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How to Solve Your People Problems: Dealing with Your Difficult Relationships

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I knew I was going to like this book by the second page of the first chapter (which may be a new record for me!). Clinical psychologist Dr. Godwin begins "How to Solve Your People Problems" with a laugh out loud anecdote from his own childhood. And that surprised me. I thought maybe a book written by a psychologist would be serious... studious... somber. I couldn't have been more wrong! Dr. Alan Godwin goes about the business of covering a very serious topic, "conflict," with a delightful use of humor, interesting stories, real life examples, and everyday language. Staying away from doctor-speak, he chooses instead to write "How to Solve Your People Problems" in a digestible, readable, and engaging way.

"How to Solve Your People Problems" is basically broken into two parts; conflict with reasonable people, and conflict with unreasonable people. Each of these types of conflict must be handled differently, and I found Godwin's approach informative and eye-opening. When discussing unreasonable people Dr. Godwin writes, So here's what we're up against when we have conflict with unreasonable people. They automatically assume we're the ones in the wrong, they fail to see their contributions to the conflict, they claim no responsibility for any part of the problem, they're not bothered by the impact of their words and actions on us, and they change nothing because nothing about them needs changing. Is it any wonder that unreasonable people are so difficult for us to handle?

When a reasonable person argues with an unreasonable person, they have different objectives. The reasonable person's conflict goal is resolution while the unreasonable person's goal is rightness. To the unreasonable person, being right is entwined with his identity as a person and/or survival. He needs to eat, he needs to breathe, and he needs to be right.

I don't like conflict, and I don't know anyone who does (I'm sure they're out there--I just don't know any). But, conflict is a normal part of life and it's important that we learn how to best handle it when it comes our way. "How to Solve Your People Problems" would be ideal for young married couples, for those struggling with obstinate family members, as a tool in pastoral counseling, or for those in a hostile work environment.

On September 4 my wife Ann and I celebrated 14 years of marriage. We're very happy and with the recent addition of our daughter Katie it's hard for us to imagine a better relationship or a stronger family.

That wasn't always the case, though. By January 2005 we had a marriage where conflict was regularly damaging our relationship. We still cared about each other, but we weren't connected in a healthy or sustainable way. We were headed for divorce.

That's when we got a recommendation to see Dr. Alan Godwin. We called him and arranged an appointment.

Neither one of us knew what to expect. Would this help save our marriage? And what was this Dr. Godwin like?

A clue to the man and his methods came as he opened the door to show us into his office that first day. He greeted us with one of the warmest smiles and firmest (yet gentlest) handshakes I've ever encountered. His eyes were bright and his pleasant Southern accent was inviting.

"Hello. Call me Alan," he said as I started to greet him with his professional title and last name.

Alan made us feel better about what we were doing during the first moments of meeting him.

There were many sessions after that first appointment. They were sometimes hard and often painful. It wasn't easy to jettison bad behavioral habits and develop what Alan called a "new process" to deal with conflicts so our marriage could survive and thrive. But Alan, patient and caring, worked with us together and separately over many months as we created that new process and placed our marriage and individual lives into healthier, more flexible frameworks.

During those sessions it became obvious to me that Alan Godwin is more than a licensed psychologist who counsels couples as part of his professional practice. He's a "people person" whose strong empathy for others makes him well-suited to his vocation.

Now that "people person" has written a "people book" that's well worth reading, whether your relationship troubles concern your spouse, another family member, friend, colleague or acquaintance. "How to Solve Your People Problems: Dealing with Your Difficult Relationships" is a thoughtful, easy-to-read guide to handling the inevitable conflicts that come through human interaction.

I've been an actor and journalist. I know you have to be aware of your audience to be a successful communicator. Alan knows his audience too - he doesn't descend into a pedantic written lecture on the never-ending quest to understand the human brain or give us a mind-numbing history lesson on the development of modern psychoanalytic techniques. His writing style is like the man himself - down-to-earth, friendly, often funny and always insightful.

His book starts with an introduction called "Good Conflict Camp" that notes our often childish behavior when conflicts arise and truths about those conflicts. Two of those truths stand out to me as being necessary to embrace in order to become better at dealing with conflict: that we naturally handle conflict poorly and that conflict with reasonable and unreasonable people must be handled differently. Those may seem obvious when they appear in a book but I know I've failed to heed both truisms on several occasions.

The book is then broken up into three sections: "People and Problems", "Reasoning with the Reasonable" and "Dealing with the Unreasonable". Alan leads us through a myriad of man-made relationship minefields with examples taken from his personal and professional experiences, references to Biblical text, relevant quotations and common-sense observations. There are summations called "In a Nutshell" and "For Reflection" questions that help us focus our thoughts as we finish portions of the book.

