Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Conflict

When Someone Misuses Your Gift

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A gift is only a gift if it’s a joy to receive. It’s not an imposition about relevance.

A gift that inspires you may be a bad choice for the recipient. (I once received a gift certificate for an upscale steakhouse and got the phone promptly slammed on when I called to inquire about vegan dining options.) Or the recipient may think you’re using gifts to buy their affection or assert your preferences.

It’s understandable to feel disappointed when your gift isn’t used as you intended. Try to get over it. You gave the gift out of choice, and now you have no control over how the recipient uses the gift.

Getting your gift misused doesn’t mean they’re rejecting you. It just means that you have dissimilar tastes and preferences—a trait that most relationships should weather.

If you perceive you’ve hurt the recipient’s feelings, apologize and retract the gift in favor of something more appealing to the recipient.

Idea for Impact: Gift without expectations. And don’t expect to get it right always with your gift choices.

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  4. Ever Wonder Why People Resist Gifts? // Reactance Theory
  5. How to … Gracefully Exit a Conversation at a Party

How Not to Handle a Bad Boss

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Demanding bosses come in an assortment of guises: idealists, megalomaniacs, overbearing tyrants, windbags, windbags, narcissists, micromanagers, and so on. And you’ll work for some at various stages in your career.

But no matter the boss type, attaching labels like demanding or overbearing can eventually turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The moment you label someone as problematic, you’ve made them more challenging to work with because you’ll no longer give this person the benefit of the doubt. You’ll not relate with them on a productive level.

Idea for Impact: Focus instead on recognizing the boss’s specific behaviors. Calibrate yourself to match your boss’s style, and build a strategic liaison founded on expectations for yourself and the relationship.

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  5. No Amount of Shared Triumph Makes a Relationship Immune to Collapse

Making the Nuances Count in Decisions

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Holding your tongue and withholding a definite opinion is often more prudent than being rapid-fire because the topic at hand may compel a bit of nuance.

These frazzled and frenzied times are the antitheses of active inquiry. No one pays attention. Not anymore. The open-ended conversation quickly devolves into spewing ill-considered opinions. Active inquiry and thoughtful dialog lose out.

No need to shoot your mouth off in response to negative emotional triggers. It’s okay to be ambivalent about some things. It’s good to be skeptical about what you think you know. That’s where the nuance begins.

Idea for Impact: Reality is often more nuanced than you may realize at the moment. Take the time to consume information more deliberately, allowing shades of meaning. Seek first to understand.

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  5. How Understanding Your Own Fears Makes You More Attuned to Those of Others

When Anonymity Becomes Cowardice

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A variety of psychological factors contribute to people being nasty online. Rider University psychologist John Suler famously argued that online environments unleash aspects of our personality that we usually keep under guard—a phenomenon he called the online disinhibition effect. With names concealed, there’s no pressure to maintain a public facade. Cyberspace becomes a separate dimension where the usual rules don’t apply. Actions no longer carry consequences. There’s no liability for rudeness and inappropriate behavior.

The disinhibition effect is also called ‘The Gyges Effect,’ after the Ring of Gyges, a mythical invisibility device in Plato’s Republic. The ring grants its owner the power to become invisible at will. Plato considers whether an intelligent person would be just if one did not have to fear any bad reputation for committing injustices.

When Anonymity Becomes Cowardice - The Psychology of Internet Trolls Social media has a way of magnifying some of the worst facets of human nature. By allowing masked identities, as Professor Suler points out, abusers avoid accountability for their conduct and dissociate their online selves from their real-world selves. In real life, combative behavior triggers a victim’s immediate reaction–a change in tone of voice or a counterargument, even aggression. However, these deterrents are missing or delayed in the online world, and social inhibition is removed. Online abusers see their victims as faceless, abstract cutouts with no feelings and undeserving of fairness, compassion, and honesty.

