There’s No Such Thing as a Difficult Person

Move 1 — Reframe: strengths are neutral, not good or bad

When Rayne looks at a “difficult” person, she doesn’t see a personality problem. She sees a profile, and a consistent one: people who see what’s possible when others can’t. People who aren’t stopped by the barriers that stop everyone else. People who have confidence and who can communicate. 

Every single one of those is a strength. They land as “difficult” because the very traits that make someone a visionary make them intimidating to be on the other side of.

Here’s a reframe that helps lower the temperature: strengths are neutral. There’s no good or bad version of “sees what’s possible and won’t be told no,” it just is what it is. Like any strength, it can be harnessed or it can run unmanaged.

There’s data that supports and makes sense of this, not just vibes from years of coaching conversations. Rayne has the trait of Command in her own top five strengths — a strength that lands in the top five for only about 2% of women (and roughly 5% of men). It lives in Clifton Strengths’ “influencing” domain, which is the domain that shows up LEAST often in leaders, period. So when someone reads as intimidating, it’s often because they’re carrying genuinely rare wiring. The people we call difficult aren’t broken. They’re rare — which is a very different thing.

So if it’s not a character flaw, what IS the gap? Usually one specific skill: the ability to see something through someone else’s eyes. The visionary who steamrolls a meeting often genuinely can’t feel what the room is feeling — and that’s a skill gap, not a character flaw. So Rayne treats “difficult” as a skill, knowledge, or will gap — something that can be named and worked on — instead of a verdict on who someone is. Not “this person is an asshole,” but “this person hasn’t built that muscle yet.”

That shift sounds small. It is not. The second you stop asking “why are they LIKE this?” and start asking “which strength is running unmanaged, and which skill is missing?” — you’ve got something you can actually work with. For them, or for yourself.

Which strength is running unmanaged?

Move 2 — Get out of your own head: thought or fact?

Most of the exhaustion of dealing with a “difficult” person doesn’t come from them. It comes from the story we’re telling ourselves about them.

Rayne is wonderfully blunt about this. When thoughts like they don’t respect me, they’re trying to undermine me  are running over and over in your head, you are, in her words, wasting your intellectual firepower. Our thoughts are finite, and you’ll never actually know someone’s intent (they often don’t know it themselves). So assigning it with total certainty is as unhelpful as it is tiring.

So the first move is a question to ask yourself: Thought or Fact? “They were late to our last three meetings” is a fact. “They don’t value my time” is a thought you created. The behavior might be real, but the intent you’ve assigned is a story, and the story is what’s eating you alive.

Rayne developed her Thought or Fact exercise before she ever took on a coaching client. Rayne has OCD, and deals with intrusive thinking she describes as “waterboarding for the brain.” So, she had to get genuinely good at interrupting her own thought spirals. Out of that came this tool she now uses with leaders. Once you’ve recognized that the thing gnawing at you is a thought, not a fact, you run it through four questions:

1. Is this thought helpful to my mental and physical well-being?
2. Does it take into account all the positive alternatives — or just the worst case?
3. Would I tell a friend to think this way?
4. Is it helping me move forward?

Here’s Rayne’s favorite part: it’s a trick. The answer to all four is always no. That’s the point. The power isn’t in the answers, it’s in the asking, which cracks the window just enough to set the thought aside for a moment and look at the actual behavior in front of you. This matters because if you walk into a conversation still telling yourself they don’t respect me, that’s the conversation you’ll have, no matter what words come out of your mouth.

Move 3 — Name the behavior, not the story: Notice / Impact / Suggest

Now you actually have to say something — and this is where most of us fumble, because we still lead with the story we just worked so hard to set aside. You don’t respect my time. You’re being dismissive. You steamrolled that meeting. Every one of those is an interpretation, and the second a “difficult” person hears it, you’re not talking about the work anymore — you’re in a fight about character.

Rayne’s move is a clean four-part structure that keeps the conversation on the behavior and off the character verdict:

• Notice — name what you observed, like a camera would. “In our last two meetings, you cut me off before I finished my point.” No adjectives, no intent.
• Impact — say what it did. “When that happens, I lose my train of thought, and I leave unsure if my piece was heard.” Your experience, not their motive.
• Suggest — offer a path. “Could we try letting each person finish before we jump in?” A request, not a referendum.
• Question — hand it back. “How does that sit with you?” This is the move that turns this into a true conversation.

What makes this work — especially with someone “difficult” — is that there’s nothing to argue with. You can debate “you’re dismissive” all day. You can’t really debate “you cut me off twice.” And because you’ve stripped out the intent, they don’t have to get defensive to protect themselves. (Remember the skill they’re often missing — seeing through someone else’s eyes? Notice/Impact/Suggest gently hands them that view.)

Two things Rayne would want you to know. 

• It usually feels stiff the first few times — do it anyway. She makes leaders role-play it three or four times out loud before the real thing. Yes, everyone hates a role-play, AND it works. 
• You can adapt this to whoever’s across from you.

Managing UP at a “difficult” boss? Same three parts, softer suggest: “The plan shifted twice this week. The impact is I’m not sure which version to build against. Could we lock it in before I start?” You’re not managing their personality — you’re naming a behavior and its cost to the work, which almost any boss can hear.