A portion that resonates strongly with me occurs near the end of the "Reasoning with the Reasonable" section. It's a list of questions I now try to ask when I'm in conflict with someone else. The list is called the "5 Crucial Questions for Good Conflict":

Which problem will we fix?
Why do we feel so strongly?
How can we agree to fix this?
What will we do to implement it?
When will we evaluate it?

Alan notes that awareness, empathy, humility, reliability and responsibility are the "muscles" needed for the actions that satisfactorily answer these questions. Notice that the word "right" isn't listed. As I've heard Alan say before, "Do you want to be 'right' or do you want to have a relationship?"

That last question leads me to Alan's final section about dealing with unreasonable people. We all have someone in our lives that fits the unreasonable tag: the "toxic" parent, the controlling spouse, the manipulative acquaintance or the difficult-to-deal-with colleague. Alan lays out strategies to set boundaries in our relationships with such people and avoid the "dramas" they try to entice us into playing with them.

The balance between age-old truisms, modern situations and flexible solutions makes "How to Solve Your People Problems" a practical guide for overcoming corrosive conflict. What marks this volume out from similar books, though, is that it's not just a mental health professional talking to us through these pages. Alan's humane and inclusive prose makes us feel a friend is helping us relate to other people in an enriching and nurturing new way. I know Ann and I are glad he's been our friend since that day in 2005. Now through this book he can be yours too.

I bought this book two months ago after an upsetting conflict. Out of all the books available on the subject, I bought Dr. Godwin's specifically because reviews had mentioned he addresses the differences between trying to resolve conflicts with reasonable vs. unreasonable people.

That's always been my complaint: that all the self-help books and commuication strategies to resolve conflicts only work if you are dealing with a cooperative and responsible person. But my family, and so many people I would routinely encounter, were impossible. It made me crazy. It made me very sad. And I never found a book that addressed this, especially not one that was quick and easy to read, written not in academic language but for practical use.

By the time the book arrived, I no longer cared as much about the frustrating situation so it sat unread. Then this morning, I had an encouter as crazy-making as they come. Someone I'd upset stood me up, then called the next morning to berate me - and claimed they hadn't stood me up because they'd told me they might not come. They made several other claims that were wild distortions of the truth. They wouldn't let me speak. Then when I instinctively went quiet,realizing I wasn't being heard, they said I was being passive-aggressive. There was more, but you get the point.

I pulled out Dr. Godwin's book. I've now read only two chapters of the 2nd part but without hesitation give it 5-stars. I personally think the truly brilliant books are the ones that you can understand! And the ones you can read in a night, if so inclined. Anything beyond that is filler.

His book accomplishes all that. He says 5 times more than most people in 1/10th the space.
I promise you - if you are dealing with someone who bullies you verbally, seems to exist in their own reality, relentlessly blames everything on you so that you start to think you're crazy, doesn't treat you with respect while claiming you're the one not treating him with respect...you get the picture...get this book.

There's something so healing about reading a description of your experiences and having your responses validated. There's something so freeing about being told "This person who does THIS and THIS and THIS is NOT reasonable and you won't be able to reach him/her because your goals aren't aligned and all they want is to be right."

I'm a psychotherapist. They don't teach you this stuff in school and I never saw it explained in any self-help book before. I studied communication as part of my couples' work and still never came across a commonsense discussion of how to argue with a narcissist. All you ever read are descriptions of good vs. bad communication practices. You're never told that some people will never use or respond to effective communication skills because they aren't interested in communicating - they only want to be right.

Get this book. You'll both enjoy and get a lot from it.

"Amazing book! Not a bunch of hard to understand advice, or unrealistic situations, but a very practical guide to better understanding the relationships we deal with every day. Dr Godwin gives hope that it is possible to live at peace with even the most difficult people. His insightful, often humorous examples are easy to relate to. An enjoyable read and well worth the time!"

If you are looking for ways to deal with any difficult relationship, whether it be a spouse, boss, child, or parent this book can give solutions. It shows how to deal with reasonable people through humility, awareness, taking responsibility, empathy, and being able to correct personal wrongness. You will learn to quit pushing each others buttons. Also to focus on one problem at a time and not get sidetracked through deflected arguments on to unrelated topics or attacking each other personally. Instead listen and understand why each other feel the way they do about a topic.
How ever dealing with unreasonable people is different. In their case it is important to set boundaries appropriate for the relationship and not allow them to cross those boundaries. Do not let anyone play the master, martyr, or messiah in your life. Keep all your relationships in the proper context and roles.
"...dramas only success if others play their parts... avoid participation by neither giving in nor displaying aggravation-two different forms of participating".
"To solve conflict problems with reasonable people, we should talk more. To solve conflict problems with unreasonable people, we should talk less and act more".
Great book, very useful information and a quick and easy read. It will give you Christian based principles you will use for life in all of your relationships.

