Choosing chaos over malice 🌲👻
A few weeks ago, we discussed how to email like a human - and how showing up like a human in your communiqués has SUCH a big impact on how nice a workplace can feel. Especially if you do most of your work in an inbox or Slack channel. But guess what?
Showing up like a human also means we might have a busy, intense, or even a straight-up terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
We all know this vibe
We all know this vibe.
We've all had one. We’ve all definitely worked with someone having one. This is a Normal Workplace Event and will be until our work is all done by robots. 🤷🏻♀️
Where normal turns into not-nice is when we start seeing the bad day, or weird message, or short email, or Google Docs comment for more than it is. In other words: we assume there's malice instead of recognising it's probably just normal human chaos slash existence. Life is MESSY, after all.
Here's where this might hit home for you:
Someone sends a Slack message without an emoji (and they normally use a lot of emojis).
Assuming malice: You stress they're mad at you or that you did something wrong.
Assuming chaos: You reason they're busy and needed to send a quick message - maybe they're on the go - or hey, they just forgot.
Your manager sets a meeting time at the end of the day.
Assuming malice: You just KNOW you'll get disciplined or fired, and you stress about it all day.
Assuming chaos: You assume they probably have no time to chat until then, and they booked for their freest moment, not realising how it looks.
You open up your project and see you've been left loads of comments on areas to fix.
Assuming malice: You think you're terrible at your job or see red and find reasons to dismiss their comments.
Assuming chaos: You realize that you forgot some areas, you reason you could have done more with the work, and/or recognise you now have a roadmap for completing your task in a stronger way.
