The Colleague You Find Impossible To Deal With May Be Someone You’ve Invented

There is one difficult person in almost every working life, whether it’s a colleague, client, or collaborator, who takes up more of your mental energy than the rest of your job combined. You’ve drafted emails to them in the shower, you’ve replayed their last comment in your head at 11 pm, you’ve decided, quietly and without quite noticing, that this is just how they are. But what if the version of them in your head isn’t actually them?

This 45-minute workshop with author Grant Ballard-Tremeer walks you through what’s really happening when someone becomes that person in your working life and gives you a specific set of moves for changing the dynamic. Not through better communication techniques or corporate frameworks, but through a small, surprisingly practical shift in how you understand what’s actually going on between you.

What you’ll take away:

• How to spot the “phantom” in the room: the exaggerated, worst-case version of a difficult person that your brain quietly constructs and then treats as real.
• Why digital work makes it so much worse: how brief emails, blunt chat messages, and missing tone push your brain into prediction-mode, treating ambiguous signals as personal threats.
• The ninety-second reset: a specific, physical practice for interrupting the chemical wave of defensiveness before it takes over.
• The single question that changes everything: the one open-ended move that replaces professional armour with actual curiosity, and almost always reveals that what you assumed was going on wasn’t.
• A concrete first step for one specific relationship: you’ll leave with a specific person in mind and a specific move to try this week.