I feel like this is something that women have to do a lot (not that men don’t) to avoid being thought of as overly aggressive. I hate it.
I once had a (male) boss tell me (female) that to be successful as a leader in our engineering industry as a woman, you have to be a bitch. He was trying to encourage me to be less polite and more confident, but he also made it clear exactly what he thought of those confident women. I think he was trying to be a good mentor but it fucked me up, because I don’t consider myself a bitch, nor do I want to be one. It took me a long time to realize he was wrong, and that I can be a kind person and confident at the same time.
On the flipside, I was once given feedback that I’m “too direct” in emails and it came across as rude. What I realized was, it wasn’t the directness, it was the lack of friendly communication around it. You can say “I know the answer to your problem, do this thing” as long as you add in “Hi so-and-so, thanks for the great question! Here’s my brief reasoning, so I recommend you do this thing.” One is “bossy”, the other is friendly and acknowledges the recipient is an equal asking for advice, instead of an underling who should obey you because you said so.
I wonder if this is gender or industry or country. I’m in government info tech and we are pretty tolerant of single line emails stating an undecorated answer or solution
Or perhaps we’re not but I don’t hear about it due to being male, tall, and grey haired
It must be difficult to know what to make of that kind of feedback. Some people value indirectness, others value directness, and many people value both, at different times. And then there’s the sexist aspect of some responders. Sigh.
I know the answer to your problem, do this thing
If it makes you feel better I wouldn’t be remotely put off by a response like that
There are subjects in which I have formal training and extensive experience in. Here I speak with authority and don’t use slippery language; I may even cite sources.
There are other subjects that I read about once probably somewhere on the internet at some point in the last 25 years or so. Here I will phrase it as “If I understand correctly” or I might even pose it as a question inviting others to correct me.
I went to flight school during the time when we all thought System of a Down had recorded a song about the Legend of Zelda. If you don’t have an internal rating system about how reliably you “know” the things you “know” you’re probably not worth listening to.
Lotta potential positions you could take with regards to that system, y’know. cracks epistemological knuckles, what ya got? How do you decide how much weight to attribute to a fact you heard someone else tell you? Who? In what context? That stuff doesn’t, I believe, have a pithy answer
We are in a post-trust world. We’re all probably better off just swimming out to sea.
Shit I never responded. But I hard disagree
See, if you can’t trust anyone, your ability
To fabricate a plausible model of reality
Is compromised.Nobody can interpret the world alone.
No small group can.
Too much is known.
