Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Manipulation

Beware of Narcissists’ Reality Twists and Guilt Trips

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Beware Narcissist Guilt Trips: Recognizing Toxic Manipulation One of the tell-tale signs of narcissists is their sneaky manipulation of situations to induce feelings of guilt in romantic partners, family, teammates, and anyone in the inner circle—especially regarding behaviors they perceive as disrespectful or ungrateful.

Guilt serves as a tool for manipulation, enabling narcissists to pull your strings and get what they want. They readily distort reality, causing others to doubt their own actions and emotions. They even refuse to dish out any love or approval until others play by ‘the’ rules.

Watch out for dramatic letdowns, sneaky digs, or affection/approval that comes with strings attached. Safeguard yourself against such manipulation. Don’t let the narcissist erode your confidence in your own feelings and perceptions. Their behavior reflects their own issues, not your personal worth.

Idea for Impact: Set firm boundaries, stick up for yourself, and don’t back down, even if it means refusing further engagement when necessary.

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  4. Entitlement and Anger Go Together
  5. Making the Nuances Count in Decisions

Spot the Signs, Draw the Lines

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Patronizing Behavior: Spot the Signs, Draw the Lines Ever experienced disempowerment, frustration, or communication breakdown due to someone’s perceived superiority or authority? Learn to identify three common patronizing behaviors:

  • Talking down: Speaking in a simplistic or slow manner, assuming you won’t grasp complex concepts.
  • Unsolicited advice: Acting like you can’t handle things on your own, and, worse, making decisions for you without consultation.
  • Disregarding opinions: Interrupting, dismissing feelings, and implying overreaction or irrationality.

First move: Stay mindful. Recognize signs of patronizing behavior in those around you. Defend your boundaries: Be assertive when lines are crossed, standing tall against disrespect or manipulation.

Idea for Impact: Respect starts with you. Your standards for how you’ll be treated matter!

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Avoid Control Talk
  2. “But, Excuse Me, I’m Type A”: The Ultimate Humblebrag?
  3. Beware of Narcissists’ Reality Twists and Guilt Trips
  4. The Trouble with Accusing Someone of Virtue Signaling
  5. The Sensitivity of Politics in Today’s Contentious Climate

The Trouble with Accusing Someone of Virtue Signaling

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The Trouble with Accusing Someone of Virtue Signaling The pejorative culture-wars phrase ‘virtue signaling’ has become an ad hominem scorn—a shoddy substitute for intelligently addressing the substance of the argument you’re purportedly discussing.

If you declare somebody is ‘virtue signaling’ when you have an ideological disagreement with them, you’re probably more interested in making groundless and unfalsifiable speculation about their motives. You’re unhesitatingly framing their intellectual or emotional foray as an act of narcissism. (Paradoxically, wielding the term sometimes serves as virtue signaling in itself. You’re pleading a moral high ground by calling out virtue signaling.)

You can’t rebut a person’s subjective position merely by discrediting that person or dismissing their opinions as grandstanding. You can’t denigrate people’s motives without speaking to their argument. Even if you think someone is likely virtue-signaling, keeping your speculation to a minimum is better.

Idea for Impact: Don’t judge the motives of others. It rarely helps to respond to a conflict by indicting them of a personal sin that is internal and, therefore, inscrutable to anyone else.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. “But, Excuse Me, I’m Type A”: The Ultimate Humblebrag?
  3. ‘I Told You So’
  4. Avoid Trigger Words: Own Your Words with Grace and Care
  5. Why It’s So Hard to Apologize

Cultural Differences and Detecting Deception

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Cultural Differences and Detecting Deception Spotting a liar isn’t an exact science; factors like eye contact, direct versus indirect communication, and many of the frequently highlighted “sure signs” of a liar may not always hold up across different cultures.

If you’re seeking more reliable indicators to help you discern truth from fiction, here they are:

  • Inconsistent Stories: Liars often weave a web of contradictions, changing their narrative as they go. When the story keeps evolving, it’s a red flag.
  • Lack of Detail: Liars tend to avoid specifics, offering vague responses that leave you with more questions than answers.
  • Defensiveness: While a poker face can hide the truth, excessive defensiveness can signal deception. When confronted, liars may become overly protective of their secrets.

Idea for Impact: Cultural sensitivity is essential when navigating the complex realm of truth and deception.

