While most of us, hopefully, lead relatively contented lives with a circle of amicable friends, family and work colleagues it’s fair to say it’s not uncommon to have at least one relationship in your life that causes a bit of grief. It may be a colleague, an in law, a sibling, someone on the school committee – and it can vary from a mild unease to full-blown confrontation.
Doris Schachenhofer has worked for many years with people in roles from social worker with homeless people, delinquent teens and prisoners to international speaker and workshop facilitator and she believes sometimes these frictions are easier to deal with than we think.
Doris spends most of her time these days traveling the world facilitating classes and workshops for Access Consciousness. In her ‘Being You Adventures’ classes she really helps people reduce stressful situations and relationships of all kinds.
Here are her 6 tips for those stuck in difficult relationships:
- Acknowledge the situation is not working for you, even if only to yourself. Don’t try and pretend everything is okay, in the hope it will be.
- Don’t speculate that it’s about you, they may have something else going on in their lives that you don’t know about. It may not even have anything to do with you.
- Don’t let it consume you– don’t obsess and talk about it all the time to others as it makes the problem bigger. Make sure you retain your sense of fun and take that joy with you wherever you go – don’t miss out on your own life because of someone else’s behavior. Constantly feeling like the victim is exhausting.
- Be grateful for that person. This may sound impossible if someone is being unkind but just try it for 20 seconds a day. Gratitude and anger can’t coexist – I’ve seen a lot of people dissolve resentment by focusing less on it.
- Start fresh every day. Don’t let yesterday determine today and see every interaction with that person as a clean slate. Choose to be kind even if they aren’t, choose to be happy rather than approaching that person with anger and frustration due to the past.
- Always be you. Don’t turn into someone else around that person, keep being you and keep being fun and don’t make yourself small.
“It’s too easy to get into vicious circles with people and start to dread being around them,” says Doris. “Because we feel that way before we’ve even seen them, the chances of an interaction going wrong are high; we need to learn to shift this. I teach my students these strategies, which I’ve seen work in my own life, and many of them report enormous success.”
About Doris Schachenhofer
After completing her social work studies in Vienna, Doris Schachenhofer worked with children, homeless people, delinquent teenagers and prisoners transitioning back into the real world. As an Access Consciousness® facilitator, she now travels the world supporting people to be more of themselves. Her Being You classes are delivered in both live and online settings. Follow Doris here and on Instagram.