The philosophy of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy encourages you to see all humans as fallible beings. There are no super-humans and no sub-humans. Therefore, I encourage you to rate only what people do but avoid rating, summing up the entire person for what they do or fail to do. Even when you are fully accepting of humans as fallible humans you will often encounter problems with people due to the things they do which are not to your liking. When dealing with humans keep in mind the following points about human nature to help you effectively respond to their difficult behavior. If you expect humans to display their fallibility you may not be as surprised by it and thereby avoid making yourself upset by it. This will give you leverage when dealing with them. Here is my tentative list. I say tentative because humans are so complex this list will need to be updated as I continue to learn about and from fallible humans:
- All humans are emotionally disturbed. Some are more disturbed than others. Humans tend to want certain things and then disturb themselves by transforming what they want into an absolute necessity.
- Humans are fallible, error prone, born mistake-makers.
- Humans are inclined to avoid discomfort and often attempt to shirk work and responsibility. They will often try to shift costs to other people to avoid discomfort.
- Humans often inject their egos into matters and as result feel hurt, anxious, angry or experience unhealthy envy. They will often try to put you down to feel good about themselves or better about themselves.
- Humans are often inclined to insist you see things their way which they then may define in a self-serving way as “right, truthful, fair, logical, or valid”.
- Humans often are more interested in their well-being than yours and when both your desires and theirs cannot be simultaneously met expect that they will try to have their desires met at the expense of yours.
- Humans often do not pay attention when you speak to them.
- Humans often are slow learners.
- Humans often prefer to complain and blame rather than solve a problem because of the discomfort involved in expending effort to solve a problem.
- Humans often say one thing and do another. To a greater or lesser extent all humans display some degree of hypocrisy. Study what people most often do and not what they say or look like. A person’s behavior is an important window to understanding their true motivations.
- Humans will generally do what they want and not what you want.