But you said it was fantastic….avoiding conflict at all costs

“This looks great, fantastic work.” It’s not often I was sent praise.

Complete.

Tick.

Satisfaction.

A few weeks later I bobbed my head around the door, “I’m in London tomorrow doing the voice over for the animation, see you next week.”

“What? But I’ve not seen any of this?”

You sent me that email four weeks ago to say everything looked great. There were no comments, so I assumed you were happy with it.

“I need to see everything now.”

The next 30 minutes were excruciating. 

Red pen marks scribbled all over the text. Words that now would not match the images. The anger was building up inside me, radiating from me. I would be up until midnight sorting these changes and communicating them, dealing with the graphic designers. She had no idea. Still…I said nothing. 

I wanted to say…

This is completely inappropriate, you said it was fantastic and now you want to change everything.

The changes you are making will make it worse, the images and words will not by in sync.

I wanted to yell…

Stop criticising the people doing the animation there are not too many images, you haven’t been involved in the project at all and have no idea how many images are appropriate for this length of animation.

But I didn’t. I internalised that anger and gave one-word answers until the whole ordeal was over.
Yep. Yep. Yep. I’ll do that.

I wanted to get out of that office as fast as possible. I wanted that confrontation to be over as fast as possible.

Every time we don’t speak up, we take a personal hit. Over time, this builds up as resentment against that person. 

Resentment is suppressed anger and over time resentment feeds feelings of unhappiness.

Are you nurturing a grudge plant?
 
Speak Soon,
 
Hannah
 
PS Join me next time to discover a psychological model for behavioural dynamics to shift you from resentful and underappreciated to valued and respected.

PPS I’ll be live in Breakthrough Unleashed this Saturday at 19:30 BST explaining this model and the tools to help you deal with challenging people confidently.