No one wants to swim with sharks. Yet difficult people are, by their very nature, sharks: Aggressive, territorial, and tribal. When we unexpectedly find ourselves dealing with a difficult person, we often give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they will “play fair”. In our desire to “get along with others”, we often just make the situation worse. The hard truth is that we must learn how to identify and respond assertively to difficult people without being “eaten alive”.

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assertiveness