Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Difficult People: Over 325 Ready-to-Use Words and Phrases for Working with Challenging Personalities

Renee Evenson

Oct 2013 · Sold by AMACOM

About this ebook

How to Manage Work Relationships in a Constructive Way that Leads to Success.

Learning how to maintain strong, harmonious work relationships is essential. Unfortunately, at some point in your career, you'll have to work with people whose personalities or habits make every interaction with them a trial.

Communications expert Renee Evenson has written the definitive phrasebook on how to confront the situations that can arise when dealing with difficult personalities and bring about a positive outcome. Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Difficult People is packed with practical and easy-to-use tactics such as:

• 325 powerful phrases to communicate effectively, as well as powerful actions to take in support of those phrases.
• 30 common personality traits, behaviors, and workplace scenarios along with the phrases that work best with each.
• Nonverbal communication actions to back up your words.
• Sample dialogues that demonstrate how phrasing improves interactions.
• A five-step process for moving from conflict to resolution.
• "Why This Works" sections that provide detailed explanations.

Often, an employee who can interact well with others and feels comfortable handling conflict will be promoted over an employee who possesses greater job or technical knowledge. From egotistical bosses to meeting monopolizers, you'll learn how to develop the skills to handle any type of conflict with anyone.

Ratings and reviews

Not as described!! It does not have 'phrases' to use. Instead, it plays out make-believe scenarios over and over and suggests how they should be handled. This may be useful to a teenager entering a corporate environment, but as for adults who already behave like adults, it is not useful at all. I was expecting examples of sayings, such as "your urgency does not make it my priority". Not, role-play between two narcissists, then deconstruction of why it goes wrong. And Google doesn't refund it. Waste of $13.

good simple read and opened up my mind to know that you can help people change their perspective and even manage conversations when you start of the right foot in the conversation

From looking at the free sample, it appears one claim is to avoid starting a sentence with the word "you". A recommendation is to start with the word "I". For example, instead of saying, "You interrupted me," say, "I was upset when you interrupted me." In my opinion, the examples provided did not address the concept being presented. The word "you" continued to be used in the spirit of accusation. Perhaps an alternative could be to say, "I get upset when I'm interrupted." If I'm going to purchase an instructional book, then I would prefer one that has greater consistency in presenting concepts.

About the author

REN'E EVENSON is a small-business consultant specializing in workplace communication and conflict resolution strategies. She is the author of several books, including Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service and Customer Service Training 101.