When was it the last time your girlfriend or coworker made you angry? Maybe they said something reckless or overloaded you with more work or posted something nasty about you on social media?
Life is a web of relationships. As social creatures, we are directly dependent on each other. As you are trying to surround yourself with good people who may bring happiness and joy to you, don’t forget that you will probably have to deal with difficult people in life too.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius lived on by having to take his share of difficult people every day. So much so that he logged the following lines in his diary:
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself the following: The people whom I will deal with today will interfere with me every minute of the day; will be ungrateful to me; will be arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and mean. People are like that because they cannot distinguish good from evil. But I saw the beauty of the good and the ugliness of the evil and realized that the wrongdoer has a nature to do with me—not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind and a share of the divine. And therefore none of them can do harm to me.
He believed that people who got into trouble were often ignorant. Why is that? Because this mental framework helped him empathize with those people. When you believe that someone’s faults are due to their ignorance, you can take pity on them and excuse their mistakes more easily.
One of the core beliefs of Stoicism is that destructive emotions arise from errors in judgment. Stoics believe that many things are out of our control. One way to deal with Difficult Situations is to expect the worse (through negative visualizations).
Before your next meeting with a difficult colleague, get prepared by thinking about everything that could go wrong. During the meeting, focus on your own reactions not on their actions.
Remember the advice Epictetus gave us: “Man is not shaped by events, but by the meaning he gives to them.”