The Lawyer Life Podcast

How to Deal with Difficult People

• Autumn Noble • Season 1 • Episode 19

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In today's episode, we are digging into a topic we all deal with from time to time but a topic that seems pervasive in the legal industry: Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad humans and how to deal with them.

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You are listening to the Lawyer Life Podcast. Episode No. 19 "Dealing with Difficult People".

 

Welcome back, everyone, to the Lawyer Life Podcast. In this podcast, we explore all the highs and lows, goods and bads of lawyering, and I leverage all my experience making partner, building my own practice group, teaching at colleges, going in-house with a Fortune 300 company, building my own firm, and leaving law altogether. I leverage those experiences to help my clients navigate their career path and find what works for them.

 

If you're a lawyer who's looking to make a change to your practice or even leave law altogether and would like to learn about all those options from someone who's actually done it, you are in the right spot.

 

If you were listening to this podcast and want to explore coaching and the work that we do in the collective a little bit more, I urge you to consider the Lady Lawyer Collective, which is a group coaching program that is currently underway.

 

In the Lady Lawyer Collective, we spend seven weeks meeting one hour each week to dig into all the tools that we actually need to be successful in lawyering that they never taught us. The best part of it is, if you're anything like me and the idea of getting on a call with a bunch of strangers to talk about your problems is really unappealing, you can participate as little or as much as you like; camera time is not required.

 

If you want more information on the Lady Lawyer Collective, check out the show notes and see when the next series begins. Alright, in today's episode, we are digging into a topic we all deal with from time to time, but it's a topic that I think seems especially pervasive in the legal industry, and that is those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad humans, and how to deal with them.

 

As I was thinking about this episode, and as I'm sure many of you are thinking as you listen to this, we have so many experiences with difficult and challenging humans in practicing law. In preparation for this episode, I kept coming back to an experience that I had as a young attorney that I thought might be a good place to start to unpack how we deal with those challenging humans.

 

So for me, this experience that is most poignant was when I was a young attorney at my first firm, and I had been tasked to put together a memo on a particularly sticky legal issue for one of the firm's biggest clients, and I had been tasked to undertake that project with another senior associate working alongside me. We dug into the project, and we put together this memo that I think, even to this day, I still feel pretty good about our legal conclusions, and we sat down with the partner to present to him where we landed on the issue.

 

It was very apparent out of the gate that he was just not happy with where we had landed. As a lawyer, you know part of the gig is that people don't always love the advice that we give them; they don't like knowing that they're potentially doing something out of client compliance or that they need to change things. I think, in this particular instance, the assigning partner really didn't want us to conclude that the client needed to make some adjustments in order to be in compliance.

 

So as we were sorting out our recommendations for changes that the client needed to make to be more compliant, we could just see his face turning red and just looking like he was about to explode, and he started peppering us with all these questions in a very aggressive, kind of Socratic manner. We were both kind of stunned because I think we both really felt like we had spent a ton of time on the project, the memo was really on point, and we had sort of left no stone unturned.

 

He started lobbying these questions at us that felt really unrelated, but at the same time, he was a partner, and we thought, well, maybe we really did miss something. So as the questioning, or interrogation, more like it, went on, I could feel us both starting to think, "Oh shit, like we really stepped in it. Like he's really mad. We really messed something up," and started to feel really embarrassed about what was happening and feeling bad that we had just gone off the deep end.

 

Of course, all of this is happening while we're sitting there in his office, of course, with his door open, of course, so that everybody outside can hear the ass-chewing that we are currently getting, and it was just so humiliating. So, and that's not even the story. So we go back and we "fix" the memo. We start chasing down all of these leads and questions and ancillary issues that he had brought up, thinking there's got to be something here; we clearly missed something. He's so pissed at us because he knew the answer all along, and we just missed it.

 

So we reworked the memo, however realizing that we still think that we had the answer right, even after chasing down all those avenues and looking in all these unrelated areas, we still felt pretty sure that we had the answer right all along. So we adjust the memo; it reflects everything else we looked at and kind of softens the conclusions and leaves room for the possibility that, you know, maybe there's room for flexibility in compliance here.

