01 · Philosophy · 8 min read
How to deal with difficult people at work, without becoming one
Yoga philosophy has an unusually practical answer to the colleague who ruins your Tuesday: stop trying to change the weather.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from work but from a person. It follows you home. It writes replies in your head at eleven at night. It is, in our experience, the single largest source of corporate suffering — and the least discussed in wellbeing programmes, because it cannot be solved with a fruit basket.
First, name it accurately
Very few people at work are malicious. Many are frightened, overloaded, badly managed, or operating on incentives you cannot see. This is not an invitation to excuse behaviour. It is a way of lowering the temperature of your own response, which is the only part of the system you control.
You are not required to like someone in order to be unbothered by them.
The yogic move: separate the event from the story
Patanjali describes suffering as the misidentification of the self with what happens to it. In plainer language: the sharp email took four seconds. The forty minutes afterwards were yours — added, unpaid, self-inflicted. The practice is to notice the seam between the two and to stop paying.
- Notice the body first — jaw, shoulders, breath. It reacts before you know why.
- One long exhale. Twice as long as the inhale. This is not a metaphor; it moves your physiology.
- Write the furious reply. Do not send it. Delete it. The point was to discharge, not to communicate.
- Wait one sleep before any consequential response.
- Reply to the content, never to the tone. Refusing the tone is the strongest available move.
Aparigraha at work: stop collecting
Non-grasping usually gets read as an instruction about possessions. Applied to office life, it is about grievance. Keeping a mental ledger of everything a person has done to you feels like justice and functions like a subscription — you pay it daily, they never see the bill.
When it is not a personality, it is a pattern
Equanimity is a practice, not a policy for tolerating harm. If the behaviour is repeated, targeted, or affecting your health, the practice's job is only to keep you steady enough to act clearly: document dates and quotes, escalate in writing, take advice from someone outside the reporting line, and treat leaving as a legitimate option rather than a defeat.
- Document: date, what was said, who was present. Facts, not adjectives.
- Escalate in writing, calmly, once. Verbal complaints evaporate.
- Find one ally and one person entirely outside the company.
- Keep your CV current — not as a threat, as ballast.
Be soft with people and specific with facts. The reverse is what ruins careers.