Are You a PITA?

I first heard the term PITA (Pain In The Ass) when referring to clients or coworkers from friend and international consultant to accountancy firms, Chris Frederiksen (The 2020 Group), in his seminar, How To Build A Million Dollar Practice in the early 80s. It resonated with everyone there as Robert Orndorff’s and Dulin Clark’s new book, The PITA Principle: How to Work With (and Avoid Becoming) a Pain in the Ass, will resonate today with anyone that has had experience working with groups of people anywhere. Mention PITA and no doubt someone’s name or face will pop into your head.

They define PITAs as those “folks who arouse our emotions, challenge our patience, and make us labor for our money on a daily basis.” Their goal in mentioning this is two-fold. First they want to give you some coping strategies to help you deal more effectively with those people. Secondly, they want you to avoid being on someone else’s PITA list. We can all be PITAs from time to time, but by promoting a little self-awareness they hope to help you to either avoid or emerge from being a PITA. This second goal is not an easy task.

Heightened self-awareness, or lack of, appears to mystify some of society’s most prominent figures, from the corporate executive who unknowingly yet chronically berates his employees through abuses of power, to the physician who patronizes her patients thought her intellectual arrogance, to the politician who cannot and will not admit mistakes in judgment out of ego-preserving stubbornness.

The authors note that those people who refuse to take the time to gain a little self-awareness and learn to soften or manage their PITA tendencies, “don’t get the importance of developing the other side of themselves because they are either too self-absorbed, too unaware, or too defensive to let other information enter into their consciousness.” This is a prescription for self-destruction.

They describe eight types of PITAs in detail and offer some coping strategies for each and advice to help you get some perspective on their behavior. You’ll also find a selection of ten more PITA types that get honorable mention.