 

So we give him the memo, we leave it on his desk, and we hear nothing from him. A couple of days go by, and we're just sitting and kind of wondering like, "Gosh, is he still really mad at us? Or did the last memo really redeem us in his eyes?" After a couple of days, we find a copy of the marked-up memo left in my senior associate's office, and she calls me down, and she's sort of staring at this memo sitting on her desk like you would have thought that someone left a dead animal on her desk. I mean, she's looking at it like she doesn't wanna touch it and kind of shocked and doesn't really know what to do with it.

 

So I sit down with her, and we start going through this memo, and it's just bleeding. I mean, he just ripped every piece of it apart, and all throughout the memo, there are red exclamation points and question marks. I mean, not even substantive questions, but just marks to let you know that he's pissed and that this is not what he was wanting. You could tell as he went through the memo, he was getting more and more angry with us, and the marks got more and more aggressive, and they're leaving dents in the paper. Then finally, at the end, you can tell he flips back to the front page and just writes in huge letters on the top corner of the memo "WTF" with two exclamation points, two underlines, and he circled it twice, just in case we missed the memo that we totally messed up, and he was even more pissed at us.

 

We sat there, and we looked at this, and we're like, "Are you kidding me? Like, this is really how people... WTF? That's your feedback? Like, not super helpful, you know? Is this really how people talk to us? What an asshole. Why does he feel the need to treat us that way after he just ripped us a new one over our first conclusions, and we tried to adjust it to reflect all of his comments, and now he's more mad at us? This is ridiculous. I can't stand him. I don't wanna be here anymore." You know, and on and on we go.

 

So this experience for me, I think, is really essential in unpacking how we deal with difficult humans because it brings us to two common elements of relationships that we often characterize as difficult. On the one hand, we feel really angry and defensive around this person, and on the other hand, we believe that this person has just treated us really terribly. So there's a lot of self-justification like, "How dare you! I can't believe you would do that," but also like, "You're kind of a jerk, and I can't believe you would treat me that way." In either case, we don't wanna be around this person, and we go out of our way to avoid them. In my case, we just stewed in anger about him all of the time. I mean, this was one isolated incident, but it was really demonstrative of how he treated us in general, and the type of feedback that we got made us really uncomfortable, and it was really difficult for us to ask any legitimate questions of him or form any kind of cohesive thoughts around him because usually, that just inflamed him even more, and it made our demise even more imminent. It's like any question was sort of an indication of our lack and our idiocy, and how could we possibly deign to ask him these questions?

 

It just created this really gross environment where we were just kind of cowering and hiding from him all the time. I thought that would be a good example to unpack as part of our discussion today. So let's just start with how I and my senior associate, how we were reacting at the time, and explore why people like him just seem to send us over the edge and just piss us off.

 

I think below the surface of my anger and indignation was sort of this thought of like, "Look, man, we have turned in so many drafts of this memo. We have been raked over the coals on this memo. I am so over it. If that last draft didn't give you what you wanted, figure it out yourself. I hate working for you. This is a terrible issue, and I just want this to be done."

 

That narrative, that story, was actually playing in the background at the same time as, well, in reality, by that point in the work, the partner had just gotten so messed up that I'm confident the memo was probably way off base at that point and not well thought out, and the arguments probably were pretty weak and circuitous. I suspect now that every criticism that the partner was lobbying at us with his red pen in that last draft was probably pretty accurate. But the tone and the approach he was using is obviously another story. But at its core, I do believe that what he was saying held some weight, and the truth buried beneath his feedback was really hitting the mark. It was really bothering me because at some level, I knew we were getting called out for a less than stellar work product, and that felt really terrible. So terrible, in fact, at the time, that I refused to admit it or acknowledge it. I just wanted to focus on how he was treating us and how he shouldn't have been treating us that way, and I really disregarded the fact that, yeah, we were over the memo, we were frustrated, we were done with it, and we cobble something together for the fifth or sixth draft, and we were just done. The memo probably wasn't great, and he absolutely picked up on it.

