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Don’t Take It Personally

Bailey Hanna

CAST 2018

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A bit about me...

B. E Sc Software Engineering 2018

Bailey Hanna

Yes, I am sure it isn’t Hanna Bailey.

@baileyhanna

Hi everyone!

So this is the obligatory “who am I and why are you all sitting here listening to me for the next 45 minutes”

My name is Bailey Hanna, and yes… I assure you that is the correct order despite everyone who asks me to fill out paperwork assuming otherwise!
I was born and raised in Canada, and this is my first trip to Cocoa Beach so this is exciting for me!
I graduated this spring with my Bachelor of Engineering Science from Western University in London, Ontario
And I am fortunate to currently be working for a company called Magnet Forensics based out of Waterloo Ontario.

I have been at Magnet for 2.5 years now, I started out as a Software Test Specialist Intern, then moved into an SDET role while I finished school and then moved back into a Test Specialist role once I was back full time. Even though I’m still relatively new to the testing community I have learned a lot and that’s why I am here to talk to you all today!

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What do I mean by “Don’t Take it Personally”

@baileyhanna

Everyone has been there. You’re talking with someone at work about an issue, or they’re giving you some kind of feedback and whatever it is that they say, you feel it hit a little too close to home. You get emotional, you feel defensive, or angry, or frustrated by what they just said to you. Instead of it being a conversation that was focused on productivity and improvement it comes off as a personal attack on you and your character. When you finally walk away from the conversation it is still there in your mind, not the topic of the conversation, but that feeling. And that, is why taking things personally can be detrimental in the workplace, because as Maya Angelou said, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, but people will never forget how you made them feel. “

This talk is designed to discuss how daily interactions with colleagues in the workplace can become detrimental to progress when we take feedback or comments personally. When this happens we tend to get defensive. When we get defensive we become more concerned about protecting ourselves and defending our abilities that we can quickly lose sight of the actual issue that is being discussed. For example, in the quote above we would likely all be trying to defend our actions and the bug that was found would actually start to come second to that and therefore we are not being a productive as we can be.

Of course, this happens outside of the software and tech sector as well but today I’m going to focus on some very specific examples of interactions that you likely encounter on an average workday.

I will try, in the next 30-40 minutes, to give you some tools to help you when you encounter situations where feedback or comments are made personal. Where they are said in a way that makes you feel defensive, or unsure. The greatest thing that I wish to share with you is the ability to step back, be able to regain control of the situation.

When we take things personally we are giving certain individuals more power over us than they deserve or should ever be allowed to have. - https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/in-flux/201408/how-stop-taking-things-personally

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What do I mean by “Don’t Take it Personally” continued...

“Stop taking what other people say and do personally. Focus instead on what you're about to say and do.” - Akiroq Brost

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What Makes Feedback Personal?

Elements of Communication

Implication & Tone

Emphasis & Inflection

Body Language

@baileyhanna

Language is incredibly strong. It gives us the power to express ideas, emotions, and interact with one another on an intellectual level. It also allows us to understand what people are saying to us. However, it can also have negative connotations depending on how we use it. And that doesn’t necessarily mean the words we use, but HOW we use them. Some of the examples we will go over today are:

Inflection
Implication
Emphasis
Tone
Body Language

I will go through some examples of situations where these are able to change the meaning of the conversation and discuss ways in which you can look for the signs of them, tips and techniques of ways to handle those types of situations, and some strategies for how best to “react” or interact with people who you find using these types of language with you regularly. The biggest point that we will be focussing on, since it’s the first step without which we cannot work on the other two, is identification. Once we are able to identify what it is that’s making us feel defensive and like this is a personal manner it becomes much easier to make sure your reactions are positive and professional.

But there’s also another side to this that we need to be aware of as well. We may be the ones who are making it personal. People get defensive when we take things personally, but there are also times where when we take a step back we may see that the interaction started with us being the ones on the offense. It may not even be in the same interaction, but if we have done it in the past then that could still be in their mind.

Though the examples and tactics focus on ways to avoid taking things personally it is important to reflect and make sure you are not also making it personal in situations.

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Implication and Tone - Example 1

Unfortunately, we failed since it would seem you were unable to grasp the severity of the situation.

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Implication.

An implication is when you use your words to imply something without outright saying it happened. For example, saying “John Doe was the only person in the building when the fire was started” could be an implication that John Doe had started the fire. Of course, they could simply be stating a fact.That may be an extreme example, but it shows the most common use of implication: to accuse someone of an action, generally an undesirable action. This is one of the things about language behaviour, there is rarely only one of these traits occuring in a single conversation.

