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Introverts, Emotional Processing, Self-Esteem and Salary Negotiations
- kevinburke 9y agoEvery time I am about to quote my rate for a contract, or enter a salary negotiation, I reread the details of http://www.cbsnews.com/news/silicon-valley-software-engineers-accuse-google-apple-intel-adobe-of-collusion/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/silicon-valley-software-engineer... That usually gets me fired up enough
- js8 9y agoI don't understand why is he letting the other people to define that there should be a conflict? For instance, in salary negotiations - I don't get why so many people (in IT) are opposed to idea of open salaries or at least a professional organization.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoThe people usually opposed are the ones who wish to maintain some sort of control.
- gbacon 9y agoThe proponents are the ones who will not mind their own business. Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Strawmen!
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoWhy is this (currently) being downvoted? The purpose of closed salaries is to keep wages down.
- RodericDay 9y agoEveryone opposed to public salaries thinks they're the special snowflakes with a secret sweetheart deal.
- stephengillie 9y agoSocialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. - John Steinbeck (disputed)
- adrianratnapala 9y agoThis is a comforting but dangerous illusion for the American left. It leads to failed political tactics like John Kerry's "misery index", where he tried to tell voters how badly off they were. This stance fools the left into thinking they need to tell the working class that they are losers. People react badly to that; they will happily forgo new welfare programs and regulatory subsidies and will instead rail against the status assertions behind it all. Which brings us to Trumpism...
- ptrckbrwn 9y ago^ found the libertarian
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoIt just baffles me that people are drive-by downvoting this on Hacker News of all places. I think most of us here agree that transparency is desirable in government, software development, security, and so many other areas. Why do employers get a pass with the tired old "we're keeping secrets from you for your own good" line?
- BurningFrog 9y agoHN also agrees that privacy is desirable in just about as many areas.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoHow is my privacy protected by a rule that says I'm not allowed to disclose my salary to my coworkers? Because that's what we're talking about, not just that the company doesn't publish salaries.
- Retra 9y agoWell, I down-voted it because it's vague, in-actionable, and conspiratorial.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoAre you arguing that the purpose of secret salaries isn't to keep employees from a better understanding of how much the company would be willing to pay them? We can have that discussion, but it would help if you made a coherent counterproposal. If you claim that open salaries cause significant friction between employees, for example, please cite comparisons to the countries and business where open salaries are common; there's enough of them that data should be available.
- Retra 9y agoI've made no argument at all. If you'd seriously like me to make one, I'm going to require funding.
- jimbokun 9y agoThat's Magi thinking, not warrior thinking. If you are applying for a job at a company, there is no chance you are going to change their entire compensation strategy as a precondition to getting the job. So it's either engage Warrior mode and negotiate, or move on and interview somewhere else. If you found a company, or in a position in your current company that upper management will listen to you, that's a better opportunity to switch to Magi mode and discuss how to change the entire compensation policy to something better for everyone involved.
- js8 9y ago> That's Magi thinking, not warrior thinking. I think you're right. But the GP is apparently more comfortable as a Magi; so why not make it into an advantage?
- canadian123456 9y agoOpen salaries will bring down the salary of anyone willing to negotiate.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoHow so?
- manyhands 9y agoEmployees who negotiate higher salaries are subsidized by their meek coworkers.
- chrisbennet 9y agoI suppose that could be true but I kinda doubt that in the case where all the workers were meek, that the company would altruistically pay everyone a bit more.
- canadian123456 9y agoThey can afford to pay those who negotiate closer to their true value (often still significantly less) is because they pay the vast majority of people less. The only way transparent salaries help the majority instead of being used as a tool for businesses to just say, "We only pay 100k/yr, that's what everyone makes" is if there is some body enforcing fair pay.
- accountyaccount 9y agoA manager could then point to the salary of someone in the same position and say "Jane gets paid $X in the same position, it would be unfair to give you a raise and not her" I don't work somewhere with transparent salaries and I already get that excuse — I've more than once heard "you're kind of already at the top of our range for X position" and "if we pay you anymore you'll be making more than me!"