 

That doesn't excuse the way he handled it; we're gonna talk about that later. But the point I'm making here is that whenever we start to feel defensive with these difficult people in our lives, it's because you believe that part of whatever criticism you just received is true. If it wasn't true, at least in part, it wouldn't bother you so much.

 

Think of it this way: if someone were to say to me, "Your performance at the symphony this weekend was horrendous," it wouldn't bother me because I can't play a musical instrument to save my life, and I'm not in the symphony. There's no truth to that criticism; there's no truth in the statement. It doesn't resonate with me at all, so I don't have to get defensive. I don't have to be insulted. I just sort of move on and brush it off.

 

But in contrast, if someone were to say to me, "You and your husband are going to really regret never having kids. You should think about it," I think my head would probably light on fire because that criticism hits a mark. It touches on thoughts and doubts that I have had about my life and it challenges difficult decisions that I have made and maybe second-guessed over the years. Yeah, there's a possibility that someday I might regret our decision not to have kids, and so when someone brings that up, it hurts and it bothers me and it pisses me off because I have grappled with and questioned the truth of that exact statement.

 

For many of us, when people hurl these types of comments and criticisms at us, we just ignite. We get defensive, we get angry, and we just get really, really indignant. The reason this happens is because we see that flag of truth in what they're saying and what they're bringing up, and we don't like what it means. It reminds us that they might be right and that we might be wrong.

 

For me, in that scenario with my memo, acknowledging the truth of what my boss had said meant owning the fact that we didn't do a good job. We had kind of given up at that point and were just over it. We had let him get us all turned around, and deep down, I knew we were right from the beginning, and we should have just stuck to our guns. I avoided that consideration at the time because I knew that when I opened myself up to that possibility, what quickly followed was the conclusion that I wasn't cut out to be a lawyer, that I didn't have what it took to stand up to people like him and stand by my work and stand by my conclusions because that all made me mean that I wasn't good enough and that I was never going to make it, and all of that just made me feel really hopeless and scared. So instead of working through all of those ugly thoughts and worries that his criticism aroused, I was resisting it all and lashing out in anger about my horrible boss and my toxic work environment instead of owning my role and dealing internally with that frustration in myself. Instead of doing that, I was burying it in self-righteous anger directed at him. It's a lot easier to be mad at someone than it is to sift through our own issues and shortcomings. So instead, we push that easy button, and we reach for anger, and we push it back onto the other person.

 

Over time, this builds up into a narrative where they are terrible and toxic, and we are the victims to these horrible people. So first and foremost, we can see our struggles with difficult people as signposts that these people might be hitting on some of our weaknesses. It's not always the case, but it's a helpful exploration when you see someone is triggering you. It's possible that their treatment is bringing up a part of ourselves that likely agrees with some of what they are saying or a part of us that has the same judgments about ourselves, and that brings a whole host of gross emotions with it.

 

If we pause and allow the other person to be right, at least in some part, we have to then examine what that means for ourselves. What do you make it mean when you do a subpar job at work? What do you make it mean when you succumb to a bullying boss whose Socratic method turns you around completely? What do you make it mean when someone is able to make you second-guess yourself?

 

For me and my situation, I was making it all mean that I had failed and I would never be able to succeed because I couldn't deal with people like that, and then I lacked the requisite backbone to be a good advocate for my clients. A lot of us do this; we take those criticisms and we interpret them to mean that we're bad people, that we're less than, we're failures, rather than normal, fallible humans. Defensiveness and anger are just a means to avoid those thoughts and those feelings. It's a way to cover them up and distract from what you are really feeling and thinking about yourself behind the scenes.

 

But regardless of what that scenario was bringing up for me at a deeper level, none of that excuses how I was being treated at the time. So part of our work in dealing with difficult humans is to first ask, "Okay, what if they're right, at least in part? What if part of the reason that I'm so fired up is because they're rubbing salt in my insecurities about myself and about my abilities? Is it possible that I'm avoiding some ugly truth here and instead I'm just going on the angry defensive?"

 

After that exploration, we can then look at how we're actually being treated and try to understand more about that part of the equation. When we're angry about how others are treating us, it's usually driven by one of two things: what we make it mean when they treat us that way and how we want things to be and how we want to be treated.

