Verbal Self Defense Tactics

Archive for October, 2009

A recent article on Health.com, “Treat Your Coworker Like a Child: How to Tame a Terrible Boss or Office Bully” offer some good advice for dealing with workplace bullying. At the end of the article it even offered readers 3 quick tips on how to treat your boss like a toddler;

• Reinforce good behavior,
• Learn his/her triggers, and
• Make it fun.

These recommendations presented in the two-page article are well founded and extremely useful when properly applied, however the concern you need to think about is hidden in the information that was left out. There are two components missing which, without them, will only succeed in making your office bullying problem even worse.

In order to avoid that outcome, prior to attempting to deal with an office tyrant the two things you must remember are:

1. Reaffirm your intention, and
2. Maintain control of both your verbal and non-verbal communication.

Set Your Intention

In order to effectively communicate with a bully the first and foremost concern should be centered on your own personal intentions in the matter. Acting or speaking out from a position of anger and frustration will often lead to hopes of hurting the bully as much as they hurt you — the age old concept of “an eye for an eye.”

The problem with defining the desired outcome using a focus of revenge is that you are likely to replicate the bully’s own behaviors towards them with the expected result to be them feeling as hurt as you were when they did it to you. However the original bullying behavior demonstrated by the office tyrant was well justified in their own mind, so it is more likely that treating them in the same way will only lead to increasing the level of conflict between the two of you.

Instead of trying to bully the bully, it is more useful to focus on working towards shifting their behavior towards something more useful. By remembering that is your desired result you will have greater success in controlling your own emotions because it’s no longer about how you feel. Your attempts to find a behavior that will work for both of you is more likely to succeed because, rather than trying to change him or her, you are actually taking their needs into consideration and working toward making the situation better for both of you.

Control Your Presentation

Having the right intention before you face an office bully is only one key element which can increase your likelihood of success. The second part is to control your own communication to ensure that your words and actions stay inline with your intention.

It’s common for people to automatically feel threatened by an office bully. Even before the bully does anything co-workers are already on guard, expecting the inevitable bullying behaviors. These assumptions (although well founded) create a negative thinking pattern that results in decreasing the effectiveness of your communication skills.

Ultimately any unhealthy attitude toward, or opinion of, the bully will influence the non-verbal components of your interaction and can be picked up by the bully through your facial expressions, tone of voice, or any number of tiny idiosyncrasies inherent to human interactions. Alternatively, if you maintain focus on the right intention and take a little extra time to consider how you present your thoughts and opinions it can have a dramatic affect on the way this other person perceives your ideas. In the end, this is what can make all the difference in whether or not the bully is open to working with you in finding a solution or whether or not they simply become defensive and make their office bullying even worse.