The issue with implications is that it can be hard to know if the person is aware of how their words are coming off. Another issue with language behaviour is it can be hard to call people on their behaviour for things such as this. They can quite easily say that they were not trying to imply anything, simply stating a fact. This is the entire way of an implication, it is a subtle way to try and accuse someone of something while not having the proof to actually prove it. That is where tone comes into play.

Tone:

Tone is how we convey an emotion through our words and our voice. This doesn’t necessarily mean saying things angrily, or sadly, though that also plays a role. As we saw in the two examples, the words that we chose also play a large role in the tone of a sentence. The majority of words we use would be considered neutral, things like “the” “and” etc. but many of our adjectives convey some sort of feeling. Take “should” for example. This word, by definition, means an obligation to do something. Meanwhile, “could”, means would it be possible to. By using could you give the person a choice, and therefore they don’t feel forced or pressured into something which can make for a more healthy conversation to transpire.

Let’s pretend there was some sort of problem solving competition between different teams. This first example sentence is a great example of how implication and tone can change a sentence. Lets start with tone. And I don’t necessarily mean the tone of voice, but even just in the words used to convey feeling. We see many words in here such as “Unfortunately”, “failed”, “unable. These are all words that convey negative connotation. Now for implication. This one is easiest to spot when there are words like “you” and “I” when the discussion should be objective. In this case, it’s clear that the speaker is blaming the individual they are speaking to for the outcome.

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Implication and tone - Example 2

The situation was more severe than we believed but we did the best we could despite that and can learn from it.

@baileyhanna

Now let’s see what happens when we change the sentence up.

First, tone. We see a lot less negative words being used in this sentence and more positives. Here we can see words such as “best”, “could”, “can” these are all words that generally have a positive connotation, and clearly change the way that this sentence will be perceived, despite it being about the same incident. The implication is also different, there is no personal implication of responsibility. Instead, we see use of words like “we” and it feels more inclusive and uplifting. Clearly implication and the tone of a sentence can make a big difference on the way that it is portrayed.

So how can we work on this?

First, lets identify the implication. Generally the implication is likely that something is your fault, but it’s likely more specific than that. It will reference some sort of failure on your part. You forgot to test a certain aspect of the product, you are lazy and it caused issues, you were slacking etc. The key is to first identify that. Once you have identified that you can work on a way to defend yourself, without coming off as defensive.

Confusing, right?

But it’s not if you think about it. There are ways to defend yourself without giving the person more to go on. If you reacted negatively to them they would be able to tell others you were aggressive, and made things up that they didn’t “really” say. But if you can identify what the implication is, you are able to identify why they feel that way. Was it something you said? Someone else said? Something you did? Some piece of information they are missing? These identifications allow you to give them concrete examples that will make it harder for them to continue thinking the way they were. You don’t have to outwardly and aggressively deny it, just plant the seeds, truthful ones, that allow them to reach the conclusion on their own.

Now for the tone. This one is definitely harder. The biggest thing to do is make sure you avoid using them in your speech. But if possible, try to think about the words they used. Think about the type of things that words themselves imply by their literal meaning. Once you can do that you can make sure you don't use the same language when you respond. Otherwise it would just encourage the negative tone to continue on. I addressed tone by focussing on one word at a time. For example, one week I would focus on how how often I, or others, said the word “you” instead of “we”. You conveys responsibility, which in some instances is good! But a lot of the time it becomes accusatory. When we replace it with “we” or “the team” you feel like people are on your side and it’s easier to be constructive. The biggest thing I found was that changing my vocabulary to change my tone, changed the tone of the way people responded to me. It’s really hard to be the one who’s acting that way so when you don’t, your conversation partner will subconsciously adjust as well.

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@baileyhanna

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Emphasis and Inflection

I didn’t say you stole my money.

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Emphasis and Inflection. These two words really relate to HOW we say things, not just what we say. As an example:

*Read the sentence each way*

So, as you can see, when I put the emphasis on different words, it changed what the meaning of the sentence was. Emphasis is when you give more power to one of the words, inflection is more about how drawn out, or the different ways you you have to say the same words. You can say things very short, and snippy, or long and drawn out, or even even add emotions such as sadness or disgust. *Go through examples with the word you*

Emphasis and inflection are fueled, most often, by the emotions we feel. Of course, this can be good in order to let someone know you are upset, or that their words hurt you. But in a professional environment you will most often wish to remove emotion from the equation in order to be objective about the situation occurring. But how can you make changes that allow you to have a better interaction with someone who is highly emotional and letting that slip into the way that they are conversing with you?