 

So let me start with another story because let's be honest, as a lawyer, we have so many stories about difficult and horrible humans, as I'm sure you all do. So fast forward a couple of years, and here I am, building a practice group. I have my own team; I've got my new little associate, and she's amazing. Over time, I've been having just kind of some struggles; I'm the only female practice group chair at the firm at this time, and the board is, you know, the composition that you would expect the board to be. So I'm a huge outlier here, and I'm trying to navigate this firm, this board, building a team and running a team in the way that makes sense to me.

 

So I have this associate, and she's amazing, and she's talented, and I know she's going to be really great, and I know she is really great. She comes to me, and she says, "I need to start coming in a little bit later and leaving a little bit earlier and then rounding out work at night." I can't remember the exact reason for it; it might even have been that she had gotten a new dog, and it was a puppy, and so obviously, puppies need a little bit more grace and time in the early days. Whatever the reason was, it wasn't important. What she needed was to come in later. I want to say it was like 9:00, and she wanted to leave at 4 and then round out work at the end of the day. I said to her, "You know, as long as you get your work done, I don't really care when it gets done. As long as you keep your hours where they need to be, fine, you know, I trust you."

 

So we went on like this for a while, and it just so happened that her office was in a space that everybody could see at all times whether she was there, and it had the lights that turn on when you're there and they turn off when you haven't been in your office for 20 minutes. So it's pretty obvious when you get off the elevators, you can look at her office and see, is she there, is she not there. So it did not take very long for some of the board members to recognize that she wasn't there during these well-established business hours.

 

So the next thing I knew, I had a board member sitting in my office asking me why she was keeping these unusual hours. My response to him was, "She's billing what she needs to bill. She's getting her work done. In fact, she's billing more than some of the partners on my team. You don't work with her, and I do, and I don't have an issue with it. So, I'm confused as to why this is a problem." We had this really difficult back-and-forth where he just was so frustrated with me for letting her do this and fearful of the precedent that it was going to set for the rest of the firm. What he wanted to get out of this was for me to tell her that there are set hours that she needed to be there, and I wasn't willing to do it. So we were at this really awkward and uncomfortable impasse, and I could just feel myself getting red and getting really angry with him. It just was like, in the end, we kind of had to agree to disagree, and he kind of stormed out of my office like, "I can't believe that she doesn't understand why this is a problem." I had the exact same thought. I don't understand why this is a problem for you. I left that meeting just feeling really flustered and realizing that I had drawn a line in the sand with a board member, and a pretty important board member at that, and thinking, "This is not going to go well."

 

Years later, I was in a leadership training program, and the group that was participating in the program was asked to go through personality evaluations so that we could begin to better understand the group and how we interacted with each other. At the end of the examination, there were four categories of personalities that we each got put into: controlling, supporting, promoting, or analyzing. After doing the little worksheets and kind of the test, I found myself classified somewhere between analyzing and supporting. I've always been a good planner, thorough, and organized, but I'm also really relationship-oriented, obviously understanding and very empathetic. All of those are characteristics of analyzing and supporting personalities.

 

So then, after we've all been categorized, sorted, branded, and shamed for the unique characteristics of our categories, we started going through exercises to examine how our personality types interacted with those in other categories. So at one point, the group was asked to guess where they thought each other should be classified, and this was a bit of an odd task given the group because most of us didn't really know each other, and for the most part, the only thing we knew about everyone else was what they did for a living. So not surprisingly, the fact that everyone knew I was an attorney resulted in me being classified as controlling, and in that category. It didn't really surprise me because I would imagine that most lawyers probably demonstrate various aspects of this controlling personality, which includes taking charge, being decisive, and being very bottom-line focused. It made sense to me. Despite the fact that, like all professions, attorneys come from all walks of life and personality types, and I could certainly flex those controlling muscles and skills when I needed to. It's really not where I live the majority of the time. But these people didn't know me at that level.

