Chronic pecking by the challenging people in your life -protect your peace!
These people can be like a Woodpecker bird, chronically pecking regular holes in your heart with their sharp beak. It can be through constant negative criticism, breaking you down, making hurtful remarks, treating you with contempt, treating you poorly, stabbing you in the back, stonewalling you, and many other examples. Just makes you feel bad about yourself or leaves you in emotional turmoil.
Like most people, I have these challenging Woodpeckers too in my life—some you can avoid. However, there are those that you can’t wish away; they are there because of necessity or position, such as close family members, employment, business, or by court order as a co-parent, or a neighbour with no option to move, etc.
How to deal with this pecking problem so that you don’t always just embrace for impact?
It is essential to first determine if this woodpecker-person can be avoided or not. If they can be avoided, please pull the plug, there will be no awards for allowing harm to yourself If the woodpecker can’t be avoided, then apply the “camping technique as follows.
What is the camping technique?
When my oldest daughter was in primary school, we both took on the adventure to Kano as a team on the Orange River with her school group for four days. We were a great team and successfully navigated the rapids, having lots of fun along the way. During the day, we had to camp and rest on the river edge to take a break. Sometimes it was at a lovely spot, and other times, it was more challenging ones. If we had a choice, we would have avoided some of those unfriendly camping spots altogether. The same with the Woodpecker crowd…If you have to camp in their pecking territory do it as briefly as necessary and then row on. Don’t camp too long at that spot. You have a whole journey ahead that you can instead invest your energy and time in. Rather, allocate your precious time to things that contribute to your growth and well-being, and limit what is detrimental to you. Don’t waste time on people that you can’t change.
Plan:
- Work out the necessary frequency of the encounters and also an estimated time limit for each encounter.
- Decide beforehand to keep the conversation on the surface and which topics to avoid or navigate from.
- Prepare before the time on some of the remarks/questions that you know will come up in the encounter. The answers should be simple, without inviting discussion or revealing information that could make you more vulnerable.
- Have a trusted buddy ready to debrief with after such an encounter.
Be wise and Rise and radiate, and have your best life.