Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy Read Online Free PDF Page B

your workplace, you need to decide what’s difficult. Missing keys? Batmen on the prowl? Is it you or them? It’s usually helpful to separate the behavior from the person. It’s not your child or your in-laws that you hate (okay, maybe it is the in-laws); it’s usually a behavior that sends you into fits. Sometimes, people don’t even recognize what it is that bugs them about someone. As one of my friends, in the midst of marital discord, wailed,
    “Even the way he breathes drives me crazy!”
    If you’ve allowed someone else’s problem behavior to go on too long, it can push you to the brink of disaster. Not good. This is because it creates a negative spiral of conflict. If you ignore conflict long enough, it spirals down to a very dark place. At that point, you develop what psychologists refer to as “selective perception.” Everything someone does drives you nuts at that point. You lose your ability to see the other person as just another struggling human being. Instead, you see him or her as all dark or all light—that “all light” stage is usually called infatuation, while the “all dark” stage has you
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    02.   What the Hell Is Your Problem? (Maybe It’s You) convinced that your colleague is evil incarnate! If, for example, you’re in a long-standing conflict with Joe and you see Mary and Joe chatting together in the hall, who do you assume that they’re talking about? You, of course. At this point, you can’t even see Joe as a person. Everything he does is suspect. That’s why it’s critical to address conflict with coworkers early and often. And of course, with sufficient skill. If you wait too long, the situation becomes nearly intractable. Later chapters in this book will give you a boatload of skills to manage the most difficult kinds of behavior. First, though, we have to answer the essential question of whether it is your stress or theirs that’s driving this muddle.
    whose stress is it anyway?
    One of the toughest issues is how to decipher whether the “difficult” person is actually creating the problem you’re experiencing or whether you are so stressed that the only thing left to do is to blame the difficult person for your problem. One simple tool that will help you determine whether you’re blaming someone or simply holding him or her accountable is to take the now-famous study from Dr. Thomas H. Holmes and Dr. Richard H. Rahe. The duo created a do-it-yourself stress test.
    Banking on the well-documented theory that change causes stress, they examined the stress measured by Life Changes (LCU), ranging from the death of a spouse to receiving a traffic ticket. By adding the LCU values of the past year, you have a rough measure of the likelihood of a stress-related illness or accident, not to mention the odds of crankiness! Using the following list, simply add up the values for the events that have occurred in your life in the last twelve months.
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    Life StreSS
    VaLue
    Death of a spouse
    100
    Divorce
    73
    Marital separation
    65
    Detention in jail or institution
    63
    Death of a close family member
    63
    Major personal injury or il ness
    53
    Marriage
    50
    Being fired at work
    47
    Marital reconciliation
    45
    Retirement
    45
    Major change in health or behavior of a family member
    44
    Pregnancy
    40
    Sexual difficulty
    40
    Gaining a new family member through birth, adoption, or remarriage 39
    Major business readjustment
    39
    Major change in financial state
    38
    Death of a close friend
    37
    Change to a different line of work
    36
    Major increase in fights with spouse
    35
    Taking on a mortgage
    31
    Foreclosure on a mortgage or loan
    30
    Major change in responsibility at work
    30
    Son or daughter leaving home
    29
    In-law troubles
    29
    Outstanding personal achievement
    28
    Spouse begins to cease work outside of home
    26
    Major change in living condition (rebuilding, remodeling) 25
    Revision of personal habits
    24
    Troubles with superior, boss
    23
    Major