Step 1: Identify the emotion being portrayed! Or what word(s) they are emphasizing.

Think about what they said, think about how they said it, try and latch onto those specifics to figure out how they feel

Step 2: Attempt to identify why they feel this way

If this happens at the start of the conversation, this is obviously not going to be as easy. If you know the person well you may have some insight but otherwise you’ll likely just need to move to step 3.
If you can identify something that happened earlier in the conversation to make them feel that way (i.e. did you accidentally indicate mistrust? Is that why they are defensive? Are they in a hurry? Is that why they seem frustrated?) then you can try and take some steps to correct that.

Step 3: What point are they trying to make outside of the emotion?

If the response was solely emotion based this will be difficult. So in this case try and respond in a neutral way to lead the conversation back to the point.
Try to craft your response in way that is neutral, unemotive, and also addresses the issues that may be making them feel that way if you’ve been able to identify a cause.

The biggest thing in responding to someone who is speaking this way to you is to ensure you do not do it back. When you speak in a neutral, productive way it is hard for your conversation partner to feel comfortable continuing in that way.

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Body Language

@baileyhanna

Body language. The aspect of communication that has nothing to do with the words coming out of our mouths and everything to do with every other part of our body while we say them.

Body language is complex. It can be obvious, or it can be incredibly subtle. Today, we’re just going to focus on the very obvious aspects of body language, the things that we would see and do every day.

So let’s take a look at this still from an episode of The Office.

Arms crossed. These people are defensive. They’re not open to what is happening right now and they are trying to protect themselves.

Hands in pockets. This shows that someone is again, closed off, but not defensive this time. They are likely to come off as though they just don’t care and don’t want to engage.

Looking away. These people are looking away from the screen. This means they are not engaged in the video that everyone else is watching and they come off as not caring and not wanting to be part of the group or that they are focussed on something else.

Let’s look at their facial expressions now. I won’t highlight each one but you can see some of them smiling, some of them with a pained or disgusted look on their face. Most importantly, though many are smiling not all are doing so because they are happy. There are many variations of common expressions with different meanings.

Let’s start with the face. We smile, frown, laugh, roll our eyes and each one of these can tell us something different. And they don’t necessarily always mean the same thing. For example, rolling my eyes while I frown is incredibly different than rolling my eyes while laughing. As with everything else, there is never only one trait being displayed while we interact with one another. Even the lack of these traits, in and of itself, is a trait. We tend to associate it with indifference, lack of caring etc.

Although we pick up on people’s body language subconsciously it is important to try and figure take note of it and how it makes you feel. When we rely strictly on the subconscious aspect of our minds, we allow it to also influence our reactions. If we are able to take note and control how we feel about those actions we can ensure that we are in control of our own actions.

The only surefire way to deal with body language issues in conversations is to call them out. It doesn’t need to be in a group setting but if you can identify what it was about a persona’s body language that upset you or made you feel a certain way you can discuss it with them at a later time. There is a chance they aren’t even aware that they are doing it or they are unaware of how it is being perceived. Additionally, by changing your own body language to make sure you come off as engaged and open you will likely find that people tend to start showing the same sort of body language techniques to you.

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@baileyhanna

We can see some very negative body language in this example. There is a divide between the team members based on where they sit at the table, people are distracted during the meeting, and most of all there are looks that show that people do not wish to be present in the meeting. The one thing that I would really like to highlight here however is that this is just an extreme example. Every comic up to this point has also used body language to add to the negative impression given. Additionally, this example shows other language techniques discussed earlier as well. This is because it is very rare to only see one technique in use. It is generally a combination or some, or all, of the discussed techniques and more!

The key is to work on things iteratively. You would be strained if you tried to notice and change your responses to all of the techniques at once. The key is to focus on one thing at a time, similar to my tactic for dealing with tone. This allows you to slowly, but surely, change your conversations from a personal manner to an objective and productive one.

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Now For Some Fun!

Scenario 1:

Person 1 will be explaining a new testing technique to Person 2.

Scenario 2:

Person 1 will be discussing a bug found in the software to Person 2.

Remember! One person at a time should be trying to use some of the language techniques discussed and the other will use the tactics learned to try and avoid taking it personally and steer the conversation in an objective direction.

@baileyhanna

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Conclusion

Even if someone makes it personal, it is up to YOU whether or not to take it personally.

@baileyhanna