How to deal with difficult people at work and the inappropriate level of emotional impact those people can have on your grown up self.

Today was a tough day, I was accused of misappropriating funds by a client. In my defense I’m incorruptible and he was speaking in honestly, ridiculous hyperbole and I had multiple stakeholders jump in to support me, but, I must admit I was rattled. As we worked through a potential solution, I found the person on the other end of the line was emotional, argumentative, and entirely unwilling to be flexible about any other explanation of how the events transpired. So essentially, I was the audience for someone to blow off steam to and I gave someone who didn’t earn it at all – so much access to my head today.

After processing my early morning tears, some financial modeling, coordinating and executing a solution, I sat down and wanted to walk myself through what ended up working to pull myself out of both a professional problem and an internal spiral. If you consistently find yourself struggling to rebound from difficult situations and conversations in professional settings, take a look at this list below + I hope it’s helpful!

1.     Get calm, remind yourself you’re capable. Cue me putting my face down on my desk and aggressively mouth breathing for a few.

2.     Identify the core issue and start thinking tactically on which levers you’ll need to start pulling on the operational end

3.     Be honest, address the situation head on. Over communicate with multiple stakeholders when it’s appropriate and practice radical not ridiculous honesty.

4.      If the communication doesn’t go the way you hoped it would, look at what’s genuinely wrong and separate it from what is driving your emotional response. Don’t ruminate on the emotional piece, remember it’s 2020 – no one is having a good time.

5.     Apologize and get to work on executing your solution