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  2. The Sensitivity of Politics in Today’s Contentious Climate
  3. How Understanding Your Own Fears Makes You More Attuned to Those of Others
  4. How to Speak Up in Meetings and Disagree Tactfully
  5. The Trickery of Leading Questions

Don’t Manage with Fear

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The ability to rouse fear has forever been an essential tool of management. Fear can be an effective mobilization tool in the short term. But fear breeds complicity, not commitment.

Instead of fear-based tactics, try soft power. Build trust and gain influence using these methods.

  1. Develop an inspiring vision. Work hard to follow through on implementing that vision and celebrate even little accomplishments along the way.
  2. Communicate expectations. Ask, “How can I help you do your job better?” Follow up. No need to keep everything too close to the vest. You needn’t tell everything you know, but what you say and do has to be true.
  3. Solve problems quickly. Push for results. Set aside some time for review and create options or actions that are apt for your team’s situation. Be tough where you must be, kind where you can be.

Idea for Impact: Don’t take the fear approach with employees. With motivation, fear works—up to a point. Understand how your people view your leadership style and ensure your behavior doesn’t cross the line between pushing them hard and pushing them away.

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  3. Listen and Involve
  4. To Micromanage or Not?
  5. What Knowledge Workers Want Most: Management-by-Exception

Avoid Control Talk

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If you tend to say the following to your employees, relatives, or friends, you may be too controlling:

  • “I don’t understand why you haven’t completed that report yet.”
  • “I want you to say sorry to Accounting about your problem. I need you to go over there, make amends with them, and inform me of how it went.”
  • “We will meet at 4 P.M.”

Control talk is expected and natural. It often transpires in day-to-day conversation as a device to influence or persuade the world to see and act our way. Within certain limits of performance, control talk is accepted in critical situations.

However, control talk can get out of bounds quickly and become perceived as a threat. When one party to any conversation has more perceived power—formal or informal authority, perhaps,—unreasonable control talk can soon push the other to concede this power imbalance and restrain what he/she wants. As the American family counselor Dr Tim Kimmel writes in Powerful Personalities (1993,) “Control is when you leverage the strength of your position or personality against the weakness of someone else’s in order to get that person to meet your (selfish) agenda.”

Control talk can promptly engender intense negative emotions. The ensuing conflict becomes evident in the tone of voice, posture, and facial and body expressions. After that, self-defensive reactions will only make matters worse.

Keep all communication with others candid and respectful. Frame your messages in a positive manner that does not contain sarcasm, imply warning, provoke guilt or blame, or suggest intimidation. Summarize what you heard, and ask questions. Practice pauses—they give the other a moment of silence to get beyond the emotional response and allow them to think cognitively.

Wherever possible, ask open-ended questions to de-escalate an argument. Open-ended questions are an invitation to be nonjudgmental, investigate, relate, and see things differently. Try these alternatives:

  • “Tell me more—I want to understand. What can I do to make your job easier?”
  • “Let’s discuss possible solutions to that Accounting problem. How can we change the situation?”
  • “Are you available for a 4 P.M. meeting? Let’s see what we can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Wise persuasion elegantly combines rational arguments and appeals to positive values and the other’s feelings about a subject. Only when you can engage them emotionally can you change the way they think.

Idea for Impact: When it comes to persuasion, knowing when to push and when to back off is vital. Nobody likes a pushy person.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. “But, Excuse Me, I’m Type A”: The Ultimate Humblebrag?
  2. ‘I Told You So’
  3. Avoid Trigger Words: Own Your Words with Grace and Care
  4. The Trouble with Accusing Someone of Virtue Signaling
  5. Ever Wonder Why People Resist Gifts? // Reactance Theory

The Difference between Directive and Non-Directive Coaching

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When coaching, many managers’first impulse is to jump into solution mode and fix problems by recommending solutions. The advice is often framed as, “I’ve seen this condition before, and you should do X. That’s what worked for me when I was working at company Y.”

The Directive Coaching Style is suitable when your employee doesn’t have the time, skills, temperament, or patience to resolve her problem.

The Non-Directive Coaching Style, in contrast, encourages the employee to think through her problem and develop her own solution. This coaching style takes more time but is usually more effective, especially if the situation is complicated.

Suppose the problem presents a skill or competence that the employee can learn. In that case, a good coach nurtures the employee by challenging her to mull over the situation objectively. Merely supplying the right solution is wasted if she doesn’t understand it or internalize it well enough.

The most effective coaches I know tend to dwell less on the “what’s to be done” and more on instilling the “how to think about.”

