It certainly never does any good, for them or you, to fight back with rudeness. Don't fight fire with fire - use water if you must fight.
What i've done in the past is just remained extra calm and been very straightforward and polite myself. Essentially just being extra nice. What tends to happen is they see themselves being rude in comparison to you being nice, and since the rudeness hasn't affected your composure it makes them look bad and feel bad. It's essentially "winning." This works if you want to dominate them but I think it's actually kind of mean to do to someone - you are essentially embarrassing them and making them feel bad.
A more generous (and generally better, but much harder to pull off) approach is to again remain calm, but essentially hold up a mirror to them in a compassionate and understanding way. Explain to them their behaviour. You dispassionately apologize and tell them that you understand that they have a problem with you, but you just can't accept being treated like that under any circumstances. Tell him you're sorry though and want to help them with their issue. "I'm sorry, I really can't tolerate being treated with that kind of disrespect. I want to help you with your issue so let's go forward peaceably."
The second method is much harder to pull off. You must speak dispassionately and make it clear that you want to help them with their problem. I think it's a superior solution if you can do it.
These are my homegrown solutions anyway. Personally my goal is to really help the person see what they're doing and why it's unneccessary and unproductive. I'd much rather help them learn something than just train them to not be rude to me.
It also depends on the situation.. if someone is venting about bad service or something like that, and yelling about it and is very upset, then the best thing to do I think is just genuinely listen and try to show some empathy for their problem. They obviously feel it's important or they wouldn't be upset, so share in the importance they feel for their issue.
If someone is being rude to you as a matter of course, like a co-worker or something, then you'll probably need a more direct approach.
These kinds of things have always been hard for me... it seems like I just wasn't built for such a dog-eat-dog world. So i've learned to adapt. The main lesson I suppose is just to remember that we're all part of the same compost heap, we're all of one unified collective, and so helping others is the same as helping yourself.  |