This past week, I allowed other people’s behaviors to irritate me to the point of grumpiness. Even though I know better, I still allowed those people under my skin.
I’ve been trying to move to more tolerance for their behaviors—because I can’t change those other people. And, I’m trying to change my reactions, so I stop with the grumpys. Because no one likes a grump, even if those people do deserve my grumpiness. And while I don’t care if they don’t like me, I don’t want my grumpiness at them to leak out into the rest of my interactions. Especially to people who don’t deserve my grumpiness, often the last people in a string of interactions.
That means I need to find a little tolerance.
Easy to say, and right now, very hard to do.
As with most problems like this, the first step is recognizing I’m grumpy.
How to See My Grumpiness
I’m not a nice grump. The grumpier I am, the nastier and more sarcastic I am. And wow, can I be nasty and sarcastic.
I don’t always realize when I am grumpy—not until after I send that email or respond to that tweet. Sometimes, I’m just fine with my reaction. But other times? I apologize. Mostly because I reacted to the most recent person, not the first person who triggered my grumpiness. (See Writing Secret 10: A Small Rant About Research on Social Networks and Consulting Tip 4: Always Focus on Your Value for Your Client’s Time.)
Yes, I managed to hold onto my reactions until the proverbial straw.
Not very congruent of me, is it?
Here’s how I see my grumpiness:
- If I need to apologize for what I said or wrote. I might have moved way past grumpy, into nasty and sarcastic.
- When I feel the need to write a blog post about the situation.
- If I decide it’s time to walk off my general pissiness.
I can’t seem to notice my grumpiness as it occurs, but I can notice it later. The question is how late is later? That leads me to congruence.
Congruence Helps
When I’m nasty and sarcastic, I go directly to blaming, not considering the other person. I’m not smart enough to always recognize when I’m incongruent. (See Can You “Just” Anything? for a fuller explanation of congruence.)
But when I write, I’ve trained myself to look for places where I’m blaming people for being human. (We can want anything, even if that thing might not make sense to me.)
Unfortunately, I tend to recognize my incongruence after my reactions. As I like to remind myself, I am a work in progress. But when I test my reactions against what I know is congruent behavior, I can see where I went astray, and what to do next.
Most of the time, I need to apologize, so I do.
Choose When to Tolerate Other People’s Behavior
My recent grumpiness means I finally recognized something important: I can choose when to tolerate other people’s behavior and how. For people on social media, I can:
- Ignore this particular post/whatever
- Block them, so I never see their entreaties again
- Write another blog post, so I get some value from their behavior, aside from being grumpy. That might be part of the tolerance in the title of this post.
So far, I’ve used all of these.
Not everyone deserves my tolerance. Or yours. But if you also suffer from the grumpys, you might also use congruence to ignore, block, or tolerate them. We have the choice to manage our grumpiness.
Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. I’m a lot less grumpy now.
The question this week is: How do you move past grumpiness to (at minimum) tolerance?