I love teaching REAL Negotiation. It’s a workshop that captures all of my touchstones of dealing with other people and ourselves delivered in a convenient 6.5-hour experience including lunch. You should check it out sometime.
Every audience has its own jam and a couple of weeks ago when I was teaching the course, the group’s opening question was how to deal with a “bully”. You know, those alpha thugs, pirates, and basic dicks who show up in our lives as mean, aggressive, and of course, bullies.
Can you help me Joe?
Maybe.
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I define negotiation as, “an exercise in how to navigate life with other humans” and as audiences see quickly in the course, negotiation can be a messy enterprise. While some things in life can only be learned “on-the-job”, learning how to negotiate while you’re in a negotiation is like learning how to fight when you’re in a fight. You’ll get a better result if you have some insights, tools, and training before you jump in – especially if you’re jumping in with a bully.
If you find yourself in an abusive relationship, if you find yourself facing a bully, or maybe if you are a bully, here six top tips that might help.
1. Your Point of View (and it’s all point of view)
When you call someone a “bully”, you’re applying a label. Labeling anyone is a subjective judgement based on your truths, attitudes, and beliefs. One person’s bully is another’s defender just as one person’s horrible ex is another’s fresh love (or future ex). The best way to begin dealing with a bully is to examine your label and why you’re applying it.
2. A Question of Why
If you’re going to deal with a bully (effectively), it’s good to separate their “issues” from their “interests”. In REAL Negotiation we talk about how issues are what people say, and interests are what they mean. When the two are out of sync, poor communication will be only one of your problems.
Why is your bully being a bully? The bully probably doesn’t know (or think) he/she is a bully so asking him/her to take the knee and spill the beans probably isn’t going to get you very far. Childhood trauma? Initiation into the club? Maybe. Then again, maybe the real reason is, “It’s how I learned to get what I want in the world.” Probably.
3. Strategy #1
In our woke world, we want to believe that everyone has evolved to a level of self-actualization that they can calmly recognize their behavior and magically course correct, even in the heat of a moment. Nope. If you’re satisfied with your answers to #1 and #2 above, remember this: humans are animals. We are. We have animal instincts for things like food and sex. You may not like this, but the first strategy for dealing with a bona fide bully is to bully them back.
You be saying, “Bully them back? That makes me just like the bully”. For a moment it does, and that’s true. And here’s what else is true: I can give you hundreds of stories from all the rooms I’ve been in all over the country about people telling me how someone bullied them until they pushed back. Presto – no more bully.
It’s true there are legitimate victims in the world, and we should never forget that, but going back to #1, sometimes we label someone as a bully because we see ourselves as the victim. If you listen to a victim long enough, eventually you see that they are missing a critical piece of technology required to survive in this world: boundaries.
As a wise one once said, “We teach people how to treat us”.
4. Don’t Take the Bait
Princess Diana of Wales once said that the way to really ruin someone’s mind and spirit was to isolate them. And so it goes with the bullies among us. Strategy #2 to deal with a bully is to just ignore them. When you do, it’s amazing how they just kind of fade away.
A dear friend of mine was in a recent roust with a family member and she was really, really upset by it. I know her pretty well and I quickly uncovered that the situation at hand was really just millenniums of unresolved old family shit bubbling up. Nothing was going to get resolved in the context of that moment, so I gave her the best advice I could at the time, “don’t take the bait”. Baiting is the hallmark of bullying. Bullies are always baiting you – it’s what they do. They’re trying to get a reaction, and you don’t have to play.
Don’t take the bait.
5. Trust the Crowd (it does its job)
If you’re in a public setting as the object of a bully’s aggression, remember this: eventually the crowd does its job. I don’t do a ton of social media interaction, but I have been the target of someone’s anger toward me that she displayed in a public forum (maybe you saw it). Her rant wasn’t just about her anger, but also her public lies and deceptions. I didn’t respond – at all. Not surprisingly, over the next couple of months most of our mutual friends “unfriended” her. I felt bad for her, but it restored my faith in humanity. Eventually the crowd does its job.
6. Back to #1
Point of view really is everything and probably the best advice I ever received about dealing with bullies and other forms of unsavory people who have crossed my path is to remember this: nothing is ever as bad as it seems.
I’m not going to get all motivational speaker on you, I’m just offering a simple mantra that can potentially save you thousands on therapy, lower your blood pressure, and help you find your right mind when you’re losing it. “Nothing is ever really as bad as it seems”. And that’s true of all of our difficult moments, whether we’re negotiating with a bully or not.
Good luck and have a good week.
Joe Still
2024.02.11
Cite
“There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.”
– Lady Gaga