Immutable people
How do we work with someone we haven’t been able to build trust with and haven’t been able to build a socially accepted way to agree and disagree?

These are adversaries and usually either won’t cooperate and/or follow a different vision.

Building emotional and social connections to turn our adversaries into allies or opponents can be difficult or impossible. Work with them by trying to understand where they are coming from, and what they want to achieve. When starting a project or task with them, especially if you don’t trust them, take time for detective work to learn about their goals and vision for the project/task; the additional time will help build some understand, and will at least make the project/task run smoother.

Be curious about what they want to accomplish and viewpoints to open up the possibility of building the relationship and turning them into an ally. Curiosity will help verify their story is true, and from there help build understanding. Over time, the understanding can turn into trust.

From experience, keep track of how much energy is being put into the relationship, and how the relationship is changing. If you’re consistently putting energy into building the relationship, but the relationship is not getting better or is getting worse, then it’s time for self-reflection.

If the relationship feels like you’re talking to a black hole, then the time has come to let go of the relationship, and stop putting energy into it.

We will always run across people, for whatever reason, who are immutable. The quicker we figure out who are the immutable people in our lives, the quicker we can put our energy into other beneficial relationships.

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