 

As part of this process, I started thinking about the people in my life, the good and the bad, and I started imagining the people in my life who'd really challenged me professionally, including that board member that was really upset about my associate and her hours. I found some really interesting patterns. Oddly enough, or maybe it's not that odd, everyone in my life with whom I had significant professional struggles fell into that category of controlling. As I further read through the description of a controlling personality, there were a few things that really jumped out at me. Controlling personalities tend to be impatient, too dominant, insensitive, demanding, and unwilling to let it go. In contrast, one of the drawbacks of being a supporting personality (hello, that's me) is that they struggle dealing with critical or aggressive people. I read this and I was like, "This makes perfect sense. Like, I can totally understand why this board member and, in fact, most of the board members at that firm were really difficult for me to work with because a lot of them were controlling personality types." There's no judgment for that, but that personality type is out of the gate at odds with my personality type. It's no wonder that we struggled so much in the past. We were like oil and water, and our drawbacks triggered the others. Our communication styles were dramatically different, and our weaknesses just really inflamed the other.

 

After having this epiphany moment, I spent the evening really working through this awareness and examining how this knowledge could have changed things for me in the past. Knowing that these individuals were simply acting in accordance with their dominant personality characteristics, it could have helped me disconnect from their aggression, demands, and insensitivities. These people weren't singling me out for this treatment, and it had no bearing whatsoever on me or my value. The problem was that I had allowed myself to believe that their aggression and their controlling kind of personality types were about me. I made it all mean that I was something lesser, that I was an idiot, that they didn't like me, they didn't respect me, they didn't think I was good enough. I was miserable because I interpreted this behavior as something negative about myself. At the time, I really couldn't help but believe that it was all about me. I didn't see them doing that to anybody else at the firm. I mean, in reality, no one else was running their group the way that I was. When I was miserable because I interpreted this behavior as a condemnation of me as a person and me as a leader.

 

What I learned from this is that it really does all come down to our thoughts and how we interpret the situations and the people in our lives. If you're seeing a theme here between this episode and the prior episodes, it's because there is. Most of the time, our struggles in life with people or the things that happen to us, those struggles are caused by how we receive and interpret those people and those experiences. Our happiness or unhappiness in those scenarios is largely driven by the stories that we tell ourselves about those circumstances. Oftentimes, we make our stories about other people and their actions all center around us. Everything they do, everything they say, is about us. What if we just believe that people are acting in accordance with their personality type and it might not actually have anything to do with us? That is ultimately what I was able to take from the training session. That we all have different personality tendencies that drive our behaviors. It's just one more reason to affirm to yourself every day that the actions and words of others might not have anything to do with you and may instead have everything to do with the other person. The only thing that truly matters is what am I making their actions and the situation mean and why?

 

Once we understand how we're interpreting the other person's actions, we are then able to ask, "Is there any truth to our negative interpretation of their actions? Do I know that he thinks I'm an idiot and that I'm a terrible leader? Do I know that he doesn't respect me, that he thinks I'm not going to make this group work?" The answer was no. In fact, I had all sorts of empirical evidence to the contrary. It was just a place where he and I were at an impasse. We disagreed. It didn't have to be any type of criticism or indictment about my ability or vice versa. It didn't have to mean that he didn't think I was a good leader. That's it. With that realization, I had a choice. I could choose to believe that he and his words meant all those negative things about me, or I could choose to believe that this was just his communication style and he was just as befuddled with me as I was with him in that space. I don't like it, but it doesn't have to mean anything more than that.

 

Okay, at this point, you're probably thinking, "But seriously, these guys are a bunch of jerks. Are we really supposed to just be okay with people treating us terribly?" That's the other part of the puzzle. The last piece of this is that oftentimes, we characterize people as difficult because we don't like the way they're acting and we think they should be acting differently. That we know how they should be acting more than they do. So many of our day-to-day problems and stressors boil down to this one little nasty word: "should." That we talked about in the first episode. You know, it boils down to this notion that my boss should be more appreciative of me. He shouldn't treat me that way. They should give me more latitude with how I run my group. My boss should be a better mentor, provide support, be more collaborative, less Socratic. All of those ideas or things that I had about how these people were supposed to be treating me. I'm willing to wager that if each of us could cut that nasty little word "should" out of our lives and change nothing else, I think we would be markedly happier. The problem is we want other people to change and live in accordance with our manual for how good bosses, good co-workers, and good spouses are supposed to be. We believe that our little manuals have everyone's best interest in mind, and we believe that our manuals are the correct way to be. So when other people don't subscribe to our manual for being a good human or change to fit those models, we lose our minds.

