Rude behavior can make you want to scream, but
confronting a rude person can make you squirm.
Given the choice between standing up to a bully and
seething in silence, many people pick the latter, at
a loss for how to deal with a rude person without
intensifying an emotionally charged situation.
Johns Hopkins' resident civility maven, P.M. Forni,
takes the guesswork out of defusing more
than a hundred different everyday hackle-raising scenarios
in his new book, The Civility Solution:
What to Do When People Are Rude, published this month
by St. Martin's Press. The follow-up to his
popular 2002 field guide, Choosing Civility: The
Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct, the book is
both an essay on rudeness and a self-defense manual.
A crucial question addressed by Forni: How can one
become the kind of person people are less
likely to be rude to? His answer: If we are consistently
considerate, even in the face of rudeness,
others will often match our behavior. That, he says, is the
civility solution.
"Although we cannot hope to ban rudeness from our
lives altogether, we can limit both its
occurrences and its impact," said Forni, a professor of
Italian literature in the Krieger School's
Department of German and Romance Languages and
Literatures and director of the Civility Initiative
at Johns Hopkins, who has worked for more than a decade to
illustrate the connections among civility,
ethics and quality of life. "When we handle it well," he
said, "we feel good about ourselves and reap
other substantial benefits, such as healing wounded
relationships. Being prepared is half the solution
to any problem."
In The Civility Solution, Forni prepares his
readers to handle real-life scenarios in a number of
categories:
The Near and Not So Dear: Spouses, Family and
Friends
The Neighbors — Noisy, Nosy and Nice
Workplace Woes
On the Road, In the Air and Aboard the Train
The World of Service
Digital Communication
Forni does not advocate angry confrontations. Rather
he says he believes in speaking up in
defense of common decency and going out on a limb to let
someone know you've been hurt rather than
perpetuating the cycle of incivility.
"We teach others how to treat us by how much we are
willing to endure from them," Forni said.
"It is better not to endure even micro-indignities if they
are really bothering you. Find the strength
of character to confront that person in an assertive,
nonaggressive way and say, 'This is how I feel
when you say that, when you do that. I really wish you
didn't.' If you keep everything bottled inside,
that person will do it again."
An example of the user-friendly advice in The
Civility Solution for dealing with such sticky
situations is "The SIR Sequence," Forni's shorthand for
"state, inform and request." Namely: State
the facts. Inform the other person of the impact he or she
has had on you. And request that the
hurtful behavior not be repeated.
"Do so politely, firmly and unapologetically," Forni
said. "And do it sooner rather than later. You
will be more effective and won't have to dread doing it in
the future."
Forni has inspired several community-based initiatives
across the country to promote civility,
including in Maryland, where Howard County's Choose
Civility initiative has received international
media coverage.
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