I’m a pretty critical person – of my own professional performance and occasionally of others, especially those who wrong me or who are excessively annoying. The great thing about being critical is that I always see areas of improvement. On the flip side I have a tendency to sound negative when communicating my criticism.
I realized recently that when I voice my critical feelings about specific people (be it friends, family, or customers) to those around me it can become contagious. Verbalizing negativity, true as it may be about that person or customer, has the ability to color others’ opinion about that person, even causing others around me to pass a pre-judgement.
For those times when my verbal candidness about someone is accurate, it still does not make it okay to share that with others when the only purpose is to complain.
Remember that proverb your parents use to tell you: if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. I seem to forget this often.
Final Tought
Extend annoying and rude people graciousness. Most likely you too have been annoying at some time in your life and needed someone else to extend that same graciousness to you. Sow the attitude you’d like create around. Positivity has a great way of being infectious, both in your own mind and in the mind of others.
