Some people like to provoke strong reactions in others. They seek the fight, they care to win, they tend to protect, defend, and argue.
Some people prefer not to be noticed by others. They shy away, they let go, they hide and accept.
With the former, you have to be careful not to be drawn into the pit. With the latter, you have to be careful to assign the merit and avoid being forceful.
Mediation is always the best way, but you first need to figure out who you are dealing with.
The effort we put into avoiding difficult conversations.
The energy we invest into keeping that bad feeling at bay.
The thoughts we dedicate to finding ways to reduce uncertainty.
That’s what makes everything more difficult, bad, and uncertain.
When you accept that as a part of being a colleague, a leader, a partner, a friend, a parent, a human being, then the rest of the journey is downhill.
I’m not suggesting that we should cease efforts to alleviate pain, our own or that of others. But as psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp was keenly aware, our “mistaken belief that it can be cured” is what makes pain unbearable.
Ed Batista, Pain Is Mandatory. Suffering Is Optional.
The worst way you can welcome a new thing a colleague has worked on – something that fills a gap, something that was needed and was not there – is to say: “Can you also do this?”.
Of course, it’s imperfect. It’s the first time you have that.
Of course, you have ideas and opinions. You were given time to think about it.
Of course, it will get better. That’s probably also why they have shared it.
“Can you also do this?” is the surest way to have the colleague stop working on it. Welcome the novelty instead, the initiative, the boldness. And give the new thing time to develop and accept your vision.
It might be that everyone is out there waiting for you to come out with the new feature. Perhaps your detractors are just waiting for you to trip and your competitors can’t wait to see the sneak peek of your new product. Somebody for sure has also set an alert to track everything that you are doing and beat you to it.
Or maybe not.
The point is that the time you spend worrying about all these unlikely scenarios – let’s accept it, in most cases we are not that important – is time you could invest to put your work out there and get people excited about it.
Caution does not spread.
When we lose, it’s easy to play down the whole situation.
It was not so important after all.
Others were lucky.
That single decision was unfair and really cut my chances.
I did not give my best, but if I would have..
The context was heavily against me.
It’s a defence mechanism that puts space between us and the failure so that we don’t feel like such. And it tells of a tendency to see loss as failure.
Of course, if we want to avoid losing more in the future, we’d be better off by owning the loss and trying to see what went wrong. What it is that is under our control and that we can do better.
That’s the sign of a winning mentality.
You've got this 