I don’t mean to be flippant, but do do you know they don’t like you, or do they just not care about you. It’s both a liberating and disheartening day when you discover no one gives a shit about you.
Haters gonna hate. It probably comes from a sense of jealousy or low self-esteem. Don’t let those people get to you. Don’t give them a single moment of your brain power. If you do, they win.
Stop caring. There is nobody you could be that will please everybody, and if there was…there’d be nothing of you left as you morphed to fit the situation and company around you. Just be yourself and ignore their passive aggressive BS or avoid if possible.
(yes, it is that simple but still harder than it sounds. Ask yourself “Do I need to give a shit about this?” and the answer will usually be no.)
You can’t make people like you, but you have a right to demand respect.
I worked a job where I shared a space with another worker. They worked the shift ahead of me. Because I was brand new they thought it would be fun to leave the area a mess. I took all the garbage and put it in their company mailbox. I told them that if they left their personal stuff out I’d be nice and return it to them.
Romans 12:20 NIV “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
I don’t think that means you will harm them, but that you will cause them to bake in their own anger.
Avoid them when you can. Clear, minimal, a bit more polite than you would like to be when you can’t. If it’s work related focus on your common goal.
I’d also advise you to take some time to reflect on what makes them dislike you. If you find a lot of people who dislike you for similar reasons you may have to evaluate if you should (and can) change.
That would be my plan B. Plan A would be turn up my politeness and niceness knobs up for a little while. Maybe they’re going through a rough time and it’s temporary. After a sufficient amount of time to ensure it’s not an anomaly, then go for the direct conversation. It usually pays off to give the other person the benefit of the doubt for a little bit, but not forever. It stopped me from being so reactive.
A somewhat cheesy quote that helped me a lot is “you can be the juiciest, ripest peach in the world, but some people just don’t like peaches”. I used to try way too hard to be likeable and I agonised over people who didn’t like me.
There was an instance of a colleague being rude and unprofessional to me, and under the framework of “they don’t like me and that’s why they’re being unkind”, it put the onus on me to change, which wasn’t reasonable. It should be possible for people to not like each other in a working relationship while still being respectful and productive.
You might want to scale that down a little bit. I never borrowed somebody’s tape gun for a minute at work and thought, what a nice coworker I should send him flowers.
Indeed. I should have said “borrow something important”. It needs to be something they care about, or something they know you care a lot about. How you say thanks are examples.