The thesis of Dr. Alan Godwin's concise primer is that all people need relationship, and all relationship produces conflict, so we must learn to manage conflict productively. To do that, he breaks conflict into two types: those with reasonable people, and a longer section on those with unreasonable people. Then he divides both sections into small, digestible bits. The result is no magic bullet, but a guide to building conflict skills to maximize benefit all around.

Godwin brings a wealth of clinical experience to this difficult and emotionally loaded topic, as well as information from the brightest minds in the field. This book is meant as a Christian counseling guide, so he also applies Biblical wisdom. But faith is not so overwhelming an aspect that you have to be Christian to apply these principles. This book is succinct, in plain English, readable and useful.

The section on conflict with reasonable people focuses on constructing good arguments and avoiding being provoked by bad arguments. In essence, it's a guide to rhetoric. It presents a language-based approach that, while it doesn't overtly tip its hat to the likes of Hermogenes or Cicero, nevertheless conveys how to use words to utmost effect for mutual benefit, dispute resolution, and shared growth in a relationship.

But Godwin admits you can't argue the inarguable. When dealing with unreasonable people, conflict resolution is mainly nonverbal. He dismantles the scripts unreasonable people write for themselves and for you, shows how reflexive reactions--no matter how well intended--play into these people's performances, and reveals how to plan appropriate responses to dodge these people's tentacles.

Because few of us are taught these skills at home, school, or church the way we once were, all reasonable people should get a copy of this book. Also all people who wish to be reasonable. Useful for dealing with friends, spouses, kids, co-workers, teammates, neighbors, and anyone else we need to relate to. This book is a short, cheap workout of the "reasoning muscles" we all need and too few remember how to use in routine conflicts.

This author assists the reader in identifying troublesome areas in relationships. It offers practical tips for adjusting one's thinking to enrich his/her relationships. It is well-written, concise, and understandable to the lay person.

This book has some nice concepts but the tools feel a bit too well padded. It's a pity that the book was marketed for both personal and work relationships. The logic rather heavy for the former while the illustrations do not do the latter justice.

A recommended book nonetheless.

Pretty good book. I'll throw it into the class of the following books that cover the same topic: How to Win Friends & Influence People, People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts, and PeopleSmart.

Basically this book explains the ins and outs of the following table:

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//////////////////////------------PEOPLE-------------///
//////////////////////-Reasonable-----Unreasonable---///
CONFLICT-///////////////////////////////////////////////
Good-------///////------A-----------------B-------///
Bad--------///////------C-----------------D-------///
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

People come into conflict time and time again. Typically the conflicts can be dealt with in a good way or a bad way. Hence the X-axis label for the table. And the people can be either reasonable or unreasonable. Hence the Y-axis label for the table. What this book does is try to explain why conflict resolution in the table's sectors A and B should be sought. And conflict resolution in the table's sectors C and D should be avoided.

We are told that the outcome of a bad conflict (Sectors C & D) will result in one or more of the following:

>>No problem being solved
>>Leaves a bad aftertaste
>>Alienation
>>Brings out the worst in the participants

We are told that the outcome of a good conflict (Sectors A & B) will result in the opposite of the above listed results. Isn't this obvious, too?

But the real strength I found in the book was how it points out that it is imperative to determine if a person is reasonable or unreasonable before tackling how to approach the conflict and make it good. The people skills required to handle a reasonable person are different than those required to handle an unreasonable one.

I thought there as a lot of wonderful material included in this book. And I particularly liked the way the author had lots of point headings to help move the reader through the coverage of the subject. However, I found the book to be a little wordy and repetitive. This probably could have been avoided if the author had focused more on sectors A & B and not gone over the flipside of that discussion and covered C & D to the extent that he did. Mirror images of a topic can come across as repeating material. And in the case of this book it did just that for me.

I highly recommend someone with people skill problems who are having conflicts that don't get solved to read this book and the three others I cite above. 4 stars!

"How To Solve Your People Problems" by Dr. Alan Godwin is a decent look at personal issues written in an uncomplicated language with helpful cultural references. Each chapter begins with enjoyable quotes and pertinent scripture verses. They end with helpful questions for reflection (and possibly discussion). The appendices were not very helpful, but the glossary served as a nice reference.

Personally, I would have preferred more scripture references throughout the work. I believe the audience that this material is targeting would benefit from more Biblical advice to support the psychology located in the text. But overall, I feel this is a worthwhile read.