You know the feeling — the inner lurch of dismay when your friend buys the Jimmy Choos or Mulberry bag that you can’t afford, the gritted teeth through which you congratulate your work colleague on their promotion, the pang of misery with which you view images of happy families and couples on your social media feed…
As the American writer Gore Vidal so memorably said: ‘Every time a friend succeeds, something inside me dies.’
How many hours have you spent in the past week or month on the activities involved with maintaining relationships and recognising the needs of the people in your life?
These ’emotional labout’ activities could include, for example, organising a social or family event, spending time with someone, sending thoughtful texts, listening, cooking a meal, remembering birthdays, having a drink or coffee with someone, offering help, making someone comfortable — it probably adds up to a lot of time and probably the greatest amount of hours is clocked up by women.
The rise of management speak and workplace jargon not only debases language — it also diminishes those who use it.
It creeps into communication and, without realising it, we adopt the latest buzzword or usage, fearing that not to do so will reveal us to be out of touch.
In some situations, it isn’t too difficult to exchange words with strangers or semi-strangers. When the context is clear, we know where we stand.
We know that at a wedding or party or reception, there is a general expectation that we will engage with the people at our table or in our group, and daunting as ‘small talk’ can be, we can learn how to become better at it.
Exam time has started and we feel your pain. Even the most confident students can feel overwhelmed at the prospect of the testing period ahead.
Your schools and colleges will have given you loads of excellent advice about the best techniques and approaches. Here are a few more ideas to help you maintain your focus and energy in the final sprint towards exams.
The workplace is rife with jargon. We use the currently fashionable (or sadly outdated, if you don’t keep up) pre-packed phrases to make our banal utterances sound zippy and dynamic, and to impose a veneer of gravitas on our trivial observations.
Why take a broad view, or an overall perspective, when we can get the ‘helicopter view’? Why meet for coffee or a chat when we can ‘touch base offline’? But office jargon also disguises the reality behind the pithy expression.
‘Work-life balance’ has been a buzz phrase for many years and now ‘work-life integration’ is threatening to make it even tougher to sort out your life.
Here’s an approach that uses emotional intelligence to help you cope with numerous and conflicting demands.
In these times of fake news and alternative facts, how could we not be in favour of honesty? Honesty is a core value which is essential to human interaction. We have to be able to trust each other.
So let’s be on our guard for communication which, in the guise of honesty, presents negative comments masquerading as helpful feedback, and which raises questions about the motives of the speaker.
At first glance, it’s quite clear — the people at the top have power, and everyone else doesn’t. There’s an element of truth in this, of course.
If you have a position which gives you the last word in hiring and firing, rewarding and punishing, then you are powerful indeed. And we don’t hate you for it, because we know that you will always exercise this power with intelligence, sensitivity and responsibility.
Frank and fearless exchanges of views about entertainment, public personalities and the best place for a lunchtime sandwich are fun and stimulating.
On the other hand, disagreements about practice and policy, decisions and projections and similar kinds of work-based stuff are trickier to handle, whether they involve your colleagues or your boss. Here are some tips on how to handle contentious matters.
How’s the resolution going, the one about getting a good work-life balance? Thought so. But you’re not alone. It happens to most of us.
We start out with the firm intention of keeping work demands in check so we can have a personal life that is worth the name, but before we know it, we are overwhelmed with the relentless claims of the workplace.
It seems rather sad that such a lovely expression of pleasure as a smile should be put under scrutiny and become a subject for guidance and rules.
But smiling, like all other aspects of non-verbal communication, can add to or detract from the impact you make at work. It’s that Goldilocks effect again — too few smiles and you appear to be cold and standoffish, too many and you seem over-eager to please and to be liked. Get it just right, though, like the porridge that is neither too hot nor too cold, and you hit the right note of positive communication.