Well, we all know how the story goes. No matter how nice you are to those around you, there will always be people who will not agree with your way of being and your way of living your life. There will always be people who will find many reasons to be offended by your presence and existence on this planet and that is why it’s good to know how to respond to their behavior and maybe help them shift their perceptions a bit. So here they are, 3 simple but insightful things you can say to someone who does not like you:

1. Expand your mind a little bit

If you constantly reject people that are different than you and if you constantly reject ideas, behaviors that you find to be weird and strange, you will not evolve and you will remain stuck at the same level for the rest of your life. People often get annoyed and irritated when they see somebody who is, what Abraham Maslow called a self-actualized person, independent of the “good opinion” of others. They get annoyed and irritated to see that these people who are so busy with improving themselves, don’t really care about what other people think or say about them, because you see, unlike others, they are open to accept and welcome all kind of new ideas, situations, places, people, etc. in their lives. These are the people most of us admire, these are the people who dare tothink outside the box, allowing things to be as they are without rejecting anything or anyone. They are at peace because they know, and I will paraphrase Lao Tzu: “Peace is their highest value. If the peace has been shattered, how can they be content? Their enemies are not demons, but human beings like themselves. They don’t wish them personal harm.”

2. What irritates you the most about my person is something you haven’t accepted in yourself

Every time I say this to people I feel like I am waking up the beast in them. It takes a lot of courage to admit this but in time you will discover this to be true. Those who really know themselves are able to live in peace with others. “Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control – these three alone lead to power.” ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson What irritates us the most in others is something we haven’t accepted in ourselves and the reason why people get so annoyed when you tell them, this is because on the conscious level it does not make sense to them, and that is okay. If you will work on becoming what Carl Jung called, the observer of your own life, detaching yourself from who you think you are and from what is happening to you and all around you, looking beyond the surface, you will eventually discover something you did not know was there. You will discover what you see in others is nothing more than a reflection of who you are, and when this happens you will be able to live in peace and harmony with everybody around you.

3. You and I are One

From the viewpoint of the human genome, we are 99.9% identical and in spite of this you choose to focus your attention on the 0.1% that is different? You and I, “We are ONE, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.