- maxxxxx 9y ago
- TimPC 9y agoMany people feel open salaries and professional organizations inadequately handle specializations. In University sectors there have been effects like: CS lecturers not allowed to be paid more because positions are harder to fill vs say Fine Art History lecturers. I'm not saying that's bad overall, but I can certainly see why CS lecturers might not like it. I think it's fairly easy for these models to fail at bringing in experts because they put extreme downward pressure on the gains from expertise and aggressively enforce regression to the mean. If someone makes twice as much as someone else you have to justify it not just in terms of market demand and a personal outlook on the skillset but also in terms of the morale effects of paying someone else twice as much openly. I'm not sure that's good for many parties and I'm quite certain it's bad for at least some. I think the likely effect is fewer people in security and fewer people in AI at the companies that do these things.
- pmoriarty 9y ago"CS lecturers not allowed to be paid more because positions are harder to fill vs say Fine Art History lecturers" Why does this sound backwards to me? If a position is hard to fill, wouldn't you want to pay the person more so that they don't leave? Conversely, if a position is easy to fill, wouldn't the university pay less, since if the person leaves they'll be easy to replace? How does paying someone less because their position is hard to fill make any kind of sense? What am I missing here?
- opportune 9y agoI assume the university has a policy in place that all lecturers are to be paid the same. And the original commenter was alluding to this precisely because it is backwards.
- dv_dt 9y agoBecause another game is being played in parallel to the direct one you're thinking about. In the parallel game, if you let people who expect good salaries go, you do go through more immediate replacement costs, but are likely to eventually come across people who aren't so demanding of their salaries and get an accumulation of those, then the employer can win out in the longer term. I don't know if this strategy even has to pay off in actuality, in the long term, but that actual performance of the strategy isn't as important as maintaining that model of control of labor costs.
- rhizome 9y agoIs "stun-locked" from a video game I don't play or TV show I don't watch? A lot of the psychologizing and self-diagnosis in this post could be cut out if the author realized he was simply being verbally abused by an asshole. Which he was. No need for the "red" and "green" stuff. "Why" rarely matters, and even less often is something you can do anything about, while choosing your response is. Sometimes that response should be "you're a fuckin' asshole, Chad," which doesn't rely on knowing why they're being an asshole. Do I have to feel that I grasp the "Warrior" mentality in order to tell someone they're being rude? There's a lot of metaphor and cruft in this story as it trundles on, and oftentimes naming things is used to not deal with them. Is anybody disrupting copy-editing as a service for bloggers?
- jimbokun 9y ago"Do I have to feel that I grasp the "Warrior" mentality in order to tell someone they're being rude?" Yes, that's exactly the point made in the article. How did you manage to miss that point, Chad, you fuckin' asshole?
- pmalynin 9y agoI'm pretty sure its 'Eric'
- AlexCoventry 9y ago"They're good roots, Pablo."
- mfoy_ 9y ago"stun-locked" is video game terminology, at least as far as my understanding of it goes. Essentially some act "stuns" you, in this case a direct challenge or statement made by the guy verbally assaulting him sends him reeling. Each statement is made successively so he was stunned by each statement... hence "stun-locked" as in he was stunned, then stunned again, then again, and had no time to collect himself or respond. In video games "stun-locking" usually means to render another player out of control of their character temporarily, but when the effects are chained the other player can do basically nothing until the perpetrator has run out of ways to keep the "stun-lock" going.
- bsaul 9y agoMany of this reminds me of lack of self confidence. Being affected by other people's emotions when they are directed at you is also due to the (too) high importance you grant to their opinion of what you'll do or say or respond.
- intjk 9y agoOh, I see we've met! My current hypothesis is that a sever lack of self-esteem causes me to rely on esteem from others. But because negative interactions hurt so much more than good interactions feel good, I just end up avoiding others. There's also my mother's hypothesis that some combination of drugs will fix me. I think this seems improbable, but she claims it's how she was fixed.