Idea for Impact: When offering advice, steer the thought process. Don’t dictate the outcome. Employees are more likely to be invested in the solutions they come up with.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. To Micromanage or Not?
  3. What Knowledge Workers Want Most: Management-by-Exception
  4. Why Your Employees Don’t Trust You—and What to Do About it
  5. 20 Reasons People Don’t Change

Nobody Wants Your Unsolicited Advice

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Unsolicited advice may be motivated by a genuine interest in helping. Still, it could have roots in a narcissistic desire to prove yourself useful or establish your dominance or elevated understanding of things.

If you’re inclined to fly your own kite, your heart may not in the right place.

Getting your unsolicited advice can leave other people feeling resentful. They may refuse to give in. They may perceive your “just being helpful” as a transgression and an affront to their freedoms to do as they wish. Nobody wants to be told that they’re on the wrong path or that their decisions are misguided.

Idea for Impact: Giving Unsolicited Advice is Invasive. Reactance theory causes people to resist the social influence of others. People believe that they possess certain freedoms to engage in—and unsolicited advice can threaten this sense of free behaviors.

Now, to turn the tables, if someone offers you unsolicited advice, assume the advice-giver’s good intentions, express thanks to the advice-giver, then accept or reject the advice solely on its merits. Too, consider your relationship with that person. If they’re a stranger whom you may never see again, offer a polite response, and move on. If they’re a co-worker or a family member, have a conversation on setting boundaries.

Wondering what to read next?

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“But, Excuse Me, I’m Type A”: The Ultimate Humblebrag?

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Our increasingly egotistical culture sanctions competitiveness, achievement-orientation, impatience, assertiveness, and work-fixation. Fine. But do we need to recast selfishness, greed, aggressiveness, and egotism as virtues?

Consider the assertion “I’m type A” you’ll often hear from people who’re harried and quick to anger. That expression has become the ultimate humblebrag—an announcement for the narcissistic self, indeed. It’s often a lead up to some form of a self-absorbed burden to be imposed on others.

Intense people are off-putting, particularly to laid-back types

The designation “Type A” was presented as a negative characterization in the 1970s by cardiologists—not psychologists—about people prone to so-called “hurry sickness.” These people tend to get angry and, consequently, have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.

Now then, “I’m type A” has become the special consent some people expect to be granted to be a bit infuriating. It’s a polite declaration of the self-conscious entitlement, “I have somewhat better standards. Sorry to be so persistent.” “Sorry to squeeze you dry on this project, but I’m driven to deliver my best.”

Idea for Impact: If you’re a Type A, by all means, be an overachiever, strong-minded, demanding, whatever. But be all these without being obnoxious or instinctively imposing uncalled-for pressure on everything and everybody and every time. Lighten up.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Avoid Control Talk
  2. ‘I Told You So’
  3. Avoid Trigger Words: Own Your Words with Grace and Care
  4. The Trouble with Accusing Someone of Virtue Signaling
  5. Signs Your Helpful Hand Might Stray to Sass

‘I Told You So’

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Something goes wrong, and your frustration is so intense that you just can’t resist blurting out, “Told ya, I saw that coming” or even “Why didn’t you listen to me?”

The phrase “I told you so” one of the least justifiable in the language. It rarely generates a positive response, and it’s unfailingly damaging to marriages, friendships, and parents’ relationships with children.

Events and premonitions thereof make perfect sense with hindsight. Your loved one already knows that you were right, and she was wrong. Going through failure is hard enough. She doesn’t need you to pour salt on her wound.

At some point, when the dust has settled, you may say carefully, “Sweetie, this stinks. That surely did not go as intended. Perhaps we shouldn’t do that again.”

It’s never okay to do the “I told you so” spiel even if you have her best interests at heart. Keep your disappointment—or delight—to yourself.

Being right about something feels so darn good, doesn’t it? But hold your tongue on gloating. Give up that attachment to the need to be correct. Let your loved one be human—let her heal, learn, grow, and evolve.

Avoiding negativity in the supportive relationship sometimes means biting your tongue and allowing the pieces to fall where they may.

Give your loved one the positive support she needs and help her cope. If you are kind, she may be more willing to listen in the future.

Idea for Impact: In relationships, a little tact and a lot of silence go a long way.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Avoid Control Talk
  2. “But, Excuse Me, I’m Type A”: The Ultimate Humblebrag?
  3. Avoid Trigger Words: Own Your Words with Grace and Care
  4. Signs Your Helpful Hand Might Stray to Sass
  5. “Are We Fixing, Whinging, or Distracting?”