| ENDING CONVERSATIONS without ENDING RELATIONSHIPS
Monday, November 14, 2022
What we want is rarely what we most need.
And what we set out to accomplish often takes us away in new, unexpected tangents of discovery, peals of laughter, or sends us down a regret hole we would rather avoid.
Sometimes we are pressed for time, react badly or forget to execute our planned strategy, so this shite experience doesn’t repeat.
As for getting rid of telemarketers, apply any of the above – hang up and expect they won’t call again; they expect hang-ups and cursing, but they never expect a lengthy discussion asking them for details, explanations, what the weather is like in their 3rd world call centre, in which case they will become the party trying to end the call.
When it comes to friends, colleagues, and people we don’t want to alienate, it’s tricky to disguise your disdain … so, “Sorry …. I’m losing the call – bad connection, bye”, or “I’m getting into an elevator, I may lose the call …” are good ones. Telling someone, “Let’s agree to disagree.” – that one backfires because it engages in debate and more conversation when you don’t have time or patience for the topic, the person, or for restraining yourself ~ in which case you can end the call, or end the relationship. The choice is easy, but the method requires thought and practice.
We need words and/or an action that works; something reliable and straightforward to shut someone down, shut them up, convey our disagreement or disdain for them or what they’ve said, that perfect phrase – those ends the discussion magic words.
Finding the perfect something short and profound phrase is elusive.
Our tendency, as mine has too often been, is to explain a lengthy why to someone who is a bit crackers or gets mired in a protracted debate that accomplishes nothing.
If it’s an “accomplishes nothing” issue, hang up, sign off, and end it with, “I hear you … but I’ve gotta go – talk soon.”
Or avoid them.
Don’t think about it, and if you need comfort, just imagine you are one of those government bureaucracy folks who take your number while promising to get back to you, then you never hear from them – so, quit quietly, ghost them. But be careful because sometimes the person who annoys you today might be someone you need on another day. Dismissing people abruptly is something we do at our peril (I have countless examples where I’ve burned bridges, and a few I metaphorically blew up).
What we say we want and need is often a grandiose dream mouthed with enthusiastic rhetoric, but actions speak louder than words, as someone reminded me yesterday.
Instead of scheming grandiosely, we need short pithy-ness or pissed-off-ness; we need crisp statements that dismiss the idiot colleague as quickly and succinctly as we dispatch the unwanted telemarketer at dinner time.
The person from yesterday’s reminder exchange drew what I believe is an incorrect, or at least incomplete, inference about what someone thinks, what they believe, and what their truth is based on actions taken.
It doesn’t matter what steps were taken or the why, and discussing that would take this article too far off-point into a distraction pool of distractions to drown us all …
Back to the point – reputations matter, actions matter, and how people who never know the whole story interpret what they see, what they hear and what they read. Rarely do we open our mouths as fully informed as we can be or with as much kindness as we should because when someone sends us something disparaging or negative, we are challenged in terms of how to react. Experience with many ways of telling people, diplomatically sometimes but often not too kindly, to get stuffed, eff-off, grow a brain or get their facts right before they assign or attribute some characteristics to my actions.
You can imagine these head-twisting moments of frustration – and the discipline to hold off hitting send for a while to cool off, edit, or choose words differently, which are all in my bag of tricks. Too often, there is a tending to give a short and rude rebuke. I’ve found the better and perhaps more profound answers are:
No.
No, not effing ever.
Go to hell, you fat cow.
(this gem was given to me long ago by a writer friend advising how I should respond to ill-informed critics sometimes and well-informed ones all the time!)
And so on, but those have been tried often and too often without the desired impact; to stop the conversation, to neither agree nor disagree, but to acknowledge and validate the person’s right to their point of view and recognize their freedom to speak their views however demented they might be. So I’ve gravitated to a simple set of processes that go beyond ‘blocking’, ‘reporting as spam’, ‘deleting’, ‘unfriending’ or telling them to pound sand while punting them far far away.
I’ve learned that denial of an opportunity to have a conversation, to hear or to be heard, is a strong feeling but it pales compared to how people feel when they are denied that opportunity to meet, to talk or have their views heard. It enrages people. I know because of when I’ve been enraged and might as well have been shouting upwards from the bottom of a waterfall. This would never happen because non-swimmers like me stay out of the water …
If you want to make things worse, I suggest you say NO, NO THANKS, or in some other way refuse to talk/meet/hear that person – in other words, slamming the door in their face. Or worse, slamming that door in their face and telling everyone about it as a joke – thereby making them the joke.
Or worse yet, don’t answer the door, the phone, the email, the text, or interject or raise your hand in a meeting. I’m told ear plugs are helpful …
If you want to make things better, say, “Wow, that’s’ big news – tell me more please.”, or “uh-huh, please go on”, encourage them to tell their story, offering them no argument or complaining, and eventually they will tire and run out of energy and/or points to make, and eventually they will say, “Sorry, I’ve to go know.”
Better yet, say “I agree, but I have to go, sorry …” at the outset – everybody wins, everybody saves time and a month from now nobody will remember or care what you disagreed about.
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