Have you ever gotten upset with a colleague or client for not responding to multiple emails or phone calls? What about someone cutting corners or not being honest with you? 

I personally get really irritated when people are inconsiderate of my time. What about you?

If you’ll take the time to look inside your own life when you experience the same maddening experience from more than one person, you may be handed your perfect remedy.

Getting to the Solution

First, clarify your intended outcome before talking to the person or taking action. 

Second, check in with your level of irritation. If it’s medium to high, you’ll want to bring it down a notch or it’ll become an obstacle to your desired outcome. Try one or a combination of the strategies below:

1. Check in with yourself. Is your irritation legitimate, or are you making a bigger deal of things than needed? Get a second opinion if you’re not sure.

2. Communicate frankly with the person about the situation. State your desired outcome, make a request for what you need, and explain why you’re making the request. Let them know the impact of their behavior in a matter-of-fact way. You want to steer away from making them feel guilty.

3. Neutralize your frustration. Energetically you can’t get a different response from someone unless you get your focus off the behavior that’s irritating you. You’ll need to trust that you can still get your desired outcome no matter what they’re doing. For instance, my mate isn’t known for his punctuality. When he’s running late, I focus on getting to where we’re going in perfect timing no matter what time we leave the house. It always works out, one way or another.

4. Look in your own life. Are you doing the same behavior as the person/s you are frustrated with in that area of your life? If you are and it doesn’t feel good, then that is the very reason you’re experiencing this behavior with someone else. Don’t focus on integrity as the issue… as in you have to walk your talk. This is about energetic focus.

One of my coaching clients was complaining about someone on his team who kept bypassing his supervisors and having little chats with the head honcho of their division. But guess what my client does when he wants immediate results? Bypasses his boss and goes straight to the head honcho. He always feels a little bad about doing it, therefore a perfect setup for one of his employees to do the same. The behaviors are a vibrational match.

Either my client needs to change how he feels about going around his boss, or stop going around his boss himself. Another option is to change how he feels about his employee doing the same thing.

5. Get clear on why the behavior triggers you. Let’s go back to the example of my mate’s tardiness yanking my chain. I make up a story that someone who is always late to meet me or causes me to be late somewhere is disrespecting me. And while you may agree with me, in his brain it’s got nothing to do with disrespect or even me. It’s about his own stories about having to be somewhere at a certain time.

Once you know WHY it triggers you, you may be able to instantly disconnect from your irritation and work on releasing the trigger. In other cases it will help you to design a different system or way of communicating with the person.

Because it’s important for me to be on time, and I know my partner isn’t intentionally disrespecting me, I’ve created systems AND communication to ensure my needs are met. I tell him a time to meet me that’s much earlier than I would someone else… and I communicate the importance of him being on time. I set us both up to win with my plan. For instance, I don’t schedule date night in San Francisco on a work night… it’s a recipe for disaster with him rushing home from work and then us fighting traffic into the city.

Bottom line: Don’t sit in your irritation. Dig into a solution that may or may not involve a conversation with the person. And be open to YOUR thinking being the only problem… not them.

Change your perception, change your life. 😉

Did this help or make you more irritated?

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