A peer, no authority in the room? Same structure, and it works because it never pulls rank: “When the deck changed the night before, I had to redo my section at 11pm. Could we lock shared docs 48 hours out?”

Move 4 — If you ARE the difficult one: own your strengths AND your wake

If you read that profile in Move 1 and felt a little seen — the vision, the drive, the effect you have on a room — this part’s for you.

The trap most “difficult” people fall into once they realize they’re landing as difficult: they try to shrink. Talk less. Push less. Soften every edge until they’re a smaller, more palatable version of themselves. It almost never works — partly because it’s miserable, and partly because the sector NEEDS what you do at full power. The vision and the refusal to accept “that’s just how it is” aren’t the problem. They’re the point. A leader is literally paid to be out front with a point of view. Having one isn’t the bug. Not knowing how to bring people with you is.

Rayne’s the proof. She’s not interested in becoming less command-y, less direct, less her. What she’s built instead is the ability to aim the strength rather than fire it indiscriminately, and that’s the difference between a strength harnessed and one running unmanaged. The work isn’t to have less of your strength. It’s to know it well enough to drive it.

Rayne developed a simple tool to help folks harness these strengths: The RID Process.

• Reflect: Briefly describe an upcoming project, meeting, or relationship that is important to your goals and legacy — and may be challenging.
• Identify: Which strength could show up and, if unmanaged, hinder your success? Name the strength and how it could get in the way.
• Decide: Choose one specific action you will take to manage the potential negative side of this strength so it supports — rather than undermines — your goals. Describe how this action keeps you aligned with your desired outcome.

Here’s how this could look in real life:

• Reflect: I am preparing for a high-stakes presentation to a board of directors, where success will set the stage for a large-scale project approval.
• Identify: My Achiever strength could push me to work tirelessly to complete every detail — overloading the presentation with unnecessary detail, skipping delegation, and losing sight of the bigger picture.
• Decide: I will set a clear boundary on preparation time and prioritize three key points that align directly with the board’s interests. I will assign supporting tasks to team members and trust their contributions.

And, when you’re in the moment and the RID-process doesn’t apply, she has a couple almost-embarrassingly simple tactics for the big personalities who tend to take up all the oxygen in the room:

• The pre-speak gut check. Before you jump in, ask yourself: Is what I’m about to say of value — at this moment, with these people? If not, hold it. (Yes, sometimes the move is just to not talk.)
• Doodle. Genuinely. Giving your hand something to do is one of the simplest ways a dominant voice makes room for everyone else’s.

But you can’t aim what you can’t see — and you genuinely can’t see your own wake. So the other half of this move is building the one missing skill: seeing how you come off through others’ eyes.

You know what you meant. What you can’t see from the inside is how it landed. So ask. “How did that meeting feel from where you sat?” Then don’t defend. Just take it in. 

Here’s the catch this type of person always runs into: you’ll swear you ask for feedback. You tell people you want it. And it doesn’t come — because roughly 9 in 10 people are uncomfortable challenging their boss, and the very confidence that makes you effective also makes you hard to push back on. (People with this wiring often don’t even feel the power dynamic, which is exactly why they underestimate it.)

So you can’t wait for honest feedback to arrive. You have to lower the bridge, on purpose, over and over: be transparent about what you’re working on, ask people to affirm it when they DO see you doing the new thing — not only flag when you don’t — and thank them specifically when they push back. 

Move 5 — Keep the main thing the main thing

Remember Pat’s words: I don’t have time for this. That worked on me not because it dismissed the difficulty, but because it pointed at something more important — the work. We were driving food to schools so kids could eat. THAT was the main thing. My frustration with one colleague was real, AND it was not the main thing.

When Rayne talks about keeping the main thing the main thing, she doesn’t mean a tagline either. She means a person — a girl she started kindergarten with in a Louisiana town of 200, someone who took 40 years to finish her college degree. THAT’s the main thing. The reason she’s in the room at all. It’s the same engine under all her work: as she tells her own clients, some of whom she’s coached for YEARS — I love you AND I’m a big cheerleader for you, and the reason I do this is because I expect you to go do something with the privilege of the seat you’re in. The more supported and brave a leader gets, the more they spend that privilege on the people who don’t have it.

This is the move that keeps all the others honest. None of this is about being conflict-free for its own sake — it’s in service of the mission. So you get to keep asking two questions, on purpose:

• What’s the main thing here? When you zoom out to why you’re actually in this work — the kids, the community, the mission — a startling amount of the friction gets smaller. Not gone. Smaller. Worth less of your energy. (It’s also just freeing.)
• Is this working — for the mission AND for me? Because keeping the main thing the main thing is NOT a mandate to tolerate anything forever. Sometimes the honest answer is that the dynamic isn’t worth what it’s costing, and the most main-thing move you can make is to change the role, change the team, or walk. (Rayne names this straight up: sometimes the spinning is really code for I’m ready to move on — and naming that is its own kind of progress.) That’s not failure. It’s clarity.

For me, all those years ago, the answer was to stay, and that “difficult” colleague became someone I deeply admired. Your answer might be different. The point isn’t the answer. It’s that you get to ask the question from a place of what serves the work — instead of from the middle of the thought spiral.