Excerpted from The PITA Principle: How to Work With (and Avoid Becoming) a Pain in the Ass, by Robert Orndorff and Dulin Clark

Even the coworkers who are a huge pain in your ass do have some redeeming qualities, so this chapter discusses how to identify these positives and use them to best advantage. It’s important to appreciate that everyone is different and that different isn’t always bad.
Two Types of PITAs
The acronym PITA humorously captures the two categories of PITA people. The first PITA category is the challenging one, the one that makes you squeeze stress balls and rub your temples. The second category of PITA is the good one, the one to which we should all aspire. The following sections describe the characteristics of the two PITA categories.
Pain In The Ass
The first category of PITA is based on those often awkward, difficult, unpleasant, frustrating, and emotionally draining interactions with specific people in your organization. In this case, the acronym PITA is understood by many to mean “PAIN IN THE ASS.” We were drawn to the expression because it speaks a universal language. It says it all in a few simple words. It captures and expresses our annoyances in such a satisfying way. It is a language spoken in private office chats, in whispered exchanges in mailrooms, at happy hours, during dinner-table discussions, or through self-talk in the most private recesses of our own minds.

PAIN IN THE ASS! It speaks to the real but unfortunate truth: that days, weeks, months, and years of frustrating interactions with some coworkers puts them into a category that’s easy to quantify, easy to understand, and easy to communicate to others who sympathetically understand our plight. These folks who arouse our emotions, challenge our patience, and make us labor for our money on a daily basis are simply known as PITAs.

Now, let us be clear that it is not our ultimate goal to callously tack disparaging labels on people or put people down. Rather, our goal is to provide you with some coping strategies in dealing more constructively with different types of difficult coworkers.
Professionals Increasing Their Awareness
Another goal is to strategize against becoming someone else’s “pain in the ass.” We do not want you to land, and most importantly stay, on another person’s PITA list. We would rather you possess the self-awareness and undergo the honest self-analysis that it takes to either avoid or emerge from being a PITA. We would rather you be associated with a PITA of a different kind: our second category of PITA, which stands for “Professionals Increasing Their Awareness.” These are people who are courageous enough to look at themselves in an honest way, who realize that no one is perfect, and who are open to exploring ways to address their interpersonal and communicative deficits.

It’s important to acknowledge that PITAs of the Pain In The Ass variety do exist in a variety of types and behaviors. It’s equally, if not more important, to understand that the only way to avoid this colorful label is to work on being more self-aware, less defensive, and more willing to take an honest look at how well you are relating to others.
The Importance of Self-Awareness
One of the primary concepts at the foundation of The PITA Principle is the importance of self-awareness. The roots of psychology are firmly grounded in the notion of self-awareness as the path to ultimate growth and “choicefulness” as a thinking human being.

Freud was the first to describe and promote self-awareness (consciousness) as having the power to free a person from the forces that dominate and control individual behavior. Although his theory has been vigorously challenged on the grounds that he placed too much emphasis on sexual and aggressive drives that dictate behavior, few psychologists doubt his core theoretical assumption that unconscious material such as feelings, behaviors, and memories need to be explored and made conscious before real psychological progress can occur. Today, therapeutic professionals essentially view heightened self-understanding as synonymous with psychological maturity.

It’s understood that most of us who encounter and cope with problematic workplace behaviors don’t have professional backgrounds and training in the psychology of personality. However, it’s not hard to buy into good common sense, and common sense dictates that we can come to understand and change only those behaviors that we accept and know to be true. Whether we’re speaking about our own behaviors or the behaviors of our coworkers, it is essential that we develop the capacity to see ourselves and others honestly and to be courageous enough to acknowledge our own areas of ineffectiveness and struggle.

Although easily stated, this process seems to pose one of the greatest challenges to humankind. 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, the physician who patronizes her patients through her intellectual arrogance, to the politician who cannot and will not admit mistakes in judgment out of ego-preserving stubbornness.

M. Scott Peck, the renowned author of The Road Less Traveled and A World Waiting to Be Born, astutely recognized that interpersonal difficulties and personality clashes between coworkers are highly complex and deeply disruptive features of organizations; they require skilled interventions that ideally lead to heightened awareness and increased organizational functioning. Peck, a highly respected psychiatrist, understood that increasing self-awareness was a necessary condition for any long-term behavioral change to stick. Whether we are talking about our work unit; our civic group; our church; or our city, state, or federal government, everyone needs to bring an elevated degree of “mindfulness” to his or her own work behaviors in order for organizations to function properly.