Don’t Let Them Bring You Down: Strategies for Dealing with Rude and Aggressive People

Q: Should I say something when somebody is rude?

Sometimes, and know what you are hoping for. Most people who have genuinely not noticed are mortified when it is pointed out. The ones who snap back are usually embarrassed rather than defiant.

Q: Does this mean I have to excuse bad behaviour?

No. It means not carrying it round the rest of the day on their behalf. What they did stays theirs. Your afternoon does not have to be part of the payment.

Q: How do I get better at this?

Start with compassion for yourself, because you make these mistakes too. I put scuff marks on every skirting board in my house with the wheelchair. Anybody who thinks they never cause anybody any bother has simply not been told.

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anger · compassion · relationships · boundaries

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You wouldn't believe how rude some people can be.

Just you're minding your own business and they push in front of

you in the queue, they let the door slam in front of you, they fall

over my feet.

Ah, really annoying.

Frustrating.

How to deal with these rude and ungrateful, aggressive, arrogant

people, meddling people in our lives.

How do we deal with these?

That's today's show.

Welcome to Stillness in the Storms, a podcast dedicated to finding

peace and calm in the midst of life's challenges.

Whether you're dealing with personal struggles, global crisis,

or simply the daily stress of modern life, this podcast is here

to help you find a sense of balance and well being.

That int was wrote by chat, GTP, GHP, OpenAI, or just AI.

I don't know what it's called, but yeah, I thought it did pretty

good.

I typed it in and said explain Stillness in the Storms podcast and

that's what it wrote.

Welcome to Stillness in the Storms, a podcast dedicated to finding

peace and calm in the midst of life's challenges.

Whether you are dealing with personal struggles, global crisis,

or simply a daily stress of modern life, this podcast is here

to help you find a sense of balance and well being.

I thought that was pretty awesome.

I thought that was pretty good.

It also gave me a couple of other examples and I'll do them on

the next two podcasts.

But you know, it did better than me.

So I'm going to be out of a job soon.

I'm just going to say, hey, write a podcast and I'll just read

it.

I'm only joking.

I'm only joking.

You get me.

You get 100% me or on this podcast, 98% me.

But yeah, I want to talk about rude, arrogant, just ungrateful,

meddling people.

But just before that, I want to say thank you to Jennifer, Laura

and Audrey.

Thank you so much for donating and it makes all the difference.

And I've made it really easy now for people to go and download

the five Simple Practices for Inner Peace.

It's a book I wrote not that long ago and it just gives you a

little more inner peace in life.

Really simple things you can do even if you cannot meditate.

And also there's a donate button as well which helps me with

the hosting of this podcast and helps me with the editing.

The more help with the editing, the more episodes I can

put out and it really makes a difference.

So head over to thank you steven dot com.

Yeah, that's easy.

Thank you steven Dot com.

There you go.

And I will remind you at the end of the podcast so we can sit

back and relax and just enjoy the podcast.

Okay?

Talking about meddling and interfering people, I've got a wonderful

quote by Marcus Aurelius, and I always use this.

I always go back and read it whenever people are starting to really

annoy me.

Because, you know, people annoy me, you know, all the time.

It's not like you get to a place in life where you find inner

peace and nobody ever bothers you.

Nobody ever gets on your nerves and everything's rosy and

you're walking around in this world and it's just beautiful and

you're hugging trees and everything's just love.

It's just not like that.

People will still annoy you.

People still get on your nerves, and it's the reality of things.

I get on my own nerves, trust me.

My mind is so mentally chattering all the time that I'm

like, seriously, you want to think about that now?

As if I'm not busy enough.

You know exactly what I'm saying, you know exactly what I'm

saying.

And you know, and it comes up with the most inappropriate things

to think about when not thinking about it, where nothing.

If it's like, can you think of the most inappropriate thing to think

about now?

Yep, already on it.

That's your mind.

That's what the mind does.

But I want to go back to this quote, right?

Marcus AURELIUS, you know, 2,000 years ago, two and a half thousand

years ago, he was on it, wasn't he?

So 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 will be like this because they can't tell good from evil.

But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil.

And I have recognized that the wrongdoer has 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.

