a good idea to use additional sources to give you more options on how to best communicate with these personalities. It is nevertheless highly recommend as a personal development read.

Contributed by: Kiki Kallis