How Someone Who Irritates You Can Help You Grow by Being a Mirror
In Spring 2022, I attended The Rich Litvin Intensive, an online multi-day event for around 150 coaches. In these types of events there are often breakout groups and ways to connect with participants outside the main sessions. Rich recommended using these opportunities to seek out the people who irritate or get on your nerves since he finds that those people are usually the people you learn the most from.
I took Rich’s advice and began to seek out more people that irritated me (both in that particular event and outside of it). At the time, I thought that the people that irritated me the most would be the people most different from me, but I’d soon find that is counterintuitively not the case.
In Fall 2022, I applied to, was accepted to, and joined Rich's 4PC group of 30 highly successful coaches from a diverse variety of backgrounds and focus areas. 4PC is one of the best personal growth containers in the world and consistently gives me the opportunity to supercharge my development as a person, coach, and leader. One of the many reasons that the 4PC container is so powerful is that it encourages people to get real (members talk about their deepest struggles and their greatest successes) and the group encourages you to get messy, try new things, and do things that scare you.
After joining 4PC, I found that I was irritated or bothered by some of the members of the group at times. Though, curiously, I found that I was most often irritated or bothered by people who shared the same Enneagram Type as me (in other words: people who are similar to me).
What we judge about others is [not always] what we judge about ourselves
As I continued with 4PC, I started to get a better understanding of why this was. There’s a concept often attributed to Carl Jung that when we judge someone we are judging them because we see that part of them in ourselves. That concept made sense to me. However, I began to wonder “do I only judge, dislike, and/or get annoyed by people or their actions in areas where they exhibit a characteristic I have?”
As I sat with and experimented with this over the course of my first year in 4PC, I came to the conclusion that, of course, that’s not true. As an extreme example, someone could commit a heinous crime or injustice against me, which would be an obvious cause of me judging them or disliking them for reasons that have nothing to do with my own characteristics. As a less extreme example, I may get irritated by and dislike someone who insulted me.
So given that I definitely can judge, dislike, or be annoyed by someone doing something or saying something that doesn’t relate to any characteristic about myself, I wondered how could I determine if my judgment, dislike, or annoyance of them was actually a judgment, dislike, or annoyance I have of myself?
This is an important question to answer because other people help us learn about ourselves, so if there is an unconscious judgment I have about myself then I can use my perception of another person to help uncover things I didn’t know I judge about myself. From this knowledge, I can then take action.
How to know whether the judgment is about yourself
I came to the conclusion that the big distinction is this: If (1) the other person hasn’t actually done anything to you and (2) your judgment of, dislike of, or annoyance by them eats at you when they aren’t even around, then your judgment, dislike, or annoyance is probably related to your own judgment, dislike, or annoyance of something about yourself. In other words, if (and only if) those two conditions are true, then the judgment/dislike/annoyance you feel towards the other person is actually mirror into yourself 🪞
For example, when I was in group meetings in a corporate setting I would often find it annoying when someone rambled and didn't lay out what they were trying to say succinctly. However, once I was done interacting with a person who rambled a lot, my annoyance would fade quickly. Additionally, that person’s behavior/characteristics did not eat at me when the person was not around. The reason for this is that I am not a person who typically rambles or fails to convey points succinctly.
On the other hand, my judgments of others related to characteristics about myself tend to eat at me when the other person is not around.
Three categories of self-judgment
Once you’ve determined that a judgment, dislike, or annoyance of some part of someone else is actually related to a characteristic about yourself, how can you begin to put this into action?
One useful step is to categorize this judgment, dislike, or annoyance into one of three categories:
Something you are not and could benefit by being more of. The other person has something you’d like to be/do/have, but aren’t or don’t do/have currently.
Something you are and would not like to be. The other person is like you in a way that you would not like to be/do/have.
Something you are that you’re over-suppressing. The person is like you in a way that you would benefit by being/doing/having more of. In other words, you’re suppressing a valuable part of yourself.
As an example for Category 1, you may find that it bothers you that someone is very open and honest with the world about who they are and what they’ve been through. If that really bothers you, it may be that you could benefit by being more open with the world on who you are and not keep so much held inside (i.e. be more vulnerable with people).
An interesting note on Category 2 is that often judgements a person has about someone else who exhibits a rather extreme expression of a given characteristic is really a judgment about the judgment holder themselves. For example, one’s judgment of a very wealthy person can stem from the judgment holder’s guilt about the money and prosperity they do have.
Category 3 was particularly powerful and helpful for me, since its existence was less obvious to me than the first two categories. Below, I’ll give an example of how discovering an unexpected Category 3 judgment benefitted me personally.
How I was over-suppressing an important quality about myself
As mentioned earlier, I found myself most often getting irritated by others who were the Enneagram type as me.
