"Those who love to be feared and fear to be loved, they themselves are more frightened than any one."

– Saint Francis de Sales

I have chosen this quote by Saint Francis de Sales because it is one of the more popular among the participants in my seminars and presentations, and because I believe that it can offer a unique perspective on the "difficult people" that tend to be the focus of so many people's frustration and anger. In fact, I believe that the wisdom in this quote can be valuable in our dealing with any difficult or negative person that we encounter in any walk of life.

In order to understand how this wisdom might be useful, we first must understand how and why we react to difficult people the way we do, and determine whether this reaction is truly serving us. For example, most people would say that they very naturally find themselves reacting to the difficult people in the world with emotions such as resentment, anger, frustration, desire to avoid them, etc. These fight-or-flight reactions are both familiar and understandable, meaning that this is probably not the first time we have found ourselves reacting in such a way, and that it is easy to see how someone would find themselves feeling these emotions, and reacting with these behaviors in response to the negative words and/or actions of others.

In fact, I want to be clear that I am not saying that these reactions are "wrong" or that we "should" be responding in some other way. I am simply suggesting that we ask ourselves the question: Are these reactions truly serving us? Or, put another way, are they helping us create the experience of life that we want with respect to (a) how we define ourselves and (b) how we allow others to influence that experience?

I believe that our tendency to respond to the difficult people in the world with resentment and anger may not be serving us because these responses make these people much more important than we want them to be. In other words, if we define what is "important" as "what occupies our thoughts and emotions," then continually thinking of "them" and "what they did/said to us" allows the difficult person to dominate not only our thoughts and feelings, but the chemicals that are produced by our body as a result of these thoughts.

What I am suggesting instead is that we respond not in a reactive manner, but "On Purpose," or in a way that we have chosen because we feel it best represents who we are, and because we believe that it gives us the best chance to influence our quality of life and the quality of life of those we know and love.

It is from this more purposeful perspective that I believe we can look at the wisdom of this week's quote and discover its value. For example, when Saint Francis de Sales says: "Those who love to be feared and fear to be loved, they themselves are more frightened than any one," what he is doing is characterizing the difficult people in the world as "frightened" versus "frightening." This, in my opinion, is a valuable perspective because it helps us bypass our natural fight-or-flight reaction and choose a more purposeful response. We might just see them as frightened and move on because we have more important things to do. Or, we might see them as a frightened child and respond with compassion or curiosity about what is causing their fear.

However, regardless of how we choose to respond to them (or their response to us), we will be engaging our neocortex and our feelings of clarity (this is information about them and their fear, not about me), confidence (I can choose to engage them with compassion or just wish them well and move on) versus the fear-based, brainstem feelings of frustration and resentment. This means that we will not be reacting to a frightened person with our own fear, but instead we will be in the best place (the Top of our Mind) to choose what we do, what we feel, and who we are . . . on purpose.

Take care and God bless, Dr. Bill