{"id":2479,"date":"2007-09-12T17:35:27","date_gmt":"2007-09-12T21:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ewm.com\/2007\/09\/12\/help-im-surrounded-by-jerks\/"},"modified":"2007-09-12T17:35:27","modified_gmt":"2007-09-12T21:35:27","slug":"help-im-surrounded-by-jerks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.myewm.com\/?p=2479","title":{"rendered":"Help, I&#8217;m Surrounded by Jerks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wow, wow, wow! I was throwing out some of the useless stuff on my desk in anticipation of our move to the Alhambra office and look what I found &#8212; an article I saved from the January 18th issue of <em>The New York Times<\/em>. It&#8217;s about the difficult people we have to deal with every day both at home and in the office.<\/p>\n<p>The article breaks difficult personalities into 7 basic categories:  Indecisives, Know-It-All Experts, Super-Agreeables, Complainers, Silent and Unresponsives, Hostile-Aggressives and Negativists . . . and goes on to explain that difficult people are not harmless. The <em>Times<\/em> quotes one management consultant as saying:  <em>&#8220;The impact of slowing productivity or creating unhappy customers is immeasurable, unknowable and often a company&#8217;s biggest cost.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Experts agree that we need to find a way to communicate with these people because they&#8217;re not going away.  Psychologists say people exhibit difficult behavior because they have a need that&#8217;s not being met. The article presents a very clear message:  <em>In the end, we cannot control other people, only our response to them.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I thought about this many times after I read it and even brought the article to the office to show the other Muses. Yes, it was interesting reading and it spawned a couple of knowing laughs, but the honest truth is that on any given day I can easily morph into an ugly personality that fits snugly within one of the 7 categories listed above. On those days the jerk I&#8217;m forced to deal with is <em>me<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Somewhere &#8212; not in the <em>Times<\/em> article &#8212; I read that if I&#8217;m not part of the solution, I&#8217;m part of the problem. I guess I have a lot of work to do and it&#8217;s not all about making ads look good, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wow, wow, wow! I was throwing out some of the useless stuff on my desk in anticipation of our move to the Alhambra office and look what I found &#8212; an article I saved from the January 18th issue of The New York Times. It&#8217;s about the difficult people we have to deal with every [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2041,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_expiration-date-status":"","_expiration-date":0,"_expiration-date-type":"","_expiration-date-categories":[],"_expiration-date-options":[]},"categories":[79,91],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.myewm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.myewm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.myewm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.myewm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2041"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.myewm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.myewm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.myewm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.myewm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.myewm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}