91–100 of 144 posts
If this resonated with you, consider reading Nonviolent Communication by Rosenberg, the ultimate guide in thermostat-speak. You focus on stating unmet needs. Good stuff.
When I hear people trying to use "Nonviolent Communication" it only makes me more angry. It is manipulation and so transparent and condescending. Sometimes communication needs to be violent.
He who raises his voice first, loses.
While the article has some good points about the importance of emotional intelligence and awareness, I'm skeptical about the idea that we can simply "choose" to be thermostats. Humans are complex and emotional creatures, and our emotions can be triggered by a multitude of factors beyond our control. The article's suggestions, while well-intentioned, feel like a form of emotional labor that can be exhausting and unsus…
> I'm skeptical about the idea that we can simply "choose" to be thermostats. Well, it’s like most things, it takes practice and time to be good at it if natural talent isn’t there. Sure, things out of our control can trigger emotions, but one incredible ability of humans is to rationalize those emotions and act in more constructive ways than to immediate react back. It can be quite liberating and fun to understand a…
The more I practice changing or revamping my reactions/approaches to situations, the more those things improve.
Not everyone will agree but IMO - the skeptic is simply not that willing to try. That's ok. But it's the reality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Emotional outbursts (like being startled/angered/in pain) may be temporarily irrational your own logic-wise, but your regular emotional background absolutely reflects what you actually believe is happening and the way you think. Yes your emotional background reflects what you believe is happening, but you can correct your belief if you analyze and rationalize the emotional response when you feel it, which then upda…
I find it very hard to impossible to do immediately afterwards. I can detect it, which is somewhat obvious, and write down the situation, but finding the source of it immediately I find unrealistic. Either we talk about different things here, or I lack some Sherlock Holmes level skills that you have. Anyway, if something bothers me that hard, making it unbother me is an improvement to work in a stupid situation, not…
https://gist.github.com/TheUltDev/fc8386e42205504c55d1cf2127...
(as this is a state of mind and logic thing, a program of state and logic is a better way to describe it vs words)
While the article has some good points about the importance of emotional intelligence and awareness, I'm skeptical about the idea that we can simply "choose" to be thermostats. Humans are complex and emotional creatures, and our emotions can be triggered by a multitude of factors beyond our control. The article's suggestions, while well-intentioned, feel like a form of emotional labor that can be exhausting and unsus…
> I'm skeptical about the idea that we can simply "choose" to be thermostats. Well, it’s like most things, it takes practice and time to be good at it if natural talent isn’t there. Sure, things out of our control can trigger emotions, but one incredible ability of humans is to rationalize those emotions and act in more constructive ways than to immediate react back. It can be quite liberating and fun to understand a…
This thread actually made me realize it's much easier to express this in code vs words since it deals with state and logic:
https://gist.github.com/TheUltDev/fc8386e42205504c55d1cf2127...
This is the my process of rationalization and resolution. The flow is the same for all scenarios, but I only coded logic for one scenario I described in another comment:
Let's say someone close to you is unusually quiet and short with you. You irrationally think they are mad at you or ignoring you because they are being short. That makes you feel mad because you didn't do anything to them! Upon receiving the feeling you start rationalizing the response and realize that you have no evidence that they are mad at you and there are many times you don't want to talk. You then simply ask them if anything's wrong and they say they have a headache! Whew, it wasn't about you at all, it was just a headache! You then empathize with them and want to help so you ask if you can get them some advil and know not to be loud or talk too much until they start feeling better (acting normally)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ooh, some lifetimes ago at a company we had a CEO that did a company wide presentation where he kept mentioning that the shareholders are the most important thing of the entire company and we all should do everything to please the shareholders. The instant hate towards him could almost be touched and tasted.
It is both inspiring and depressing that intelligence is not a prerequisite for high up roles.
There's an unspoken premise here and I'm going to question it. Avoiding tension, conflict, hard words and other things of the sort is not always the right choice. Sometimes letting conflicts play out gets you the best outcome with the least amount of suffering. Just like ripping off a band-aid. There's plenty of times when wining a conflict is far better than avoiding it. And I see articles like this, books like Nonv…
Yes, agree. This is all a continuation of the Positivity Cult. Anger is a method of communication that is greater than words, and it puts the explanation point at the end of some of the most important statements. Just read this: I need help. I need help!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Good for you if you can create a consulting business out of stating the obvious I suppose. In my experience, tech problems are a lot easier to solve than people problems, and a lot of things that don't go well in a project turn out to be people problems. E.g. here are a few issues I encountered in my current project at work in the last month: "their framework makes assumptions that don't apply to our code, so we re…
> where in the end it turns out a lot of issues are just people not talking to each other or misunderstanding each other? What makes a huge difference is how you frame your interactions. If you extrinsic your interactions you're all-ways going to come away with a lack of agency, stress and/or frustration. if you intrinsic your interactions, you're going to be more in control, accountable, and over-all indifferent to…
I'd message this directly, but she doesn't provide a method of contact on the site (reasonable).
If you can sense that someone is tense or "off vibe" in a group meeting, you should be able to reasonably determine why. If it's not immediately evident and they are not alluding to it in the meeting - then you should table the discussion until you are able to chat 1:1 with the person.
Not downplaying any of the strategies for being chipper and staying positive and being a good vibe... which seems obvious... but to push it back on the "bad viber" and dice roll on whether you'll be charismatic enough to do it without causing even more bad/awkward vibes, I think is unnecessarily risky.
I've been in many meetings where someone seemed "off" but after conferring with others more familiar with the situation found it it's quite usual and not a sign of anything wrong. Had someone intervened there and tried to "discover" the case of the bad vibes, it would have amounted to "why are you like this" which is not the kind of thermometer input required.
Likewise if someone is being openly confrontational in the meeting because they feel strongly about something, the right course is for someone else to step up and discuss it without any ambiguity or levity - ruling out irrelevant emotions not related to the discussion - if the stakes were high enough to merit losing face in a meeting, they should generally be high enough to discuss and resolve.
My experience has been, in many board meetings and conference rooms with C-levels, that the norm for these discussions is someone "off vibe" and it's rarely koombayah when there is something at stake being discussed. Bringing unnecessary levity to a serious and often uncomfortable meeting is taken as a bit of an insult to the topic or the opinions being tabled. You can read accounts of an Jeff Besoz or Steve Jobs executive meeting and glare into this first hand.
What I learned is that that last email didn’t do a good job explaining the changes, so what I plan to do is start a forum for folks to post their questions and our CEO will answer them every Tuesday. I know it’s only an example, but hahahahahahahaha, ha. Start with something realistic if you do that. The worst thing you can do is to teach them you’re a bag of funny promises.
At a former company we once had an away day workshop where they allowed anonymous questions for the company director which would show up on a screen for everyone (it was a ~40-50 person company). We were a management consultancy and trialling what they thought was cool new tech to use with other companies. ( This was a while ago, smart phones were newer and apps were still "cool" ) Well, they very quickly learned to…