You can’t argue with how someone feels.
I received this piece of advice years ago when I was fighting with my boyfriend and struggling to communicate my side of things. In the simplest terms, someone cannot argue with how they made you feel, because feelings are subjective. Therefore, if you express to your partner/friend/family member how they made you feel and why you felt that way, they are more likely to understand your point of view than if you were to focus on their actions. This advice really struck a chord with me and has since brought me great success in framing my side of a disagreement.
Flash forward a few years to when I first entered the workplace, all wide-eyed and fresh-faced and only 22 years-old. I had no idea how to navigate working relationships or how to differentiate between a colleague and a friend. So when I began encountering tough situations at work and having disagreements with other colleagues, my initial reaction was to address them in the same way that I would address issues with anyone else in my life- at an emotional level so they could understand how their actions made me feel.
Lol.
The entire first year at my job, I would address issues with my colleagues and boss from an emotional place. Luckily, I have an incredibly supportive team and no one told me to STFU or fired me. They always tried to help me work things out and calm me down, but eventually they stopped seeing my emotional reactions as the result of me being new and inexperienced, and started buying into the image I was accidentally painting of myself.
They saw me as weak, fragile, and unable to navigate office politics without an army of colleagues by my side. They would tiptoe around providing me with difficult feedback, they would take the blame for me in situations they had nothing to do with, and they’d rush to fix any problems I had instead of holding me accountable for my mistakes.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was buying into the bias and proving to my colleagues that women are emotional basket cases who shouldn’t be trusted with anything important. And it was scary how easily my colleagues accepted this as “normal” behaviour for me.
I had become the little sister that everyone felt they needed to protect and no one felt they could trust.
And worst of all, I stopped trusting myself. I had enabled a damsel-in-distress type of dynamic between myself and my colleagues, and the more they treated me like I needed protecting, the more I believed it. I had no faith in my own capabilities and my self-esteem at work plummeted.
I realized I needed to change when I started having issues with other colleagues in the business outside my team. No one took me seriously and people would often go around me to get things done- making my role completely obsolete.
Eventually, one of the senior managers that I work with held a meeting with myself, my boss, and other managers to discuss my performance on a project I was doing for her. She gave positive feedback on the quality of my actual work, but said she was having a hard time understanding how to communicate with me.
And in front of myself and 5 other people she asked my boss if someone else could work on her project instead of me.
It was devastating and humiliating. In that moment I realized that feelings don’t make friends in the workplace and that navigating personal relationships is not the same as navigating professional ones.
I am now on the road to ~emotional reaction recovery~ but it hasn’t been easy. Even with the guidance of many strong, very professional female mentors, I struggle everyday to rebuild my credibility and prove to my colleagues that I am not some damsel in distress they always need to save. I work hard to frame every conversation from an objective point of view, go to all my meetings prepared with action-based evidence, and avoid talking about my emotions/feelings/personal life at all costs. (And also crying- I definitely don’t do that anymore. At work.)
It will take months to gain back the trust I lost, and I know it will take even longer for me to start trusting myself and my own capabilities again.
My advice to young girls about to enter the workforce is leave your emotions at the door. Don’t make the same mistakes that I did. You are not at work to make friends, and playing the victim is never worth it.
I’m not saying this because I buy into the bullshit patriarchal bias that women are overly sensitive and could spontaneously burst into tears at any given moment.
I’m saying this because the bias does exist.
It’s a prejudice that we will have to work extra hard to discredit our entire lives.
I learned just how easy it is to get trapped in that bias. And now I’m learning just how hard it is to get out.
The post Consequences of Playing the Damsel-in-Distress in the Office appeared first on Twenty Something Living.