Idea for Impact: Keep away from being nasty online. Awareness and activism are vital to civic duty, but you should seek out actual human beings who know how to converse intelligently on anything they disagree with.

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How to … Stop Getting Defensive

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What Is Defensiveness?

Defensiveness generally stems from a consistent feeling that you need to protect yourself. There may have been a time when you were constantly questioned or felt unacknowledged. This can lead to a habit of turning on the fight response, even when it’s unnecessary. In other words, your defensiveness was perhaps useful at one point, but it’s less so now.

To learn graceful ways of coping with feeling defensive, try to pinpoint when, where, or with whom the defensiveness impulse typically occurs. Take a week to become aware of your behavior. Next, write down a few interactions you would have liked to conduct differently: do you wish you had stayed quiet and listened, asked questions, stood up for yourself, and asserted your position? Rehearsing alternative responses will help you react more calmly in future scenarios.

Time to “Go to The Balcony”

When you find yourself in a conversation triggering your self-protective, defensive impulse, take a moment to pause. Relax and think about what you are doing. Inhale slowly, gaze out of the window for a moment, or repeat a reassuring mantra in your head (“I’m feeling provoked,” “I’m annoyed by that comment,” or “I need to be centered.”) Slow down your response, so you have time to gain control.

Harvard’s William Ury, the author of such acclaimed books on negotiation as Getting to Yes (1981) and The Power of a Positive No (2007,) calls this process “going to the balcony.” It’s figuratively retreating to a mental and emotional refuge.

That’s a prudent response. When you’re provoked, one of the most significant powers you have is the power not to react but to go to a place of calm, perspective, and self-control. There, you can acknowledge your emotions. You can refocus on yourself, remind yourself of your deepest values, and reorient yourself on “the prize.”

Idea for Impact: Respond, Don’t React

There is a mighty difference between responding and reacting. When you respond, you’re using communication devices to express yourself and gain understanding. When you react, instead, you’re merely trying to fight back, win over the person or stamp out the other person’s allegation.

Reacting only creates conflict and escalates emotions.

It’s okay to become hurt by negative feedback, and it’s okay to disagree with criticism. However, learning how to respond calmly and soundly will provide you with an effective way to stay centered.

Teaching yourself to respond and not react may be hard at first. But it gets easier with practice. And in time, you’ll likely feel calmer. Commit and practice.

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  2. Mindfulness Can Disengage You from Others
  3. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  4. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  5. The Law of Petty Irritations

Competitive vs Cooperative Negotiation

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Does a competitive person make a better negotiator than a cooperative person? Wharton professor G. Richard Shell’s insightful Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People (2006) contends there isn’t a straightforward answer.

Competitive people don’t mind interpersonal friction and thus initially have the upper hand over less aggressive personalities with little appetite for friction. However, competitive people generally lack skills in managing relationships, which gives cooperative people an advantage in situations where interpersonal trust over the long term is crucial. It’s easier to negotiate against someone who has a similar personality. Negotiation gets dicier when different personality types mix.

How to improve your results? Practice. Prepare through information-gathering and setting achievable but optimistic targets for the negotiation process.

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  2. Boundaries Define What You are—and What You’re Not
  3. Nice Ways to Say ‘No’
  4. What Jeeves Teaches About Passive Voice as a Tool of Tact
  5. Never Take the First Offer

How to … Deal with a Colleague Who Talks Too Much

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If a coworker has a habit of talking incessantly—mostly about his personal life—and doesn’t heed when you hint you can’t be distracted from work at the moment, address your frustrations directly and respectfully.

When you think he’s ready to listen, have a chat privately and make him aware of the issue. Say, “I like conversing with you, but sometimes you keep talking even after I tell you I need to get back to work. Often, I feel pinned down. Could you please heed when I say our visit impedes my work?” You may add, “I’d always be happy to talk to you when I’m less busy or over a drink in the evening.”

This talk may be briefly awkward for both of you, but so are most tough conversations. Often, problems are best nipped in the bud.

