Winning People

Alternate title: How to Avoid Being Avoidable

I’ve been thinking for a while about how some people have a “knack” for alienating others. Or if not alienating them, at least building walls or burning bridges between them.

So if you’re one of those, here are some things you — yes, you — should avoid in order to not flunk the “Winning People” part of real living:

1. Be critical of them or how they do (or don’t do) stuff.
2. Have a scornful or demeaning attitude toward them, even for “justifiable” reasons. 😯
3. Downplay their accomplishments or sufferings by raising up your “superior” ones. 🙄
4. Call attention to your accomplishments or your insights.
5. Make the conversation (if not the prospective relationship) primarily about you.
6. Hold them to your personal standards of whatever…and make sure they know it.
7. Pooh-pooh their personal standards and likes and preferences if you fail to meet them.
8. Be controlling of (and unjust with) those clearly under your authority.
9. Be demanding. (Hint: This is made worse when you have no “right” to be demanding.)
10. Be an ingrate.
11. Be impatient.
12. Be thin-skinned about criticism or less-than-complimentary input.
13. Be rhino-hided about criticism or less-than-complimentary input.
14. Be hyper-sensitive and imaginative (and then unduly inquisitive) about what other people say, do, think, imagine, and mean.
15. Have a Bah Humbug attitude toward this subject and this list. (No, really!)
16. Be disrespectful.
17. Fuss at and criticize and argue with your spouse in public…or in front of them.
18. Don’t apologize when you’re wrong or when you’ve wronged others. Instead make excuses. Or blame others.
19. Take a list like this…and put people on the spot with it (or with this subject as a whole).
20. Imagine I’m targeting this at you specifically. (Do you really think I’d be so careless or class-less? Especially in a wide-open public forum like this? Give me a break!) 😀 Also see #5. 😆

Is there more that should be said on so needful a subject?

Yup, I’m afraid so.

That’s what the Comments section below is about! 🙂

So if you want people to be around you or if you want people to look forward to being around you….listen up!

For all that I know (and for all that you know), some people treat being around you as something that must be done in order to “get it over with.”

Do you like being that kind of person?

Just askin’.

😉

PS: If you’re a Christian, this subject becomes even more important.