- bsaul 9y agoMy personal way of helping myself is to first of all realize everybody feels like shit, do lame things, has moments of weakness, etc. Once you've really really realized that ( knowing it is not enough, you have to know people that seem brilliant and successful and find out how shite or vulnerable they sometimes feel), you start to be a little less ashamed of your own weaknesses. Another good thing is your start to be a lot more tolerant and human, and, well, less of an asshole. You also become less afraid of failing, which lets you try more things.
- robhunter 9y ago"The Warrior engages in a fight, and might indeed revel in it. Politicians, CEO’s, Lawyers, wheeler-dealers, and used car salesmen fall into this camp." CEO's? Really? Walking into a conversation with a CEO with this stereotype in mind surely impacts the conversation, no?
- WJW 9y agoWalking into any discussion with that mindset impacts the conversation. It might still be the right strategy if the CEO is really like that. For example, it would probably be a bad choice to go into negotiations with an used car salesman without a "Warrior"-like mindset.
- scottLobster 9y agoSeems like most of his advice could be summed up as: "Don't over-complicate the situation". To use his first example, when he's being insulted why spin off into emotional-analysis neverland? What's happening there is you're being abused by an asshole, and you should respond to said abuse and, once that situation is resolved, examine the real issue more thoroughly. I'm speaking as someone who used to think exactly like this guy. What I realized in early college was: In general, no one cares. No one cares if you're partially wrong, no one cares if you're a little off or awkward, no one beyond your family/SO and close friends gives a flying fuck about your emotions. Nor will they remember a slight moment of awkwardness a week later. They're simply far too consumed with their own lives for it to matter. Demanding perfect social interactions is paralyzing, irrational and not expected. He does arrive at some appropriate conclusions ("Know thy worth"), but all the analogies and self-analysis he does isn't "emotional processing", it's simple insecurity. IMO the only emotions he's processing in those moments are fear and anxiety.
- silassales 9y ago> In general, no one cares. No one cares if you're partially wrong, no one cares if you're a little off or awkward, no one beyond your family/SO and close friends gives a flying fuck about your emotions. Took me awhile to figure this one out, but once I did, life was significantly better.
- klodolph 9y agoThis is an important fact to realize for those of us with mood disorders, who see the world through the lens of our own emotions and moods, while others see our actions as unhealthy or erratic.
- pixelperfect 9y agoPeople do care about these things if you are a well-known public figure. I think the constant scrutinizing over the conduct of public figures misleads people into believing that their own actions are being scrutinized in the same way.
- aorloff 9y agoRather than coming up with a set of emotional safeguards to deal with poor engineering management, why not just find a better manager ?
- burritofanatic 9y agoLift heavy; do Jiu Jitsu - deter the manager from ever attempting to verbally abuse you lest risking discordance. Relish in your newfound mental clarity.
- magic_beans 9y agoWe're talking about a guy who was so paralyzed by the fact that the woman he was having sex with whispered sweet nothings into his ear that he dedicated three paragraphs to unpacking the discomfort it caused...
- danielharrison 9y agoYou joke but I think there's something more at play here. Sounds like the guy cannot multitask at all. Maybe on the spectrum.
- jventura 9y agoHe says exactly that in the post: "Why couldn’t I think of the snappy response? Because I can’t do verbal processing and emotional processing at the same time!!!"
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoSounds like that's the case to me as well. Having safe stock phrases is explicitly a strategy used by autistic individuals to cope with unexpected situations. Like, one common issue that teachers often run into with more severely autistic students is that they'll say "no" to requests because they need to give a safe response of some sort, and the teacher interprets that as being willfully defiant rather than simply overwhelmed by the current situation and trying to do something safe.
- adrianratnapala 9y agoI think you are saying the author should be a bit more alpha-male and partly I agree. Though not particularly alpha-male myself, I would have handled the first situtation better by instinctively out-arseholeing the arsehole. But I would not handle all such social situations so quickly or confidently. And sometimes the moments I miss are opportunities to be nice. The point being that moving along a personality dimension can't replace a missing skill, though it can partially amelirate the effects.
