How to Deal with Rude People

Due to some carelessness, 860 million dollars could be flushed down the toilet.

That will happen if the Mona Lisa painting is not taken care of.

We all know about Leonardo Da Vinci's painting, but very few know how fragile it is.

It is in such a weakened state that it is sensitive to any change.

Moving it to another floor or changing the room temperature will cause irreparable damage. So the painting has to stay in its current position and be handled with the utmost care.

Handling rude people doesn't require as much care as the Mona Lisa, but it can feel quite close.

But why talk about dealing with rude people?

Well, there is a lot of them in this world. If you go on the internet for five seconds, you will see rude comments first.

You step out into the real world and bump into a rude person pretty quickly. They are everywhere. So it's essential to know how to handle them. Because you never know who these rude people are or who they know. And one sour interaction could be costly down the line, no matter how much in the wrong they are.

Life's unfair, eh?

But that's no excuse. We have to adapt to reality and deal with rude people respectfully. Plus, if you can do this, you will show your maturity.

Someone who can see past the petty rabble and move on with their day. Simple concept, but not easy to achieve. Since we all know how easy it is to get riled up in rude interactions and hurl names.

U mad?

Just kidding, I had to throw that in. But one thing to throw in this article is how to view rude people.

Now, this might sound elitist, patronizing, call it whatever, and I don't care. What I'm telling you is practical, and that's all that's needed in this world.

So the way to view rude people is people who don't know any better or are having a bad day.

That's it.

We don't know what people are going through. Their pet may have died, they may have lost their job, or they were raised in a rougher part of town. There could be a million reasons why the person you are dealing with is rude.

I am not excusing their behaviour.

I am just accepting human nature for what it can produce. So the next time someone pisses you off, and you're about to give them a stone-cold stunner, follow these steps.

Step 1: Remain calm.

You want to be sorta invincible in the sense that most things don't rile you up. I wrote a whole article on this, called The samurai trait to focus on in life.

And it goes in-depth on remaining calm in general. This step is crucial because it shows you dare to face things in life and not let your emotions overrun you. The best of mankind demonstrated being calm during turbulent times in life.

Although rude people aren't life and death situations, calmness still applies to preventing them from getting under your skin. Since they are humans not knowing any better or having a bad day, they shouldn't faze you. However, this next step might disturb you. But bare with me.

Step 2: If appropriate, apologize, regardless of whose at fault.

It's bad enough not to let rude people annoy us, but to apologize. I must indeed be out of my mind!

Yet, there is something deeper to it.

Yes, I am asking you to apologize regardless of who is at fault. But this is to show your maturity. Since you see interactions with rude people as petty, you apologize to end the exchange on a good note and move on.

It takes a strong person to do this.

To know that they are in the right but still apologize. Very few people follow through on this. But again, you are different. You are on the path of maturity and authenticity. But all of this sounds like too much work!

And you're wondering if you can just avoid rude people?

Like I said earlier in this article, rude people are everywhere, and you can't avoid them all the time. So we have to learn how to handle them appropriately. Otherwise, if we are inexperienced, we can accidentally turn a petty matter into a problematic situation. So it's better to learn and implement this in our lives. So that we have the insight and maturity to let petty matters be petty and move on in life.

I know this sounds simple.

But look online for stories of how road rage turned into a severe offence. It all started with a minor mishap. These things can happen randomly. So it's our responsibility to prepare ourselves to deal with this world.

And the sigma males' prophet, Marcus Aurelius, can attest to this with this entry in his diary:

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural."

Someone who understood these ideas from Marcus Aurelius was Hideyoshi, the great unifier of Japan. Who dealt with his fair share of jerks but didn't allow them to undo their decades' worth of work.

Hideyoshi

Sake, insults, and a room of powerful men. These were the ingredients for taking down Hideyoshi by Katsuie and Morimasa.

They did not want to see Hideyoshi succeed anymore. Even though they served their recently murdered warlord, Nobunaga, they did not wish for Hideyoshi to gain any more power.

So they planned to invite all the powerful barons and force Hideyoshi to drink a lot of sake. Then when he was drunk, insult him, start a fight and kill him.

It was a simple plan.

But you can't defeat a man like Hideyoshi with simplicity.

Anyways, the plan goes according to plan with the gathering and drinks. Then Katsuie asked Hideyoshi to shampoo his hair, something the young Hideyoshi had done once twenty years ago. Many in the room were shocked by such a request, especially of Hideyoshi's stature.

Without missing a beat.

Hideyoshi agreed and apologized that his drunkness might give Katsuie a poor shampooing experience. The room was stunned by his response and became sympathetic. Katsuie was ashamed of his request and pretended to sleep.

Ending that situation.

But Morimasa did not want his plan to be defeated. So he egged Hideyoshi on by telling him that he should not leave this insult unpunished.

And calmly, Hideyoshi tells Morimasa about how the wife of the emperor in the past once washed the body of a beggar. And shampooing Katsuie is minor compared to that.

On top of this response, Hideyoshi gives a short speech.

Where he explains why he does not want to let small trifles break their unity. Something they all worked decades for. And any internal strife would allow their external enemies to strike.

Again, the room was stunned.

And like Katsuie, Morimasa accepted their plan as failed.

Takeaway lesson

When you know your worth, mission, and what you want in life. You will not let rude people get in the way of it. You can see Hideyoshi was in the right, yet look at how he dealt with such a volatile situation.

Hideyoshi is human, and we can follow his example when dealing with rude people. Another thing we can take after him is avoiding this common mistake when dealing with rude people.

Becoming conflict-averse

I want to be crystal clear here. I am not saying to be conflict-averse. In petty matters, deal with rude people, as mentioned in this article.

However, if anything serious requires you to tackle the situation, then deal with it accordingly. You must be able to tell the nuisance when a matter is petty or severe. In fact, a rule of thumb in life is that things are rarely black and white. And you have to be able to tell the different types of gray.

Another thing to note.

Even in serious matters, you still handle it as if it were rude people on petty issues with calmness and politeness. But unlike the minor concerns, where you let it go, of severe matters, you are unwilling to shy away from the issue that needs to be dealt with.

And for this article, let's not shy away from the fact this needs to end soon.

Summary

• Learning how to deal with rude people is essential since this will always be part of our lives and proves our maturity.

• The best way to view rude people is as if they don't know any better or are having a bad day.

• To interact with rude people, remain calm. And if appropriate, apologize, regardless of whose at fault in the petty situation.

• Avoiding rude people is not a wise strategy. We need to deal with them as they come to build our experience. Otherwise, our inexperience can turn a petty situation into a problematic one.

• Hideyoshi is a prime example of how to deal with rude people when the stakes are high.

• A common mistake in dealing with rude people is to become conflict-averse. Dealing with rude people, as I mentioned, is for petty matters. Anything serious has to be dealt with upfront.

Rude people will never go away.

Instead of thinking that people need to change, it's better to consider how we can change ourselves to better adapt to life.

It's not easy changing ourselves.

Trust me, I know, but it is easier than moving the Mona Lisa to a different floor.

Until next time,

Bulcha

The Charismatic Nerd