~by Haley Lynn Gray~
No matter where you go or what stage of life you’re at, there are always people who are, to put it plainly, difficult. Not eccentric — the deliberate, revenge-seeking, knife-in-your-back kind.
The colleague waiting for an opportunity. The client who needs someone to blame. They exist in middle school and they exist in business, and the behaviour is remarkably similar in both.
Why they behave like that
Almost always because it has worked before.
Aggression, blame-shifting and manufactured drama persist because somebody accommodated them. The pattern is rewarded and repeats, and the person barely thinks about it any more.
Which means the useful question isn’t why they’re like this. It’s what your response is teaching them.
What actually works
Document everything. Dull, and the single most effective thing. Dates, what was said, what was agreed, in writing. Follow verbal conversations with a short email — “just to confirm what we agreed.” People behave differently when there’s a record, and if it escalates you’ll have facts rather than recollections.
Stay boringly professional. They’re frequently trying to provoke a reaction that makes you look like the problem. Don’t supply it. The gap between feeling and responding is where this is won.
Be specific about behaviour, not character. “You interrupted me three times in that meeting” is addressable. “You’re impossible” is a fight.
Reduce the surface area. Fewer unstructured interactions, more written communication, other people present. Difficult behaviour thrives in private and shrinks in front of witnesses.
Use the actual mechanism. Contracts, managers, formal processes. Retaliation feels satisfying and makes you the story; process is slow and works.
And leave when it’s the right answer. Fire the client, change the team, end the arrangement. You can’t fix another adult, and in your own business you’re not obliged to keep anyone in your life.
If you’re the owner
You have a responsibility here that employees don’t.
Your team is watching what you tolerate — and what you permit becomes the standard regardless of anything written down. One person allowed to behave badly will cost you several good people, quietly, over about a year.
Deal with it early, specifically, and in private. And when it doesn’t change, act. Everyone else already knows who the problem is, and they’re waiting to see whether you’ll do anything about it.
And for your children
Much the same advice, in smaller words: document, don’t retaliate, involve the adults with actual authority, and reduce contact where possible.
What they most need to hear is that being treated badly isn’t a verdict on them. It’s a fact about the other person — and one of the few genuinely useful things you learn early is that you cannot make an unreasonable person reasonable. You can only decide what you’ll accept.