 

The truth is that these notions about how people are supposed to act, they're all just our own opinions and our own stories. There's no requirement that your boss respect you or appreciate you or give you credit for your work or treat you kindly when he's frustrated. Every adult human on the face of this planet has the absolute right to act any way that they want to. Yet despite this truth, we spend so much time and effort being frustrated and irritated that our bosses don't treat us the right way. They don't mentor us, they don't take time to teach us, they don't handle their frustration appropriately. Think about how much time and energy you could save if you just stopped wanting people to be different and instead just let them be whoever they want to be.

 

Let's be honest, the real reason we are frustrated with humans most of the time is because they're not acting how we want them to act. Even when we tell them how we want them to act, they don't do it. Then we get really pissed and the relationship tension just skyrockets. You can tell your boss you want him to speak differently or you want him to give more positive feedback, and he might comply, but he probably won't. The problem is that when we tell someone else these are my needs and I would like you to satisfy them so that I can be happier with our relationship, the problem with that kind of a request is that we're giving them all the power. We place all possibility of our happiness in that relationship on them changing and complying with our request for how we think they should act. If the theory underlying that request was true and that's how we get happy in relationships, we're all screwed because that means the only way we get to be happy in a relationship is if the other person changes the way that we want them to and acts how we want them to. For most of us, that just never works out. I know for me, it certainly has never worked out. Humans do not want to be controlled or manipulated so that others can feel a certain way. No one should have that much power over your happiness.

 

When we take this approach, we're basically saying the only way I can be happy with our relationship is if you will change your behavior to align with my needs. It sure sounds a lot like a prettier form of manipulation. We're trying to change someone's behavior, we're trying to control them in order for us to be happy. That does not seem like a recipe for a good and healthy relationship. Instead, we create a fake relationship where someone is pretending to be something that they're not and we're pretending that we love them the way that we want them to act. But we really don't. We love them the way that they are when they act the way that we want them to act. The only person who can influence and control your happiness is you. When we want someone else to change so that we can be happy, it rarely works out. We end up disappointed and the relationship further erodes. If you don't want to live your life experiencing that result over and over again, you have to choose to be happy with the relationship as it is and accept the other person for who they are, not who you are desperately trying to mold them into.

 

Think of it this way: how do you feel when someone tries to get you to act in a way that you don't want to or when someone tries to make you do something that you don't want to? We hate it. But that's the reality of it as a human. Every person in your life can choose to act any way that they want to, and the same goes for you. No one gets to decide how someone should or should not act except for themselves. Furthermore, everyone seems to have their own idea about how people, including you, are supposed to act, and everyone's manuals don't match up. So now we have all these conflicting expectations about how we're supposed to be and how they're supposed to be. These types of small spats just plant seeds for dueling manuals and dueling expectations that can rot a relationship from the inside out.

 

Usually, my clients will explain that from these small spats, they're now bogged down with new and more interesting thoughts. "We're never going to see eye to eye. We have totally different values. This is never going to work. He's never going to respect me. This place is just toxic." When each party subscribes to the validity of their own model of how a person should be, no one wins. The relationship cracks simply grow into a chasm as each party reveals more about their manual and how the other party doesn't meet that criteria. At the same time, while we're doing that, the boss is creating the same thing. He's got a whole manual himself for how you're supposed to be acting. As we dig our feet in, we just create more and more distance.

 

So how do you move forward? First, we have to recognize that you each have these manuals about how you're supposed to be for the other. Second, that's okay. It's human, and you will both have expectations of how this relationship should work and how the other person should act. But then you have to decide if you're willing to live in accordance with the other person's manual. My guess is that the answer is probably no. Similarly, they're probably not going to act how you want them to or expect them to, no matter how hard you try.

