Learning to Shut Up
When the only way to fix it is to stop trying to fix it.
A few days ago, I bought something expensive that I immediately regretted after seeing the dent it made in my bank account. So I did the only reasonable thing possible: I looked up the returns policy.
After some waffling and indecisiveness, I finally decided that okay, maybe I don't need the most expensivest version of the thing. It's useful, but I really only need the version with basic features. So I emailed their customer service to request an exchange, which their website stated was possible.
What followed was the most frustrating interaction, where long story short, I learned that exchanging the item for a cheaper one would cost me significantly more money than if I were to return the original item, get the refund, then purchase the new cheaper one. What?
At one point, I found myself drafting different versions of an extremely snarky email, doing up calculations and breaking down the returns policy to justify why it all made absolutely no sense.
Eventually, I snapped out of it and thought, what the hell am I doing?
I deleted the draft, and replied that I would forego the exchange and just take the refund.
For as long as I remember, I've always either said too much or said the wrong thing.
In my report books, many of my teachers called me 'outspoken'—an euphemism for having little respect for authority and always talking back.
At a previous part-time job, I once tried to speak up on behalf of other part-timers about a work incident. We didn't get the response we expected, so I took it too far and made it personal.
Once, during lunch with an ex-girlfriend's parents, I misread the vibe and cracked a joke that only I found funny.
These can seem like isolated incidents or funny little anecdotes, but they've added up to a personal history peppered with moments where I've beaten myself up for not realising: maybe I should have been more tactful. Maybe I should have read the room. Maybe I should have accepted that it was out of my hands. Maybe I should have just shut up.
I started working on this in my early 20s, and even though I consider myself a lot more thoughtful these days, these impulses still show up in different ways. What I've learnt is that the problem is rarely with the specific words that are coming out of my mouth. Instead, it's about what I'm trying to do with them.
Carol Kauffman, who did a bunch of work advising executive clients during the recent Silicon Valley Bank collapse, illustrates this precise point in the following explanation:
The quote that really comes to my mind about real-time leadership is the Victor Frankl one that between every stimulus and response, there's a space. And in that space lies our freedom. That means basically when something horrific happens, we all have our natural reflexes. Some will dive in and be furious, others will run away and try to analyze it. Other people will feel, who do I need to take care of? Other people will completely tune out. So those are some of the different options, but how do you make some kind of space for yourself so you can rise above your reflex depending on what's really being demanded of you at that time?
Most of us aren't dealing with crises or horrific life events on a daily basis. But you might encounter situations where, like me, you could feel like
You need to prove that you're right and someone else is wrong
You don't want to deal with the consequences of someone else's mistake
You want more trust and autonomy to do what you think is best, or
Something is simply not going your way
For me, the natural reflex in response to such experiences is often to influence and control.
Looking back on that exchange/refund incident, I can see how I was unwilling to accept that this ridiculous returns policy existed, and that I had to deal with it. In my own unique way, I had failed to distinguish between making the situation better and making myself feel better about the situation.
And maybe, because I was also dealing with other things that I felt I had no control over, this seemed like an easy way to recover some sense of agency—if only I could get them to admit that their returns policy was dumb as hell (on hindsight this is hilarious, but in that moment it was true).
In the end, they replied to say that if I was still interested, they could do the exchange and include the additional refund. They had realised there was a loophole in their policy.