- oDot 9y agoWhile it is useful, I disagree with the concept, which to my understanding is: > I have the following problem: "..I can’t do verbal processing and emotional processing at the same time..." Here are ways to mitigate it. Mitigation, in my opinion, is secondary to actually solving the problem. I'm not sure whether OP believes it's solvable and chooses to mitigate, or just mitigates because he thinks there's no solution -- either way, I believe it IS solvable. People who have that problem can learn to do both things at once, A person can gain control of his Farmer/Magi/Warrior aspects instead of just exhibiting a given, and most importantly: People can avoid win the war without engaging in battle. There are so many "fights" going on in that piece, when things can be solved without them. Don't underestimate your own capabilities.
- danielharrison 9y agoAn alternative approach I use to combat alpha-holes, and general abuse/anger is to not answer the question 100%, or answer with a lot of ambiguity. The goal is to raise more questions than you answer (don't answer them, just throw a curve ball). Couple it with some down-talking and you're good to go. This throws the attacker into a bit of mental confusion and their anger subsides instantly as they're trying to process this unexpected deviation from their pre-planned storyline. Example: Ahole: Your code broke while demoing it. You're a shit dev and you should feel shit. You: You demoed with the alpha code?! Really? Did your mom never tell you to ask before you touch? hope you learnt a lesson today. Maybe you should write some lines.... ' I shall not touch alpha code....' This is probably an extreme example but it works in every day situations too. The goal is not to argue back at all. Just flip the entire thing on its head and leave them out to dry. If they come to battle with a knife, shoot to kill.
- chrisbennet 9y agoSomething that isn't a counter attack like "Is your shirt inside out?" may also work.
- jrs235 9y agoOr just say "Sorry Tom" (if his name is Tim). (Any name that is close to his name but isn't his name: Jason/Justin, Tim/Tom, Nick/Rick, Bob/Bill, etc.)
- rarec 9y agoI'm not sure that's a good example at all. Frankly, acting as nonplussed and bothered is the best approach. Ahole: Your code broke while demoing it. You're a shit dev and you should feel shit. Example You: Damn right, absolute shit. At least I do a pre-demo check before trying to show my shit to people.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Did your mom never tell you to ask before you touch? Hope you learnt a lesson today If I weren't livid already, that would get me there. It's condescending, needlessly brings in and insults a loved one and offers zero empathy or productive feedback.
- ryanmarsh 9y agoWarrior here. It took me some pretty embarrassing red flagging in relationships with good Magi to realize what I was doing wrong. It's so easy to roll over people without meaning to. I'm sad and embarrassed to tell you there are a few people from early in my career who won't return my calls or blocked me on twitter. These are people I deeply respect. It's so easy to fuck this up when you are a decisive competitive extroverted energetic person. I cannot stress enough the importance of a soft touch around quiet creators. If I could humbly recommend a trick that will warn someone like me of the damage they could do. Send an email after the first "stun lock". Explain how the interaction made you feel. If the person isn't toxic they will realize what they've done and apologize immediately. If they don't you're dealing with a grade A asshole and there's honestly nothing you can do short of learning to be a bigger asshole which would probably violate your integrity.
- dgreensp 9y agoI'm confused about whether the "WTF your crap is crap" example is exaggerated or true-to-life. If true, I would leave that job, or at least report to management that I'm unwilling to work with that person and be treated like that. If the example is exaggerated, then it confuses the point a bit because it bakes the author's sensitivity into reality for the purpose of the article. Maybe I've just always worked with other sensitive, conflict-avoidant engineers, and not assholes, but the example is way outside of bounds for me. The way to think about a situation like that is in terms of having boundaries, not about ego. Don't take abuse. You don't need a witty comeback. Or, it will come when you stop thinking you need to tolerate abuse. The part about talking with your partner about what works for you in sex is lovely.
- mdns33 9y agoyou are the man. great work.
- fundabulousrIII 9y agoWhen you let the other guy piss you off you have lost. Just be amused in general + skilled and have some trust in your abilities and intelligence and don't trust anyone but your people. If you sucked you will suck forever to the people who knew it. Know thyself and move on.