 

So at this point, you have a few options. You can simply agree to disagree about your manuals. You can share your manual with them and see if that yields any results, see if there's maybe some room for compliance there. Or you can carry on your merry way, looking for another human or another job that will meet 100% of all criteria in your manual. For example, if you think my boss should not yell at me in the hallway in front of everybody, that's your manual for a boss. They're not supposed to do that. You can decide whether your expectations of your boss are important enough for you to discuss it with him or her directly, or you can leave and look for another boss that more closely aligns with your manual. Whether you have the discussion or not, just know that he doesn't have to change to fit your manual of a good boss, and he probably won't. He can choose to act anyway that he wants, and he doesn't need to change for you to feel better about your worth and your skills. You can instead just choose to let him be who he is. You can just decide to let it go, knowing that you'll probably never change him, but you can change how you show up in the relationship.

 

This is where our previous discussion comes back in. The reason you feel so crappy in those scenarios isn't because of him yelling at you in the hallway. You feel crappy because of what you make it mean when he yells at you. Because you're thinking, "I'm so embarrassed. Everyone is judging me. He thinks I'm an idiot. Everyone must think I'm an idiot. I can't believe he did that. People are probably gossiping about me." Those thoughts are what make you feel terrible. He could yell at you, and you can have completely different thoughts that aren't going to make you feel like crap. Thoughts that aren't about you. You could instead think, "He must be a really unhappy person to treat people like that. What is going on in his life that he would lash out at me like that? When I leave this firm, I hope he sees how this played a role in my decision. He seems really stressed out about his big client that just left, and I'm sure that's what this is about. It's not about me. I'm good at my job, and everyone knows it. He's just being dramatic. He's being a total jerk, and no one around here is surprised by it." The point is, you don't have to make it about you, and you don't have to make it mean something negative. All of those buckets of thoughts are available to you, but we just typically want to make it about ourselves and something negative about ourselves.

 

If you can clean up your thoughts around other people and stop thinking about how they should be acting, you'll stop caring so much about that manual. For a good human, it won't matter as much because you'll find that there is nothing the other person can do that will impact your happiness because that power rests with you and you alone. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying that you should just be a doormat and let other people treat you like crap. What I am saying is that we all need to be really clear of all the shoulds and BS in our heads about other people before we can clearly evaluate any relationship and make a decision about whether we want that relationship in our life. We have to know that we're placing a whole bunch of expectations and ideas on that relationship, and we have to know what those manuals are before we can kind of decide, is my manual the problem or is the relationship the problem? If our discomfort around another human is all being driven by unspoken expectations and manuals, we have some work to do. This work will help you examine what's really going on without all of the drama. What is really going on with this person and why does it bother you so much? Are they hitting a nerve? Are their actions really that important to you? What am I gaining from maintaining expectations about how this person is supposed to act? Are those expectations serving me in the relationship or are they just making me an angry toxic human? Is it worthwhile for me to express my expectations and manual to this person and see if it makes a difference? Those are all questions that we need to explore when evaluating how we show up in difficult relationships.

 

If after all of that exploration, your conclusion is "No, I really don't like this person. I don't think it's a me thing; I don't think it's an expectation thing," stick around because in the next episode, we are going to dig into how to know when a relationship has run its course and it's time to walk away. 

 

That is all for today, my friends. Thanks so much for joining us again this week, and remember, if you like this content, be sure to rate the podcast and consider leaving us a rave review. I would appreciate it. Next week, as I said, we will continue this topic and explore how we know when a relationship has run its course. I hope you'll join us there. 

 

In case you missed it, the Lady Lawyer Collective has launched for 2024. In the LLC, we will dig into relationships and topics just like this, as well as the key tools you need to master relationships with difficult people and take control of your career. This is the only group coaching program made for female lawyers and the unique challenges that they face in lawyering. In the Lady Lawyer Collective, we will cover everything you actually need to know to find meaningful success in law, and we do it all meeting weekly over seven weeks. As I said, the best part is you can participate as much or as little as you like. Leave your camera off, observe from a distance, or sit at the front of the class and ask all the questions. The choice is yours.

 

As always, check out the show notes for more information on the Lady Lawyer Collective or for additional resources on this week's topic, or to grab a free coaching consultation. As always, thanks for listening and thanks for sharing with your friends.