What's Annoying?

LOUD TALKERS!

Do they realize they are loud?

Two reasons they may not:
1.  Low Self-Awareness - they don't know their loud.
2.  High Arrogance - they don't care their loud.

"Bossiness" doesn't work...

Positional Power–influence based in your job description-is the weakest form of influence.  You can use your “title” to force people to do things, but there is no respect or loyalty, only building hostilities.

Relationship Power-influence based in who you are and what you represent-is the strongest form of influence.  People will listen out of loyalty and devotion.

Common sense?
Did you ever notice that common sense isn't commonly practiced.

We live in a society very different than twenty years ago. The continual barrage of information has left people smarter, skeptical, and angry.  It's harder to influence anyone to do anything because our society is filled with messages affirming entitlement and a "we don't HAVE to" attitude.

Building relationships--building trust one conversation at a time--is the only strategy for building sustaining influence necessary for a productive environment, whether talking about a classroom or a workgroup. 

What Is Your Intention?

Your intention behind your actions is an important place to begin to understand your level of authenticity. Integrity based communication not only matches your spoken words to your intended message, but it also matches your intentions to moral principles of integrity, empathy, fairness, compassion.

Truthfulness should be filtered through the skill of making choices on "how you choose to say it."  Trivial matters that have no benefits to your "honesty"(benefits:  i.e. making the situation better in some way), it's what's left unsaid that is the integrity-based choice.

Through years of training and consulting, I've come across many individuals who proudly announce, "I have no trouble being honest!  I tell it like it is!"  I instantly know they are the aggressors who take pride in bullying others and who have no more self-awareness than someone who never owned a mirror.  Their effectiveness is minimal and they take a sadistic pride in their "directness" and veiled "honesty."

Telling your elderly aunt that her hair is thinning...or to mention to your uncle that he has bad breath...serves no purpose to the greater good outcome of relationship building in communications.


Truthfulness without the skill of tact and diplomacy leads to brashness and rudeness. It takes developed wisdom to discern situations and realize that it's most important to keep your own integrity in check by keeping the integrity of the other person a priority.  

Self- Improvement 101

You may recall the news photos of Karl Wallenda's final high-wire performance as he attempted to cross two tall buildings.  As he made his way on the wire, using his famous balancing pole, an intense wind came up.  Everyone watching immediately understood Wallenda's dilemma.  As the wind blew him off the wire, he clutched onto his balancing pole. All he needed to do was to let go of the pole and grab the wire.  But, because the pole had saved his balance so many times before, he held onto it even as he fell to the ground.  He held onto what he knew best even when it no longer served him.  --Leadership from the Inside Out

"He held onto what he knew best even when it no longer served him."  We all do this--hold onto the habits we know best, even when they don't serve us any longer.

On Listening...

When I ask you to listen and you start giving me advice, you have not done what I have asked.

When I ask you to listen to me and you begin to tell me why I shouldn't feel that way, you are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen and you feel you have to do something to solve my problem, you have failed me, strange as it may seem.

Listen!

All I asked was that you listen" not talk or do---just hear me...I can do for myself. I am not helpless.

When you do something for me what I can and need to do for myself, you contribute to my fear and feeling of inadequacy.

But when you accept as fact that I do feel what I fell, no matter how irrational, then I can quit trying to convince you and can get about the business of understanding what's behind this irrational feeling.

And when that's clear, the answers are obvious and I don't need advice."

--Ralph Boughton, MD