Marcus Aurelius, okay, it's kind of long quote, but I want to

pick it apart a bit later in the podcast.

But let's get to the main point of this.

I was out with my sister the other day and we had a doctor's appointment

and we queued up at the chemist and I, you know, something

shiny caught my eye, so I went and had a look at it and I, I think

my sister bent down to look at something in a bag or something like

that and someone went past her and just, you know, jumped the queue.

And I got back and said, you're right.

And yes, yeah, just lost my place in the queue.

I went, all right, did you move?

And she went, no, I was right here, so.

Okay.

And I could tell my sister was agitated and I, I said, don't worry

about it, it's fine.

And we had this conversation relatively quiet, but I think my

sister wanted the person to hear in some way.

I can do confrontation, I'm terrified of it.

I'm like, don't say anything, God, you know, hide, you know, put

the blinds up, you know, no one can see me that I'm agitated.

I would hate for them to.

But in somewhat there's a part of me, there's a voice inside of

me that wants them to know that, hey, you just done me wrong.

You've just really, you've ruined my day, you know, okay then,

ruin my day.

But you know what I mean, you feel hard done by.

It's not right.

It's not just you waiting in the queue.

They should do the same thing.

They're adults for Christ's sake, they're not two year old children.

So we have all that process in our mind of all these different things

and we see it the way we see it now then if I see it from my sister's

perspective, she was in a queue there, plain view obvious,

she was in the queue.

So why would someone do that?

And that's a correct perspective.

Then take another perspective.

Someone's walking in through the door, they're not sure if they're

putting something in their bag.

Are they just looking at the shelf?

The shelves were quite close.

Were they minding their own business?

Perhaps they had their head in the phone or something like that.

Don't judge that, just, we all do it sometimes.

Maybe they had an important phone call, whatever reason, and

she just didn't take much notice and walk past and join the

queue.

You know, that's a different perspective and that's again a correct

perspective based on the person that jumped the queue.

Maybe that's where they were viewing.

And the thing is, there's multiple reasons why we do these

ignorant, stupid things.

We're not always walking around blissfully aware of everything

else that's going on.

When I drove my car before my accident, I was only driving for

about eight months.

But the amount of times I would cut in front of someone or

someone would beep and things like that.

And that's only the times that people pointed out to me.

I wonder how many times I did it.

And someone, like, went, oh, they just pulled out in front of

me or done something wrong or braked aggressively and things like

that.

All those things people moaned about.

But the thing is, unless it's pointed out to us, we don't know

we did it.

And very often, if it is pointed out, we go on the defensive

and we try to justify it.

It's like, no, I didn't do that.

I was perfectly fine.

There was plenty of room.

Well, there might have been plenty of room from your perspective.

It may not have been plenty of room from their perspective and their

ability to drive.

Who knows?

So the point is, I'm making.

There's multiple perspectives and there's multiple rights.

It's really interesting.

It doesn't mean just because your right differs from their right,

it doesn't mean your right is any more than theirs.

There's multiple truths.

And, you know, and we're talking about opinion here and the

way we feel about things.

I'm not talking about an absolute truth of, you know, H2O

is H2O.

No.

Who looks at it.

I'm talking about opinionated truths.

And if you have an opinion, if you have, you know, I have a truth

that I love and chocolate chip ice cream, someone else, and I personally

think chocolate chip ice cream is the best flavor in the world,

Having every flavor in the world, but I can't see it being beaten

yet.

That's not a truth for somebody else.

It's a true for me.

So we have multiple truths, multiple perspectives.

And so I wanted to get that out of the way to begin with because

that's one way of helping you to realize that, you know, they didn't

necessarily get out of bed to be ignorant and rude and jump in

front.

And very often, most people would be really embarrassed.

You know, if you trust, you just put in front, they go, oh, my

God, I'm so sorry.

I didn't realize.

I'm not saying say that.

I'm just saying just don't worry about it.

And that's the way you deal with it.

Just, you know, everybody is just doing their best.

Everybody's distracted.

Everybody's thinking about other stuff.

Everybody's just doing what they're doing, minding their own

businesses.