As some brief context on my Enneagram Type (8): “Eights are self-confident, strong, and assertive. Protective, resourceful, straight-talking, and decisive, but can also be ego-centric and domineering. Eights feel they must control their environment, especially people, sometimes becoming confrontational and intimidating. Eights typically have problems with their tempers and with allowing themselves to be vulnerable. At their Best: self-mastering, they use their strength to improve others’ lives, becoming heroic, magnanimous, and inspiring.” (source)
Some of the behavior from Enneagram Type 8’s that got on my nerves the most was how some Type 8’s provoked other people in the group by calling out other members of the group or speaking what they considered hard truths. While this really irritated me, other members of 4PC seemed to really value this provocation whether or not the provocative statement was actually true. (Side note: It’s generally accepted that anything you say in 4PC is said with love and with intentions to help the other person grow.)
So, during a session at an in-person 4PC retreat about leaning into an edge, I decided to experiment with provoking people with statements that I didn’t believe had any truth behind them. I stood in the center of the circle where everyone was seated and walked up to someone and pointed in their face and proclaimed, “You claim you’re bringing a big game to 4PC, but you’re not! Step up or get out!” It was a pretty intense call out and was very different from anything anyone in 4PC had ever experienced from me. I then went and did the same thing to another person, and then one more. It felt very edgy for me to call someone out like this, especially when my call out wasn’t based on any evidence. In fact, the audacity of this call out pointing at someone’s face from a foot or two away would have probably been edgy for anyone in the group.
The purpose of leaning into that edge in an extreme way was not that I would use something so aggressive in my life or work. It was to get comfortable being more provocative so I could amp up my provocation a bit when it may be helpful to the clients I coach. I typically coach by leaning into curiosity with my questions to uncover the truth. And I rarely speak a statement about someone unless I am pretty sure it’s true. My coaching style is highly effective for me, but I knew adding to my range and capabilities would be helpful.
I didn’t expect my provocations in that 4PC session to be valuable to anyone else in the group except me. However, the next day, two of the people who I called out came up to me individually and remarked how valuable my call out of them was. One person told me that what I said was true and that my call out was very helpful in motivating him to bring more to 4PC. The other person said that my call out was helpful in that it was not true and it helped them realize that they, in fact, were putting a lot into 4PC and they shouldn’t be so hard on themselves. It struck me that even being seemingly excessively bold and provocative can stimulate someone’s thinking in a very positive way.
I was very bold and provocative in my late teens and early 20s. I would say things that resonated with a lot of people, while some others thought what I said was ridiculous. This boldness actually helped me become a leader that people followed even though a lot of what I said was somewhat absurd. In my mid-20s when I realized that some of my ideas were wrong or I no longer agreed with them, I started to over-focus on getting things really right. I suppressed boldness and provocation to the point where I was barely able to access that ability at all. In fact, I’d been a very successful coach for several years before I was comfortable sharing any piece of the wealth of techniques I developed for helping clients in a blog post in case one person disagreed with me.
I’ll probably never change my coaching style to be primarily a provocateur (though that may work well for some coaches), but being able to access and use more parts of myself when relevant is always a positive. Now I’ve brought more boldness and provocation into my coaching at relevant times and it has benefitted my clients. I’ve also started putting out more of my ideas online knowing that no idea is going to resonate with everyone and that even people who don’t agree with me can still benefit from me provoking them to think about why they disagree with me.
Conclusion, insight and action
Finding and interacting with people that get on your nerves or irritate you is a great way to understand more about yourself.
When your feeling of judgment, dislike, or annoyance of another person eats at you even after your interaction with the other person is complete, then the judgment/dislike/annoyance is likely related to a judgment/dislike/annoyance of yourself.
Categorizing your judgment/dislike/annoyance into one of three buckets: (1) something you are not and could benefit by being more of, (2) something you are and would not like to be, or (3) something you are that you’re over-suppressing, can help you better understand your relationship to characteristics about yourself and give guidance on what you’d like to be/do/have more or less of.
Trying something new (or bringing back in something you suppressed) will feel at least a little edgy. In fact, if it doesn’t, then you’re probably not bringing in enough of it to make a real positive change.
Answering the questions below will help you better understand yourself, take actions in service of growing as a person, and becoming a more effective leader:
What are the top 1-2 insights you gained from this article?
What from this article might you disagree with and why?
What’s one question this article brings up for you that you’d like to sit with more?
What’s one judgment you have of someone else that may actually be a judgment about yourself? Which of the three categories does it fit in? If it’s unclear which category it fits in, how will you find out which category it’s in?
When is the next situation you can actively seek out someone that irritates you?
What would you like to experiment with being/doing more or less of in your life or work? What will be your first step to experimenting with this?