She asked me about what to do when put on a team with people who aren’t exactly team players and I gave her my take on her specific situation. She was relieved to get a couple of strategies she was comfortable using, then said: “I just wish I wasn’t so sensitive about all of this. I’m 52 years old; you’d think I would have grown out of this by now”.

Like most people, she thought of sensitivity as a character default that she could overcome and was beating herself up over her perceived weakness when she was the one who made these ill-matched, badly-conceived teams work by being attuned to everyone’s needs and the bridge between blunt personalities. Not only that, people around her probably didn’t give her credit for making it all work and certainly didn’t see how stressful she found being constantly the mediator between ruffled peacock feathers (lots of strutting going on in that office!)

My heart went out to her, another undervalued sensitive angel in the workplace and I was glad to be a some help. Here were a couple of my recommendations:

• To set her boundaries very early before she felt emotional about being taken advantage of, and to do so with as much matter-of-fact tone as she can, coupled with humor if she worried about their reaction.
• To remind herself throughout the day to depersonalize their behavior. They weren’t targeting her, they were insensitive clods with everyone and everything. I’m not saying she should let herself be abused, just that she shouldn’t read into their actions that they thought she was inferior and use her energy to set the necessary boundaries.

After all these years, it still floors me that so many people don’t get that how they treat someone matters!

Remember the last time you went to a store and deal with a sales person who had the “whatever!” method of dealing with the customer? It’s irritating; we want to tell the person to quit if they hate that job so much.

Just the other day I had to go into one of those big electronic stores full of those sales representatives that are more interested in talking with each other unless you look like you’re going to buy a $2,000 audio system. It was a delight to finally be helped by someone who seemed to like his day, who wanted to talk about product options, and didn’t make me feel like he wishes he was anywhere else.

As a customer, enthusiasm makes me feel like I’m welcome.

It also engages me with the product or service. If the sales person is too flat or laid back, the whole exchange has no life and the product or service seems unappealing.

Hate:

I remember going to a car dealership…and just wanting to get out of there as fast as I could. Why?

Because I felt assaulted by the invasive, fake enthusiasm of the sales person. He didn’t give space to look, think, breathe. He bubbled on and on about the great features of the car instead of being attentive to what I wanted.

Feeling invaded in one downside of “improper” enthusiasm. Being on guard is another; feeling like someone’s being one-sided in their presentation of the facts.

What makes the difference

First, genuineness, of course. Enthusiasm is a burst of energy tossed out at us, and we are able to assess whether it’s real or forced.

We humans have this antenna for picking up a person’s vibe beyond his or her words, body language or facial expressions.

Second, respect. I may love my product or feel my service is really needed, but I need to remember that others may be on a different wavelength.

Genuineness and respect. Those two themes keep popping up when I write about success factors.

That principle applies to anything that gave you a fright physically, or a blow to your pride and sense of security (like losing a client, not getting a promotion, getting fired, bombing a speech, etc.).

You can’t let the negative experience “gel” without counteracting it, or your mind will doubt that you’re capable of succeeding despite having done so before your recent “fall”. I guess it’s the same principle as “only being as good as your latest movie”.

Your subconscious will also want to protect you from further harm by stopping you from getting into similar situations.

There is even a chance that it might generalize your experience to other risk-taking circumstances. For example, you might have bombed a talk at the Chamber of Commerce, but your sub-conscious wants to prevent you from speaking in front of anyone, even in team meetings.

There is also another level at work here deeper than our conscious and subconscious thought: the experience has imprinted you on an energetic level.

The good news about that is that you can defuse the subconscious fear of repeating past failures by working directly at the energy level.

An increasing number of people have discovered the effectiveness of tools such as EFT (the emotional freedom technique) as one way to untangle old fear imprinting, and you can find lots of free information online. ( emofree.com is a great resource).

All good guesses, but that’s not what the studies say.

What people really want is to feel like they matter.

That’s what’s behind the craving for power, money, fame and love; wanting to feel important.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t realize the kind of importance that would really satisfy us. We get closer to grasping it when we hear of famous rich people who are depressed, addicted or suicidal and explain it by saying that they had no real relationships or nothing deep to live for.

It seems like we have to feel important under the right conditions.

We need to be recognized, yes, but if we’re recognized for a role we play or a front we present to the world, it will feel somewhat empty. We need to be “Seen” with a capital S, meaning we need to feel that people like the real us.

Makes sense, otherwise it’s not really us who’s being recognized, but a character we’ve created.

And by the way, since humans are such social beings, nothing makes us feel as safe as feeling accepted, liked, and recognized as valuable.

There’s another condition to feeling the right kind of “importance”: we need to believe that we have made a contribution to something that we care about. Otherwise any external recognition that we get will feel like a fraud.

We may say that people are valuable for the kind of person they are and not for what they do, but we humans are problem solving achieving beings. Even a contemplative monk who spends all his time meditating is making a contribution through the direction of his thoughts while appearing to be doing nothing.

So what we all want is to feel like we matter both for what we do and who we are. Contribution and recognition.

I’ll end this post with a quote from “The Secret Code of Success” by Noah St. John, one of the most lucid, practical books I’ve read in a long time (and I’m only half-way through it): “…everyone of us is wearing an invisible sign that says, “Please make me feel important.”"