Speaker 1: Picture this. It's thirty six degrees at Chatston Shopping Center
Speaker 1: and I am in a terrible mood and my friend
Speaker 1: says five words that completely transform my day. What happened
Speaker 1: to me in this trip taught me a powerful lesson
Speaker 1: about honesty, awkward situations, and why we are all experts
Speaker 1: at ignoring the obvious, especially at work. So today I'm
Speaker 1: going to share with you a simple communication technique that
Speaker 1: can instantly diffuse tension and workplace drama and make even
Speaker 1: the most uncomfortable conversations bearable. It might just be the
Speaker 1: most underrated superpower you're not using. Welcome to How I Work,
Speaker 1: a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Doctor Amantha imber So. A few weeks ago,
Speaker 1: I promised a close friend to go with her to
Speaker 1: Chatston Shopping Center on a Sunday. Is unfamiliar with the
Speaker 1: retail labyrinth that is Chatty. Imagine if someone took every
Speaker 1: shop in Melbourne, stuffed them into a giant pressure cooker,
Speaker 1: added a generous sprinkle of hengry children, and topped it
Speaker 1: with a parking system designed by a supervillain who failed
Speaker 1: architecture school. Oh and on this day it was also
Speaker 1: thirty six degrees. Now I brought with me a mood
Speaker 1: that could only be described as Melbourne hipster meets instant coffee.
Speaker 1: I'd spent hours staring at my computer screen that morning,
Speaker 1: trying to make progress on a writing project that was
Speaker 1: simply refusing to cooperate. I tried to hide my mood.
Speaker 1: The reality was I failed spectacularly. And that is when
Speaker 1: my friend, bless her truth telling soul, hit me with Amantha,
Speaker 1: you seem off. My first thought was, ah, has she
Speaker 1: broken the sacred social contract of pretending everything's fine? My
Speaker 1: second thought, all right, this is the friend who once
Speaker 1: told me that my new haircut made me look like
Speaker 1: I'd take an inspiration from a YouTube tutorial titled how
Speaker 1: to cut your own hair, not clickbait. Honesty is how
Speaker 1: kind of thing. So I admitted it. Yes, I was
Speaker 1: being about as pleasant as a paper cut. Yes, my
Speaker 1: morning had been as productive as trying to teach a
Speaker 1: cat to fetch, And yes I knew I could have canceled,
Speaker 1: but my anti flakiness programming runs very deep in my DNA.
Speaker 1: And then, like magic or basic human psychology, the cloud lifted,
Speaker 1: being called out for being grumpy mcgrump face actually made
Speaker 1: me less grumpy at work. We have mastered the art
Speaker 1: of pretending to ignore the obvious. We sit in meetings
Speaker 1: where eye rolling is visible from space, where tension between
Speaker 1: teams is thick enough to cut with a knife, and
Speaker 1: what do we do? We save it all for later,
Speaker 1: buried in carefully worded slack messages with just the right
Speaker 1: amount of passive aggressive emojis. But what if instead of
Speaker 1: this elaborate dance of denial, someone just said, Hey, I'm
Speaker 1: noticing some tension here, shall we talk about it. You
Speaker 1: might be familiar with the Feeling's wheel, something I've written
Speaker 1: about before, where it's a wheel that lists out, gosh,
Speaker 1: about one hundred different feelings and it's really great for
Speaker 1: identifying in the moment what are we actually feeling and
Speaker 1: putting a name to it. So you can think about
Speaker 1: this strategy as its extroverted cousin. Instead of naming just
Speaker 1: your own emotions, you're naming the elephant in the room.
Speaker 1: The beautiful thing about naming what's happening is it's like
Speaker 1: popping a balloon full of awkwardness. Sure, there's a brief
Speaker 1: moment of oh God, somebody actually said it, but then
Speaker 1: comes the relief. It's like finally admitting to everyone that, yes,
Speaker 1: we can all smell the fish someone microwave for lunch
Speaker 1: and know we're not okay with it. So here's my
Speaker 1: challenge to you. Next time you're in a situation where
Speaker 1: the unspoken is louder than what's being said, be the
Speaker 1: person who names it. Be my friend at chatty. Just
Speaker 1: maybe pick a better location than a crowded shopping center
Speaker 1: in the middle of summer, because some revelations are better
Speaker 1: had with air conditioning and a convenient car park. If
Speaker 1: you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on
Speaker 1: your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes dropped.
Speaker 1: How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
Speaker 1: the Warrangery people, part of the Cooler Nation. A big
Speaker 1: thank you to Martinimmer for doing the sound mix.