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  3. How to … Discreetly Alert Someone to Embarrassing Situations
  4. How to … Avoid Family Fights About Politics Over the Holidays
  5. Thanks, But No Thanks: Well-Intentioned Reminders Can Resurface Old Wounds

Tips for Working for a Type-A Boss

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Type-A bosses tend to accomplish great things, at least short-term. But their high intensity and impatience could make them hard to work for.

If you’re more of a laid-back employee, realize that most of the time, Type-A’s intensity isn’t about you. It’s the way she relates to the world around her. Type-A is what Type-A does.

Here’s how to deal with the overly amped-up style of the Type-A boss:

  • Speak up. Do your homework and anticipate needs/wants. Be proactive and take the initiative on everything. Bring solutions, not problems. If you disagree with something, communicate directly.
  • If nothing you do seems perfect enough for your boss, don’t assume the worst and put your guard up. Be more receptive to evaluation. If you’re constantly being challenged to add “one more thing,” seek specific feedback on how she’d like you to refine your work.
  • Set boundaries on what she can expect from you. Ask for clear performance goals. With Type-As, it’s always about them; you can’t hold yourself accountable for their personality. When it gets tough, try not to take it personally. Ask for what you need, but choose your battles wisely.

Idea for Impact: One of the best ways to handle a Type-A person is to try to be Type-A yourself. You don’t have to morph into an ego-driven jerk, but try to be more organized and keep on top of everything.

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  4. The Pickleball Predicament: If The CEO Wants a Match, Don’t Let It Be a Mismatch
  5. No Boss Likes a Surprise—Good or Bad

Sometimes a Conflict is All About the Process

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There’s a considerable difference between a “decision conflict” and a “process conflict,” and it’s necessary to disentangle the two.

A decision conflict is about a choice or another to be made. But a process conflict is about the approach, e.g., where making a choice has lacked rigorous deliberation (haste, a lack of participation from essential stakeholders, contempt for shared priorities, lack of attention to the tradeoffs, and so forth.) A sound decision has ensued from a meticulous-enough thought process, even if the decision emerges to be defective in the fullness of time.

Idea for Impact: Worry about bad decision processes. Make the “how” the anchor for your decision-making process. Improving the quality of decisions is developing better frameworks for making those decisions.

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  4. How To … Be More Confident in Your Choices
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Stop Stigmatizing All Cultural ‘Appropriation’

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From The Telegraph over the weekend: a Leeds-based “woke dance school,” the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, “drops ballet from auditions as it is ‘white’ and ‘elitist'” as it “reviews ballet art form as part of a diversity drive.”

Many other performance arts are rooted in other cultural traditions, so should we expect that white folk refrains from performing those because that would be cultural appropriation? Shun yoga, not wear cornrow, and drop taco nights?

Should everyone else avoid trains, cars, computers, and much else because they’re white European originations?

Should people not be allowed to wear clothing, cultivate hobbies, or pursue careers that aren’t reflective of the culture they were raised in?

Look, works of art incorporating racist clichés and caricatural images (such as in The Nutcracker) should be reassessed with a different consciousness. Appropriation is elastic and ill-defined. Not all cultural appropriation is harmful or exploitative, certainly not innocuous cultural appreciation—where elements of other cultures could be used to pay reverence and highlight the historic oppressions of those cultures. Appropriation is but offensive when what’s being appropriated brings problems to the people to who the cultural artifact belongs.

On embargoing ballet, let’s stop denunciations of white pride where it doesn’t exist before. Let’s not fuel resentment with our shrill accusations and ill-thought overreactions and contribute to the rise of white supremacy.

Idea for Impact: Raise cultural hackles only for a good cause, i.e., when there’s real offense intended. Don’t stigmatize valuable cultural interchange. Delimiting features of cultures is contradictory to our goal of creating a diverse, melting-pot society. E pluribus unum.

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