Maybe or getting into other people's business, you know, whatever

we're doing, people are doing what they're doing and they're not

always thinking.

And when we remember that, we have a softness.

I've done a TikTok video the other day about the subtle mind just

have a softness to it.

And one way of explaining that is a good metaphor, is Alan Watts

says about the wake of a ship.

So a ship goes by and we all create a wake.

Then we can create a wake that's turbulent and up and down

and all that, that everybody's gotta hold onto their rafts and try

to stay in the boat.

Or we can just be a little more subtle and we can create a wake

that's just a gentle wake that isn't really affected, just a calm.

But you cannot not create a wake.

And the point is you, you're not in control of the wake.

The wake doesn't control the ship, you know, but we can choose

what we do with it.

We can choose to, ah, we can just bob along or we can sit in the

boat screaming at the ship.

How dare you do that?

How dare you disrupt my lovely smooth lake ocean.

That's what we're doing.

We're going up and down on the wake and we're complaining about

it.

The ship's already gone.

You know, the captain's already thinking about the next problem

and that's what we're doing.

We're thinking about the next problem.

We're thinking about how to get out the car park, how to pay

for our bills.

We're.

We're thinking about what we're going to do for tea.

What am I going to do for tea?

I got a nice cottage pie for tea.

I do like my cottage pie anyway.

See, my mind boom straight away to something else.

It's what it does.

It's what it does all the time.

Why are you having fatigue?

Drop me an email.

I'll put a link on the thanks Stephen page to, to a box where you

could message me as well.

You know, you can either donate, download my five simple practices

or you can message me.

What you gonna have for tea?

Don't we live in an interesting world or a life, sir?

How do we deal with these people?

How.

How do we deal with these meddling people?

These people that make mistakes is first of all, recognize

that you make mistakes too.

Secondly, it's not personal.

They don't know you.

They don't care about you.

They're not thinking about you.

They're just doing their natural thing.

How much do you Go around.

When you're walking around the pavement or going around doing things,

how much do you consider them?

You think you do.

You think you do.

But how much do you really consider what.

What they're doing, what kind of life they're living at the moment,

what kind of morning they had, how are they feeling?

Are they hot or cold?

Are they bothered?

Are they struggling?

Are they being able to pay their bills?

You know, how much compassion have you really got for them?

And when you have real compassion for them, you can go,

do you know what?

I don't know their issues.

I don't know what they're encountering on a daily basis.

They may have jumped in front of the queue.

They may have let a door slam on me.

They may have been blindsided and walked into my chair, whatever.

You know, all these things people do.

I don't know whether that morning they got out of bed and they

were part of a violent alteration.

I don't know whether or not they had the Most terrible news 10

minutes before.

I don't know if they're struggling to pay their bills or

they're living a happy, really carefree life.

And that's the truth, is we really don't know.

And even if we think we know, we still don't know, because we'll

see someone's life.

Even if we know somewhat part of their life, we don't know all

of their life.

So we might be able to see it and go, do you know what?

They got a lovely partner.

They've got a lovely house.

I know them money, bills or anything like that.

Well, you don't know what they're suffering from.

Otherwise, you don't know if behind closed doors, it's really

like that.

And what one person's dealing with is not what another person deals

with on different levels.

You know, if someone come and said to me, tomorrow you're going

to be.

You're going to be stuck in bed for a week.

I'll be like, okay, that sucks, but I'll be all right.

You say that to somebody else and they're gonna freak.

You're both stuck in bed.

But because I've been stuck in bed because I've had pressure sores

and all that, to me, that's like a walk in the park.

To somebody else, that's not so.

What we're going through is relative.

So have compassion for them.

We live in a rude world.

We live in an ignorant world.

We live in a world that's so busy and so rude and so ignorant

that we're all just trying to get to grips with it, you know, have

compassion for yourself, too.

You make mistakes on a daily basis.

How many mistakes do you make?

Just have compassion for yourself.

I suppose the best way of dealing with these things is just.

I said to my sister when we got out of the car park, I said,

why did you let it bother you?

And she's right.

She said they were rude.

It's not right.

I agree, Totally agree.

But we're now carrying it.