- swayvil 9y agoI was did a contract at a local engineering shop a year ago. Tech writing. The engineers were INCREDIBLE ASSHOLES. Really cold and dickish, to me that is. But to each other! JEEZ. Cliquish, abusive and just fucking mean. Total lord of the flies shit. Really toxic. I had a serious talk with a couple of the more abused ones. Told them, "no, it isn't you, it's them. You need to quit." I've seen some places that were a bit... diseased... but wow. Is this normal?
- rarec 9y agoNo, that's remarkably abnormal. That said, there's more to what was presumably male socialising, than what's on the face. There's a distinct difference in ribbing each other and poking fun versus being verbally hostile.
- RonanTheGrey 9y agoYep. :(
- socrates666 9y agoCliques within large companies like Microsoft are common actually. From a higher perspective, it is a subset of people who agree to a particular fiction, and they live by it. So, for example, there is the "Indian Brotherhood" within Microsoft (NOT being racist, it is THEIR term). There are people who send in doubles to interview for them (to help you understand: at Microsoft you interview with a team you won't be working on, and on top of that, several months to a year may pass between the interview and when you actually start work). Such that, it becomes the case that the guy who shows up on day 1 is not the guy who passed the interview a few months ago. If you are a manager, and maybe you came from India and were hired in by the same route, you may feel an overwhelming social obligation to protect persons like this. It becomes the case that anyone who shows disgust, or judgement whatsoever is now a threat to them. On top of that, you have an incredible amount of leverage over this person. They have demonstrated that they are willing to lie, cheat and live a totally false life in order to impress family that lives across the seas. That person is your bitch now, and they'd better do whatever you say, or you will reveal them as a fraud/fire them (or so they think). Reality sucks so hard.
- jaggajasoos33 9y agoI think what works in dating works in such scenarios too. You ask a girl out she says no, you have to just move on to the next one. You have to tell yourself she does not know you yet properly and it is her loss. Our brain is very good at forgetting failures over time. You do it sufficient number of times and you learn to take No like a champ. Spending too much time thinking about that one failure will only result in waste of time. Of course it goes without saying that you need to see how to improve things over time. I was lucky to learn this lesson quickly. Every year I remind my boss that the salary needs to be either adjusted for inflation (and real estate inflation) or I should be put a performance improvement plan because if my performance is down you should not keep me employed.
- lowbloodsugar 9y agoWith regard to the "WTF..." issue, I would recommend that you hold a post-mortem. Get together the relevant stake holders (head of sales, head of development) and review 1. What Happened, 2. What was the root cause and 3. Remediating Actions. If its treated as an opportunity for improvement, and specifically not an exercise in assigning blame, then I've seen it be very successful. People have knowledge gaps, incorrect assumptions, institutional knowledge from other institutions, or just flat out make the wrong call under pressure, in hindsight. Learn from it and improve. That said, I've also seen it be completely pointless when a team believes it to be an exercise in blame assignment, no matter how much its been promised to the contrary. If its not possible to hold such an exercise, then the company has way bigger problems, and wouldn't you much rather work somewhere healthy?
- j_s 9y agoPaging HN's own JoshDoody, who helps developers with salary negotiation for a living. And/or anyone who has used his (or similar) services! “What’s your current salary?” is a trap question–Here's how to answer it | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13724755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13724755 "Before you even get a job offer, it's important to decide what your "walk away" number is [...] I recommend literally writing it down" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14447890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14447890
- JoshDoody 9y agoThanks for the mention j_s! This is a really interesting thread and a long article by Cliff. I'm working my way through it now. Looks like the "current salary" question came up. Any other topics I should jump on for this thread? (Soooo many comments, it's taking a long time to get through them.) Cheers!
- j_s 9y agoMy question would be to help a community I've recently discovered where college grads are practicing mock interviews on Twitch: What mindset is needed as someone with minimal production development experience (perhaps an internship or something) goes into a job interview salary negotiation? That first negotiation forms the foundation of the rest of their career -- no pressure!
