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Ohhh the inbox. Yep, all kinds of emails come your way, but there is none quite so memorable
as those nasty ones. And when they come, oooooh do they hit our buttons! Now the key is, when
you get an aggressive email, DO NOT DO ANYTHING! Take a moment to pause. This pause will save
you so much aggravation in the future, because in the pause of reacting, you give yourself
the possibility of options for how you want to handle it. But if you react in that moment,
you are going to create more and more trouble for yourself. So, everything that we do, all
the means of communication that we have, there is a connection, there is a shared energy.
And I don't know about you, but I literally feel the energy of the person writing an email,
good, bad, or different. I feel it, I feel their energy. And, of course when something
is really aggressive, you feel it and you want to react emotionally. But with the pause,
you give yourself the space to calm down and get some clarity. When we are too heated we
are literally not thinking. So, when you pause, you give yourself some objective space to
really figure out what's going on. Was this person just having a really bad day? Was there
genuinely a miscommunication? Do they have a personal vendetta against you? Who knows.
But in this space, you're not going to take it so personally. The second point is, I don't
want you to participate in it. Immediately you're going to want to think, 'Well, what?!
That's not true! Grrrr I'm going to write you back! Grrr.' When you pause, you probably
are not going to choose to respond immediately. I also know that while you may think, 'I can't
respond to them right away but I can sure as heck show my friend 'What the heck can
you believe what this person wrote to me''. No, you do not also want to share that negative
energy with people around you, whether it's your coworkers or your spouse or a good friend,
it just creates more dramarama and makes the situation even more confusing. In that moment
it's up to you to find the clarity. It's up to you to just calm the situation down, and
really think through what's going on. So that you can get the desired outcome, which is
an amicable relationship. And finally, I think that sometimes people hide behind email, and
if you take that impersonal nature of an email and make it more personal, either by picking
up the phone or talking to them in person, after some time has passed, you will find
that the humanity in the relationship brings about more possibilities of real conversation.
And it's in that conversation that you can get whatever desired outcome it is that you're
looking for. So first, take a pause; second, do not participate right away; and three,
give yourself the possibility of other options for the continued conversation. And through
that, your inbox will be pleasant experiences every time you open
it up!