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You don’t grow out of being sensitive
A couple of days ago I was giving a communications workshop at a Courthouse for its employees and had a great conversation with one of the participants afterward. Very often, people prefer to talk to me in private after the workshop because they worry about revealing too much if they ask what’s really on their mind.
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!
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