I wish I found wrangling hostile people entertaining instead of terrifying! I had a big learning edge with just learning to politely and firmly shut down people who were off topic and wasting time.
True, being very comfortable with hostility is rare, but it is learnable. I've coached countless professionals to get comfortable with hostility and open conflict. Not being terrified of social interactions is pretty liberating.
Is there a resource you would recommend studying to improve this skill or general ideas on it?
Not that I'm aware of, it was work I did personally with clients. It's largely about cultivating the belief that being liked and being respected are very different things, and that conflict is a necessary element of respect.
I also leaned heavily on behavioural experiments, helping people identify low-stakes situations where they could experiment with encouraging conflict rather than avoiding it and seeing what happens.
It usually doesn't take much to flip someone from being terrified of conflict to welcoming it.
A lot of this comes down to people-pleasing behaviours, so any resources that address that would likely be useful.
We're conditioned at a young age to believe that someone being mad at us is "bad" and reflects poorly on our behaviour, and we carry this belief through into our adult relationships.
When really, our parents or teachers getting mad at us was actually them caring about what we were doing. So if you modify the meaning of aggression away from judgement of us to someone expressing that they care deeply about something, it stops being about us and starts being about them.
What do they care so much about that they're getting angry?? What role and responsibility do we have for that anger?
If someone is angry in my direction and I do legitimately hold some responsibility for why and for solving it, that's great, that means I can actually do something about it.
If I don't hold any responsibility for causing or fixing what the person is caring deeply about, then it's just not my problem. My only job it to determine if I need to make that clear or just let the person do their angry thing and ignore them.
The key is to understand that hostility and aggression only reflect on you as a person when they come from someone who cares deeply about you and whose judgement about who you are matters to you.
Otherwise it's just a strong opinion someone holds. You get to decide how relevant that opinion is to you.
Also, the most important thing is that you can't stop people from being angry at you. People are angry at you regularly because all humans are incredibly annoying to someone. There's no amount of people-pleasing a person can engage in to stop people from being angry at them.
People who express that anger can be managed, people who silently, politely fume can't be. Angry people are asking you to help them feel better about their anger. Polite fumers just fucking hate you silently and wish you harm.
I'll take a yeller any day.
I can pretty much guarantee that I can get to a good place of mutual respect with a yeller. To get to that place with a silent fumer, I actually have to push them into open conflict to diffuse their rage.