Granted, I was the one that asked her, but we'll take it with

us.

We'll phone a friend, we'll post it on Facebook.

Okay.

My sister doesn't.

But that's the kind of metaphor that we do.

We carry on the rest of the day and we carry it.

A person just made a mistake ignorantly, and they didn't even

know, you know?

Just the same as a car park when someone's in the car and they're

trying to get out and it's.

They got all those things and that perspective on their mind.

Some people find it really hard to drive cars, especially in

a car park, and we're like, come on, go, go.

Come on, you've got plenty of room.

It's like, well, you don't know whether that person had an accident

two days before and they're now worried a bit.

You don't know whether their vision is as good as yours.

And you might say, well, they shouldn't be driving.

Well, I'm sorry.

As long as they pass their vision test, they can drive.

But I know people that don't have a good spatial awareness and

other people that have great spatial awareness but have downfalls

in other ways.

You know, I've got.

I get driven around by five different carriers, and they all

drive differently, and they all have great qualities in driving,

and none of them are perfect.

I'm perfect.

No, I'm not.

I'm not.

I can't even drive my jab properly.

You know, the amount of times I crash that.

And you ought to see my house, you know, I'd say I do the decorating

below 3 foot, which basically means the undecorate in the scuffing

up of the skirt imports and everything.

Yeah, we're just.

Nobody's perfect.

Be a little more compassionate, be a little more forgiving

and realize that we're all just doing our best.

And that's how we deal with rude, ungrateful, arrogant, meddling,

dishonest, jealous people.

We're doing our best, and we're doing it based from our lives

and our perspective.

And what we've learned to be the best.

And I think just have a softening to it.

Just try next time when someone's rude to you, just try doing

nothing with it and it feels better.

Subtle mind, you know, just ride the wake.

Just a gentle.

Do nothing with it.

Don't add no more fuel to the fire.

Add any more fuel.

That's going to make the fire go bigger.

I'm sure I didn't need to explain that metaphor to you.

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.

I always take notice when I'm reading any quotes now.

Whenever it's like 300 years or plus, it's always him.

They very rarely quote her or us or them.

It's always him, which is just funny.

It's just the time.

And that's the way they wrote.

They always wrote about the man, just as if they were the ones

that had all the knowledge.

It's just a ridiculous world.

Ridiculous.

Arrogance and ignorance and narcissistic.

That's what it is.

Can change it.

Can't go back 2,000 years.

We can be entertained by it and bemused by it.

We can be enlightened by it, but we cannot change it.

That's what's really important.

You have the power over your mind, not outside events.

Realize this and you will find strength.

You will find strength.

I like that.

There's so much strength in just being able to stay calm when

everybody else is losing it.

The best answer to anger is silence.

Another quote by him.

Brilliant.

Marcus Aurelius, one of the great Stoic philosophers from about

two and a half thousand years ago in Athens.

He basically lost everything.

He lost his boat and everything.

When he landed in Athens and he started walking around looking

for a positive spin on things, I'm pretty sure that was Bacchus

Aurelius.

Anyway, perhaps I'm wrong.

Anyway, anyway, that's my podcast.

How do you deal with meddling, aggressive, rude, arrogant people?

Should let them be.

Have some compassion for them just the same as we need to have

some compassion for ourselves.

They don't mean to be rude.

If you point it out to them, they're very often apologetic or

they get annoyed that you pointed out because they're actually

embarrassed.

That's a really important point.

And on that really important point, I'm going to say thank you

to Jennifer, Laura and Audra for your donations this week.

Makes a difference.

Thank you.

And if you want to donate or download the five Simple Practices

for Inner Peace or drop me a message telling me what you can eat

for tea later.

You can do so at thankousteven.

Com.

Take care.

I love you.

Bye.

Don’t Let Them Bring You Down: Strategies for Dealing with Rude and Aggressive People

In this episode

With gratitude to

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The transcript

One calm email.
Every Sunday.

Don’t Let Them Bring You Down: Strategies for Dealing with Rude and Aggressive People

In this episode

With gratitude to

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The transcript

More honest conversations

One calm email. Every Sunday.

One calm email.
Every Sunday.