Difficult People:  Understanding WHY, not WHAT
by Susan Dunn, MA, EQ and Life Coach

What makes another person difficult?  When we don't
understand where they're coming from.  They yell at us in an
argument when we want to quietly reason; or they disengage
when we want to talk it out.   They say they want a vacation
and then plan a full agenda while you it was sitting on a
beach veging that you wanted.  People don't make sense.
That makes them difficult.

The success of relationships depends how you deal with the
other person's "difficultness."  You can learn some
action-points (when X does Y, do Z), in which case you're
basically book-bound, or you can learn how to figure out
what's going on at a deeper level, so that you can apply
your knowledge to the myriad of situations you'll be
confronted with in real life that will never fit what you
learned in the book or seminar, with the host of people you
encounter, all of whom are difficult unless you have an
identical twin.

I'll admit I have an edge here.  Not only because I study
and teach emotional intelligence, but because I have an
identical twin sister.  Identical twins have the same genes.
We tend to think of genes in terms of physical things, and
IQ, but they relate to EQ as well.

We're aware that genes determine that X can be a great
basketball player.  He's over 6' tall and athletic. Genes
also allow Y to be a physicist.  She's got an IQ over 150,
conceptual ability and a knack for numbers.

However, in perhaps the more important aspects of life, your
personality and temperament, we're talking about the
emotional workings of the brain, or the emotional brain.
The neocortex is where we think, analyze and reason, and our
IQ is largely determined at birth.  The limbic brain is the
seat of the emotions, and if people's IQs vary, so does
their EQ - how they work emotionally.  But our EQs are not
set at birth; we can always develop our emotional
intelligence.

Our understanding of the functioning of the brain has
escalated tremendously in the past few years with the new
research tools.  We can't peer into the brain and see
cognitive intelligence, but we can see what happens when
emotion happens in the brain. For instance, brain scans show
that the emotional parts of a neglected orphan's brain work
differently than a "normal" baby's, i.e., one that's been
well care for and had its emotional needs met.

That having been said, you aren't likely to find someone who
functions emotionally the same way you do.  Close with an
identical twin, but even then there are fluctuating hormones
and individual past experiences ("nurture") which influence
our emotional makeup.  And it's emotion that motivates all
our behavior.

So accepting that no one else works quite the way you do is
the beginning.  The unhappiest people I know - and I'm a
coach who works with people around EQ - are those who think
the world should be a certain way, the way they think is
right, and that they can't be happy until everyone does it
that way, their way.  It's almost easier to be with someone
insensitive and not tuned in, than the intense individual
convinced they have a message for you, and you'd better
listen up, right?

So what's the same about everyone, and what's different?  We
all want pleasure, and to avoid pain.  The catch is, we all
use different means for getting pleasure and avoiding pain,
and we each define the concepts differently.  That's way to
"relax," Alison plays two sets of tennis, and Sharon goes to
the day spa.

If you want to figure someone else out, then, you need to
move to the meta level.  We can understand "meta" better by
examples than definitions.  It comes from the Greek "with,
after, or among."  You can see the problem already.  It can
also mean "change or transformation," as in "metamorphosis,"
changing shape, like the caterpillar that becomes a
butterfly.  It also means "more comprehensive, or
transcending," and that's what we're after.  (And in physics
it means something else.)

Now in emotional intelligence, we work on applications:
Learning the facts or theory, and the applying it to
situations in your life non of which will ever have been
covered in the lesson in class, if you know what I mean.
For instance, let's take "people want pleasure and not
pain".  Why, then, does Emily spend 14 hours a day at work
and then pursue a graduate school program at night and on
the weekends?  This would be your definition of "pain".
Emily has a different definition of "pleasure."  The plot
thickens.

Here's another example of getting it at the meta level.

Harry said when he retired he wanted to get away from it
all.  He retired to Comfort, Texas (great name isn't it, and
a place where many people retire), bought 12 acres of land
and turned 11 of them into a natural habitat.  He can see
the stars at night, and hear the birds during the daytime.
He putters around the house listening to music, reading,
spending time on the Internet.  His social life consists of
his wife and occasionally his grown children.  He rarely
leaves his land.

Martha, too, wanted to get away from it all when she
retired.  She bought a house in an active retirement
community in Alabama's Gulf Coast, and bought a catamaran.
She fills her days with volunteer activities, entertaining
on land and on sea, daycaring her grandchildren after
school, and taking commercial cruises every several months,
traveling all over the world on group tours.

What's up with that?  Harry have been a primary care
physician, his days filled with people, demands and crises
since his medical school days.  He wanted what he called
"peace" - no people, nothing he had to do.

Martha had lived with someone like Harry, rather isolated as
a full-time homemaker who did bookkeeping part-time from her
home.  She rarely saw people, and they entertained
infrequently because of her husband's demanding schedule and
reclusive nature.  In retirement, when her husband died,
Martha wanted lots of people and activities, and getting out
and going places.

They both said they wanted to get away from it all, yet one
fled to exactly what the other was avoiding.  The meta level
would tell you they wanted to get away from - what they had
been doing before.  Since each "before" was different, each
"after" was different.  So while they were doing different
particular things, at the meta-level, they were doing the
same thing.

It's the common thread.  They both wanted to get away from
it all, but they each had their own definition.  Was it
different from your definition?  Each person's definition is
uniquely different; how different, you'd be surprised.

Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but it's more
complex than that.  Each of us lives in our own little
planet, and it's in our heads!

And by the way, if understanding what's going on with other
people doesn't interest you, that's a given as well.  I find
all the time in training EQ coaches, that some people are
interested in insight and meta-cognition, while others
aren't at all.  Some want only the WHAT, and not the WHY.
Either route can take you to home base.  However, getting
the WHY allows you to navigate by the stars, while only
knowing the WHAT keeps you map-bound.

It may be easier to accept that other people are different,
that to accept that YOU are different.  We're all after the
same thing, but our means of getting it, and the particulars
of what it looks like, could hardly be more different.  If
you're the kind of person who seeks to understand the "why"
of other people, look to the meta level.  Find the common
thread.

When you see something different, ask yourself how it's the
same.  And if you don't understand at any given level,
inquire.  I remember planning a vacation with a friend some
years ago.  "And let's not get a car," she said.  "I'm sick
of all the hassle."

At the time I had a job 20 minutes from my home where I sat
at a desk all day, ate lunch in the building cafeteria, and
then went home and stayed home, as my husband was on-call
most of the time.  It wasn't until years later, when I took
a job in marketing (which is what my friend did at the time
of the vacation) and was in my car all day and night that I
understood just what a hassle "a car" can be.

Now when someone asks me to take a "vacation" with them, I
check it out.  If I'm after Broadway shows and fancy
restaurants and they want to climb mountains and wear
Birkenstocks, we're in trouble.  Using your EQ means
understanding the emotions that are our motivating factors
and learning to work with them.

©Susan Dunn, MA, EQ & Life Coach, http://www.susandunn.cc ..
Susan Dunn coaches individuals in emotional intelligence for
life improvement, and trains and certifies EQ coaches.  She
is the author of "How to Live Your Life with Emotional
Intelligence," and "How to Develop Your Child's EQ."  She
offers Internet courses, ebooks and individual and group
work.