- JoshDoody 9y agoGreat question. My top answer is the article you linked to in your original comment: Don't disclose your current or desired salary. That will cost you a lot of money. Since you mentioned mock interviews, I'll assume that Twitch channel is mostly focused on interviewing, getting more interviews, and ultimately getting job offers. If that's the case, the single best thing they can work on is their positioning - telling a story about how they'll make the company better if they're a part of it. I have a video of how Software Developers can do this effectively here: https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/software-developer-positioning/ https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/software-developer-pos... This is especially useful for internships and entry-level jobs because most of the resumes submitted for those jobs look very similar. But positioning can help a Developer stand out from the pack. Sometimes, standing out as a slightly stronger candidate is all it takes to get an offer.
- devdevdev83 9y agoThis applies to extroverts as well, not just introverts (and there are plenty of extroverted programmers too)
- nroach 9y agoI’m not convinced that the headline properly represents the content. I think it’s unfair to imply that the characteristic of introversion is correlated to a deficit in the ability to process emotional input in realtime. I would consider myself highly introverted, but I don’t identify at all with the emotional reaction of the author. It’s possible that in his specific situation he is both introverted and highly emotionally responsive. But it’s a logical fallacy to then extrapolate that connection to other individuals with only one of those attributes.
- siliconc0w 9y agoI find in general it's helpful to prepare for all interactions. Salary negotiation especially. When you get on a call to talk about salary with a recruiter you should already know pretty much how that call is going to go. If someone catches you off guard with, "Hey your demo shit the bed and ruined the client meeting" just ask them to schedule a meeting to talk about it. Always feel you like you can 'reject the premise' that you need to have a conversation on someone else's terms.
- namuol 9y ago> Has this ever happened to you? > <verbal abuse from coworker> Hell no. Not even close. What kind of terrible places have you worked? If you ever experience anything close to this level of abuse you should report it if possible, and if nothing changes, quit.
- gboudrias 9y agoThis is amateur psychology, and it's mostly wrong. Psychology is a real field and writing about what you don't know in this field can do more harm than good. I stopped at: > Getting anger out requires some physical activity to get the adrenaline to metabolize. This has been disproven. "Letting it out" only leads you to be more aggressive. Maybe at a more appropriate time, but still, it doesn't "calm you down". Time and reflection do that. The bit about "The Aspects of Farmer, The Magi, and the Warrior" seems particularly out of place. It is pure conjecture, and seems arbitrary to me. It's good to know yourself but please refrain from giving general advice based on your personal anecdotal evidence. I'm talking about everything after your own introspection. It seems like helping but it isn't. Edit: Also to anyone reading this, for the love of god, don't take psychological advice from untrained internet strangers. If you find yourself struggling with the same issues, see a therapist. They're good at this stuff.
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- eksemplar 9y agoAnything that divides people into introverts or extroverts is humbug. It's true that some people are more introverted than others in certain situations, but as a general rule, everyone are both things. Preferring to stay home and read a book rather than socialize at a bar is an introverted trait, but dungeon mastering (or even participating) in a role playing event is extroverted. Being unsure what to say at lunch is introverted, owning the tech meeting is extroverted. I mean, its obviously more complicated than this, but the basic rule is that there is no such thing as an introvert, and honestly, as a manager of people with varying degrees of loudness, it's not always the loudest or most social people who are good at bargaining for a raise.
- rimliu 9y agoPretending something does not exist will not make it to go away. Yes, you will hardly find pure introvert or extrovert, but you will find plenty of people not in the middle of the scale and those can be called introverts or extroverts. It's like claiming that gays and straight people do not exist because there are no 100% gay or 100% straight people. Yes introverts do some "extroverted" stuff, and may be even very good at that. What makes them different from extroverts is that extroverts get energised by doing that, and introverts get drained.
