How perception shapes our reality
Some years ago when I was working with a manager and I was miserable. It was a big challenge I faced at that time. This was a dominant manager, ready for action, with an outspoken style. I felt anxious, rushed, micromanaged and unhappy.
Decide on your approach
Whenever I face any challenge, I ask myself what do I want to do: accept the situation as is, try to change something or avoid it all together. Is this something I want to learn to deal with?
My first reaction was to avoid it because it felt too much of a challenge for me at that moment. It felt over my level of experience by a lot. And I was telling myself that I don’t have to deal with this kind of behaviour.
And so I started thinking of ways to get myself out of the situation. Asked for advice, looking for other types of projects. Meanwhile, I was just laying low, doing what I needed to get done, but without being so involved. So I retreated and started thinking of alternative paths.
After doing this for a some weeks, things cooled down and I was starting to think a bit more clearly. And one idea sparked in my mind: what if I can use this as a learning opportunity? What can this situation teach me? Surely learning to work with very different personalities is something I’ll be faced with in many other projects I’ll work on. I can’t avoid this forever. Even more than this, if I manage to pull this off, that will be quite something.
And so my adventure started to take a very different turn.
See it as training
I started to accept that this is training in the wild. Normally you have to pay to go to courses or workshops to learn this kind of things. I had this for free. Now if only I could learn how to manage this. As always, it’s easier said than done.
And so I started reading, thinking, thinking about my thinking, analyzing my behaviour, trying to break down to smaller pieces what was going on.
Once I accepted this as training, the game was on. I was thinking constructively about the situation. And my attitude changed completely.
Notice verbal, non-verbal and para-verbal language
One of the first things was to analyze my behaviour in the interactions with this manager: what do I say, how do I say it, what is my body language, how do I feel when talking with him. And there were a few non-verbal messages to which I was reacting very poorly. My background was not helping me in this case. I used to be triggered by a few things very easily, for reasons that were escaping me. This stuff was keeping me up at night.
Insight: I was getting very defensive, I was not speaking my mind, various chemicals were rushing thru my body making me feel unpleasant and saying stupid things. I became aware of what I was doing and how I was overreacting.
Then I did the same analysis with the manager. I’ve observed his behaviour, trying to discover what his reactions were to my behaviour. I’ve also observed his interactions with others. Cause I was wondering if it’s something I do or is it a general behaviour pattern. And sure enough, it was nothing personal. Many of the things that were annoying me were happening with others too. So this was a very useful realization: these are this manager’s reactions in certain situations. And many of the things I was interpreting as a personal attack were nothing but reflex reactions.
My reasoning was that people don’t normally set out to get someone, to become annoying, to piss others off.
Insight: I can practice ignoring some of the behaviour, translate the message for what it’s trying to say and also give feedback about the things disturbing me.
Give positive feedback for specific behaviour
It wasn’t long, maybe two months, until I’ve noticed how things started to change for the better. Both on my side, but also on the manager’s side. I was lucky this was a manager open to change based on feedback.
And I’ve started to give positive feedback for specific actions which I found useful for me. If he was open to discuss things, to give me more space, to give me more non-aggressive feedback or to hear me out, I’d call out these things, showing I notice them and I appreciate them. It was a way of encouraging more of the same behaviour for the future.
Empathize with the other person
During this I started to practice different forms of empathy. One thing was to learn about what it’s like to be a manager, the challenges and joys of it. And the things a manager cares about. This gave me some useful insights I was able to apply in my work, to optimize my approach.
To my surprise, it wasn’t long until the situation changed veyr much, little by little. I was having a great work relation with this manager, not only compared to how it was initially, but overall compared to many projects and managers I’ve worked on.
A few months after, as I was reflecting on the situation, I realized I’ve made it thru. With work from both sides, mine and the manager’s, it became a very fruitful relation.
Was it easy? No. Did I learn something from this? A lot. Did it push my limits? Of course. Would I do it again? Surely. I’m not advocating for trying this at all costs. Life can be challenging as it is sometimes.
I have learned so much about myself in this training, a lot of which I integrated in my daily routine and a lot of which will surely help me in the future.
Hopefully this will serve as an inspiration to someone and give them hope to not give up, to discover with curiosity.
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What did I read about?
In this quest I’ve read articles and books about management to empathize, read about conflict management to deal better in those situations, emotional and social intelligence to understand what’s going on, giving feedback to let others know how I feel, emotional regulation to self-control my reactions and human biology and chemistry to understand how this happens in the body. It made me curious about so many things.
