Dealing With Obnoxious People

Another awesome day to all of you motivated and enthusiastic salespeople and businesspeople! Today is one more day full of opportunities to get out there in your marketplace and identify the people who are planning to sell, or buy, a home in the very near future. Have you prepared yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally to take advantage of all of those opportunities?

One of the greatest challenges and realizations that we will eventually need to come to is the fact that not everyone is just like us … thankfully, right?! As many of you know, we are able to classify people based on one of four majority personality profiles—meaning that there is one of the four styles that tends to be dominant in the way a person thinks, acts, and communicates. Based on the popular DISC system, we would classify a person as having either Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, or Conscientiousness as their most prominent personality trait, with the understanding that all of us are really a blend of all four.

And then there’s that ever-so exciting fifth personality style that we all know and love, and have probably ALL had the questionable privilege of encountering from time to time … the Jerk. Yes—the unfortunate reality is that when you make sales your profession and you go out into the world to meet and talk with people about the opportunity to provide your product or service, you will no doubt encounter this type … rude for no reason, completely unreasonable, often demeaning, and able to make your blood quickly boil. You might get through an entire week and then you come to that last person that you want to engage on a Friday afternoon … and BAM—there they are!

The question is: How do we deal with these people when we find them? Do we stoop to their level? Do we allow them to ‘rent space in our heads’ and throw us completely out of focus and off of our game plan for the day? Do we avoid lead generating or following up all-together out of fear of running into one of these ‘Jerks’? The answer to all of these is, NO! Listen—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encouraged my coaching clients that if this is the way someone chooses to behave toward you when you are simply out trying to do your job and help people, they are the one with the issue, not you. It’s equally important to remember that a person like this is definitely not worth deviating from your goals, your plan, and your focus—meaning don’t allow them to occupy any more of your emotional bandwidth than that initial few seconds. Find a way to laugh … pity them … and then get back in the game!

Make no mistake, you WILL come across people that you just have to shake your head over and wonder what has happened in their lives that would cause them to respond to you the way that they do—AND their response to you does NOT detract one bit from the value that you offer to those people in your marketplace who DO need and value what you have to offer.

To be as successful as I’m sure most of you want to be, we need to train ourselves how to better recognize and adapt to the different personality styles that we meet. It’s critical that we become as versatile as we possibly can be to help others feel comfortable enough to do business with us. But as Strother Martin said in the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here is … failure to communicate. Some