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- Nihilartikel 9y agoAs an introverted, quiet, and pathologically sensitive by nature person, I found this article to be an interesting perspective. Also liked the 'magi', 'farmer', 'warrior' personality disposition vectors. In the pursuit of not letting my own emotions and tendency towards avoidance of potential conflict or failure rule my actions I had the notion that no person is well served by being much more self conscious than a golden retriever. That is, their feelings remain in the moment, and then they move on. This got me running with a few other dog metaphors that have served me well. For instance, I consider my own emotions, instincts, and drives as if they were also 'dogs'. Different dogs with different dispositions. Some fearful, running to hide at the drop of a hat. Others willful, jumping up on the table to grab the steak even though there will be hell or hangover to pay for later. Still others coiled, tense, and ready to bite. The question is, is the measure of a (hu)man, the sum of their dogs? I would opine that the better measure is in the ability of their master to keep them on leashes of the right length, and to perhaps, if possible, train them to sit and shake when it is needed in order to act as the person that you really wish to be. Just like training a dog or strengthening ones grip on their leash it takes consistent, deliberate, exercise and it will not happen with any amount of wishful thinking or un-acted-upon research into bettering ones' self. Stoicism seems to be a bit of a cliche of late, but I can say that it found me at the right time, and that it's brought a lot of value as a non-doctrinal system of perspective for ones' place in the universe and how to best leverage the one thing that you can actually hope to control, yourself. I'll allow myself a feeling of pride when I reach the point that a surprise verbal assault leaves me not with an hour of bruised ego, red face, and bristling nape, but with the same neutral irritation as when the ornery dog of a negligent owner barks and growls at me in passing. After all, what's the difference if the persons belligerence has as little to teach me as the dog's? Would I vow vengeance on the dog to protect my honor? Lie awake at night wondering what I did wrong? Of course not. It proves nothing and I have better things to do.
- rukuu001 9y agoThis describes my personality perfectly. I learnt to cope with those situations by emotionally distancing myself from them. Then I'm free to respond more naturally.
- jventura 9y agoI used to the same, but that didn't brought me anything good as I started ignoring my emotional state up to the point that people around me started saying that I was like a robot or something. Lately, I've started to read some peer-reviewed research and book by researchers on emotions, and I've come to accept that emotions are mostly a biological mechanism which allows for a faster reaction to inputs (from external inputs or internal inputs - thoughts) before your intellect has time to process those inputs. The book "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman has a very interesting chapter (Anatomy of an Emotional Hijackin) that tries to explain biologically what happens with emotions. The idea is that some of the sensory inputs, for instance, visual, are sent to the amygdala as well as to the visual cortex. But since the visual cortex has to do some processing which takes time, the amygdala has a faster but sloppier response. For instance, someone throws a ball into you while you're looking away. You can grasp something by the corner of your eye, and then you raise your arms to defend yourself. Only later you see that it was an inoffensive beach ball. The first reaction was by the amygdala while the identification of the ball was done slowly by the visual cortex.. So now I try to enforce a small amount of time to understand my emotional feedback mechanism before reacting to things. But if it's a shark coming my way, I flee, of course. You learn a lot about your self and your own beliefs by listening to your automatic emotional responses before commiting yourself to any action/reaction. For the case of the coworker, ideally I would say him to slowdown, unless I knew beforehand he was a jerk, and maybe I could be more prepared..
- mcappleton 9y agoWhen someone acts like a jerk to you, remember this: hurting people hurt people. It is a natural tendency to lash out at others when we are hurt. So to fix the situation, try to figure out what's hurting the other guy and see if you can help deal with the source of his pain. Don't fight back or you'll just hurt him more and make him more mad.
- icc97 9y ago> Right question is: > Why was I stun-locked? > Why couldn’t I think of the snappy response? > Because I can’t do verbal processing and emotional processing at the same time!!! This is worth repeating from the article. It explains an unbelievably common feeling I've had for my entire adult life - not knowing what to say at the time and then getting frustrated later on when you do think of something That one piece is an absolute gem. His answers for solving this aren't perfect, but certainly worth reading.
- mleonhard 9y agoThe advice about removing bad people from your life is really good. I did this a few years ago and my overall life satisfaction improved a lot.