Tag: communication

A daily choice

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Not being an asshole is a daily choice.

Not letting your mood affect the way you treat others. Not setting the agenda of a company, of a department, of a team on the base of your current focus. Not having the stress derived from your position permeate every interaction, every decision, every exchange. Not allowing busyness to become the answer to all requests of help or information or attention or care. Not giving a bad day, an unsatisfactory job, a regretful life the power to determine the days, jobs and lives of those around you.

It’s not an If-This-Then-That type of situation. We have an active role in deciding how we follow up with actions and words to the circumstances of the world.

There might be mitigating circumstances, and yet we own this.

Not a choice

Fabrizio1 Comment

Somebody once told me: “If you don’t tell me you don’t like it, you are the one losing, as I will go on doing it.”

A key takeaway from this article about radical candor, is that it’s not really a choice.

You might refrain from delivering criticism because of kindness, or because you don’t like being criticized in the first place, or perhaps the timing is not right, as everybody is in a hurry, and you’ll get back to it later, when the situation is calmer.

In the meantime people develop habits, that gets consolidated and more difficult to notice and adjust. You get frustrated, nurture a negative narrative about the other person, figure out ways to live with it and postpone the confrontation.

Until it all breaks down. If only..

Time and potential are wasted by not being candid in the first place.

Influence

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Influence has a bad reputation.

We think of influence as something that is done to people, to us. We do not like the idea of having our thoughts magically changed, and so we do not like those who try to change them nor the act itself. To be fair, influence has been used by people to impose their view on others for quite some time, so no wonder we get defensive any time someone even just mentions the word.

What if, instead, influence would be an act of empathy?

If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way – deeply and intuitively – you might even find your own mind opening in response.

Jonathan Haidt, The Rigtheous Mind

One message

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Kantar Millward Brown has found that the more you try to say, the less likely your message is going to get across and stick.

A great reminder for all the times we are tempted to tell of all the great things our product does, of all the features our service has, of all the magic we can deliver.

When the temptation kicks in, just think how effective such a message would be if you were the customer. Would you understand it, appreciate it, remember it? Would it make you buy?

Keep it simple.

We have lost

FabrizioLeave a comment

It’s not for us to judge what others do.

There are systems in place for that, and as individuals and human beings, we should not feel entitled to decide if other people’s behaviour is right or wrong.

Today we are given the illusion that we have this right, that it is necessary for us to let everybody know what we think about this or that event.

We have lost the capability to use others’ actions for self-reflection (and betterment), and we just cherry pick facts and happenings that confirm to ourselves and the world we are already better, smarter, braver, fairer.

We have lost the empathy to understand others behave like they do not because they are mean, devious, malicious, but just because they are facing our very same challenges, trying to make sense of a life that does not help them in the effort.

We have lost the courage necessary to look within ourselves first, to sit in front of a mirror and think about who we are and who we are not, the things we like and we want more of, the things we dislike and we want less of, and we drown in a continuous flow of superficial interactions that end up being shouts in the dark.

We have lost, and we are losing every day the sense of perspective, of what is important, of why should I care, or what is my role in all this.

We have lost, but we can take all of this back. It’s a choice we make every day.