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Ten Ways To Deal With Difficult People

Or at least to not kill them…

Li
4 min readSep 15, 2021
Photo by Timon Studler on Unsplash

A while ago, I had to deal with a very difficult person, who told me outright that she didn’t like my artwork.

This particular person had commissioned me to do a portrait of her dog, and when I sent her a progress picture, she turned around and told me that it looked nothing like her dog, and she refused to pay me, in spite of my telling her that I had spent over twenty hours working on it.

This really knocked my confidence, and I spent a long time trying to get myself back to creating.

I’m not writing this to try and get sympathy. The thing is, it got me thinking about how I deal with difficult people.

So, I came up with these ten techniques to help in dealing with difficult people, like her.

1) DON’T RISE TO THEM.

Firstly, don’t get into an argument with them. Oftentimes, this is what they want, and all it does is add kindling to the fire.

When this happened with my customer, I took a few days before I responded to her message, and allowed myself a chance to calm down and think about what it was I wanted to say to her.

2) KEEP CALM.

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Li
Li

Written by Li

Level 38|Wales|Writer|Artist|Crafter|Chronic Health Warrior|Fibromyalgia|DID|CPTSD|&

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