Every now and then…
There’s a time, once in a while when someone get’s on your nervers, if you’ve met me, I’m probably that guy ;-)
Well this is called life, and there’s not much point getting worked up about annoyances, or people that get on your nerves, unless you have spare time to waste on such activities anyway, personally I’d rather just move on and wait for sunny times. That isn’t always possible, either due to your own state of mind or for some reason the ‘annoyance’ (yes I just referred to a person as an annoyance not granting them any dignity or space or time or energy ) won’t give up and move on, again, this is called life.
Is it a long term or short term affect
From my experience I would say that there tends to be two types of ‘annoyance’ either it is short term or long term; it is quite important to identify this as it means you can take appropriate action. For example, if there is someone in your team that is traditionally a happy go lucky sort of person and one day they seem to just be an arse, sorry ‘annoyance’; then you’d probably be right to let it slide and do nothing about it, this is very low impact for you effort wise. If there is a member of your team that seems to take constant glee in pushing your buttons or pointing out your flaws, creeping behind your back and so on, this is slightly more longer term.
Short term ‘annoyance’
So with those that you would classify now as short term annoyances there’s always multiple options depending on how much you like the person. If you’re not too keen on the person or you don’t have to spend much time interacting with them you can just brush off the odd comment, if it is someone you have to work with closely you could simple ignore it and wait for an opportune moment to ask if everything is okay. Be warned, if you ask someone “is everything okay?” and you do it disingenuously this will fall back and hurt you, if you dont really care don’t ask, you’ll make it worse.
Long term ‘annoyance’
I hate these, mainly because it takes a lot of effort, either positive or negative depending on the brutality of the ‘annoyance’
If there’s someone in your team you just don’t see eye to eye with it’s a struggle, you’ve had a few handbags, disagreements etc already and you both pretty much agree you hate each other. By this point it doesn’t matter if the other person is being nice, in your eyes it’s two faced. There’s only really two ways to deal with these types of people, either be really nice, or be really devious in both cases be meticulous, and because I don’t want to let people in on how to “eliminate” these problems we’ll focus on the nice tact, it also drives them crazy!
I’ve been in a position where there’s been someone I really couldn’t get on with, At first it was handbags, but then I started to ask myself what causes someone to be that obnoxious. I started to look at their history, who they had worked for, where they had come from, how they had gotten to where they are, what structure their personal life had, how they dealt with pressure, what influences their decisions, what is important to them, how do they communicate, what are their tells and so on, the list is endless. I believe if you have a long term ‘annoyance’ you have to know them inside and out, this is great for the being nice approach, you have no choice but to get to know them as an individual. It will take weeks of being nice and ignoring snipes and odd remarks but you should see a genuine improvement in the relationship, once that happens you will find that it no longer bothers you what they do you can just be nice and say things like “I noticed you forgot this, so I did it for you” or “how was your weekend” see this is caring and sharing…
Summary
As much as you may want to change someone else you can’t, the only thing you have any control over is yourself so you can make yourself be nice, you can make yourself ignore comments and eventually things will get better. On a side note while being all nice and kind and not being mean it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have a good record of what is said in meetings, who committed to what and if you have a ticketing system, use it. Hopefully you’ll never need it, but if you do you have it, and because you wrote it down and the other person saw you doing it they have even less to go on.
So when is enough, enough? at the point you decide to start changing yourself and not others.
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