I Wrote a Book. And No, It’s Not About AI.
I can finally say something I never thought I would ever say: I’m a published author.
My book, The AI-Powered Art of Dealing with Difficult People, is officially out, and I recently had the chance to sit down with Jill from The Menopausal Mom to talk about it. I’ll share the interview link below, but before I do, I want to explain something about the book, because the title can be a little misleading.
This really isn’t a book about AI, despite it being in the title of the book. Why? Because dealing with difficult people is a human thing. AI can’t deal with the difficult person for you. It can’t go have that conversation with your boss, your employee, your co-worker, your customer, or your family member. It can’t stop you from getting angry. It can’t magically make somebody else reasonable, and it sure can’t guarantee that a difficult conversation is going to go the way you want it to. You still have to do that part. What AI can do, though, is help you get ready, and, that’s really what the book is about.
For years, I’ve had a Udemy course called 12 Strategies for Dealing with Difficult People. As of this post, 47,337 students from 156 countries have taken that course. (That still blows my mind a little.)
When I first created the course, I was trying to take what I had learned through law enforcement, public safety, training, and just plain old life experience and turn it into something practical that people could actually use. Over the years, one thing kept becoming more and more obvious to me.
Most of us know what we’re supposed to do in a difficult conversation.
Stay calm.
Listen.
Don’t take the bait.
Ask good questions.
Don’t let your ego run the show.
Try to understand what the other person is really saying.
All of that sounds great until somebody gets in your face and pushes exactly the right button or catches you off guard. That’s when things get harder, and that’s where I think AI can be incredibly useful by helping us prepare before hand. Cause we all know that the next difficult person is just waiting for the perfect moment to ruin our day.
I call it PDR: Practice, Drill and Rehearse. This idea comes from my background.
You see, in law enforcement, we did a lot of training to prepare for the worst possible moments because when the stuff is hitting the fan, we likely do not have time to think about the best possible response. So instead, we:
Practice it.
Run scenarios.
Make mistakes. (Cause we learn best from our mistakes and it's better to make the mistakes in practice than in the game, wouldn't you agree? So let's mess some stuff up when the games not on the line.)
Talk about what worked and what didn’t.
Then we do it again and again and again.
But when it comes to difficult conversations, most people don’t do that. We just walk into them and hope for the best. Then, about 20 minutes later, we think of the perfect thing we should have said.
AI gives us a way to change that. We can now ask it to play the role of a:
Difficult employee.
Defensive boss.
Angry customer.
Family member who keeps pushing your buttons.
You can have AI push back harder. You can try a response and ask, “How did that sound?” You can ask it where you became defensive. You can ask for another way to phrase something. Then you can run the conversation again. And again. And again.
Want to give the strategy a try right now?
That’s what excites me about AI. This isn't about having AI give you all the answers and replacing human communication. It's about utilizing a tool to help us get better with those difficult conversations with those difficult people, in those difficult situations.
This Book Is Different
You see, many of the greatest book on dealing with difficult people stop right were we need them most. They give us a framework. The strategies. The good stories from the author's perspective and then they leave us alone to try and translate all that advice into our messy, real-world situations. That's a lot of work. And, it's why most of these books end up half-remembered on a shelf.
The book grew out of that idea and I wanted to take many of the communication strategies I’ve taught for years and show people how to actually practice them before they need them. Not just read about them. Not just memorize a few phrases...actually Practice, Drill & Rehearse from your perspective, not mine as the author.
That’s why one of the main ideas behind the book is: Practice the conversation before you have it.
The Interview
I recently got to talk about all of this with Jill from The Menopausal Mom, and I really enjoyed the conversation because we got into more than just “here’s my new book.”
We talked about people, conflict, communication, and how technology can help us become
better prepared without ever replacing the human part of the conversation.
You can watch the interview here:
It still feels a little strange to say that I wrote a book and just did an interview about it. However, I'm most proud about the fact that this book isn't about me or even AI. It's about you and your difficult person or situation. It's about empowering you to utilize AI in a new way...in a human way.
And if somebody reads it, practices a conversation ahead of time, and walks into that conversation a little calmer, a little more confident, and a little better prepared, then the book did what I hoped it would do.
That’s really the point. It’s not about AI handling difficult people. It’s about people getting better at dealing with people. AI just gives us a new place to practice.
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