We had a men's health spokesperson come in to speak to us at work to promote men's health, in particular, their mental health. He was a comedian, so his entire presentation was hilarious, and everyone really enjoyed themselves. One of the things that he got us to do was play a yes/no guessing game. So four people volunteered to leave the room, and we picked an object. Then the four people came back in, and could take turns asking yes/no/maybe questions and the crowd would answer them. What the four people didn't know was that there was no object. If they asked a question that ended with a vowel, we answered yes. If they asked a question that ended with an S, we answered maybe. If they asked a question that ended in a consonant (except S), we answered no.
I thought it was a bit silly, as we didn't really achieve much other than to completely confuse the four people - though they did end up guessing some bizarre thing with a pipe, I can't remember what it was, and I'm pretty sure it didn't make sense. The guy explained that the whole point of the exercise was to teach the audience how to listen to an entire question before answering, which we had to do because our answer depended on waiting for the last letter of their question. He said that often when two people are having an argument, one will interrupt the other person before they get to finish speaking. So that person will then interrupt the first person back. All it does in the end is result in both people getting frustrated that they aren't able to get their point across.
I've been thinking about that in the dynamic of the work place. When I started, I didn't contribute all that much in meetings, I was mostly just there to learn things from other people, and so when people cut me off, it didn't bother me at all. Chances are, they were correcting something I had said, and the correction meant that there was no point continuing down that line of thought anyway. Now that I have a few years under my belt, I am trying to say more, and there are some applications that I know better than anyone else on the team, since I wrote them. However, since I am still the most junior developer on my team, I feel very uncomfortable interrupting people when they're mid sentence, so I often try to wait for a gap in the conversation.
A couple of weeks ago, I was dragged into a discussion about the way our system validates a particular request. Our business analyst and the lead developer were talking about how the system should behave, and they got into a heated argument about what the best approach is. I actually knew that because of the version of the software we were using had a limitation, one of the options was already off the table. When I tried to bring that up, the lead developer cut me off, and continued arguing with the business analyst. It's actually because of moments like these that I've learnt to try and be as minimalistic as possible with my words, because I usually only get a sentence or two in before I'm interrupted.
Sometimes I want to yell, "Can you please just let me finish?!" but I know that's incredibly unprofessional, so I politely sit and wait my turn. I'm not sure what to do, I know that I am often considered the baby of the project team, and people will often talk about music, movies or events and then say that I'm too young to know what they're talking about. In the case of the oldest person on the team, that is occasionally true, but there's only 4 years between me and the lead developer! I guess it's the stupid Asian youthful looking genes biting me on the ass.
I am trying to push myself to speak up a bit more though, because I feel like a well-timed line from me could save ten minutes of arguing, and when the $120 an hour porridge lady is involved, that's saving the company $20 for about seven words of effort. Plus, every year, my feedback from others is that I should try to speak up more in meetings. Which I mostly wrote off as them trying to say something that's negative, but isn't too negative that it seems bad. But maybe it's true, I should try to speak more, especially now that I actually have things that I can contribute.
I think the other bad image I have cultivated for myself due to this mostly silent behaviour is that people expect me to say something incredible when I do talk, like the trope The Voiceless (warning: link to TV Tropes). It just adds so much pressure to saying things. Or maybe it's all in my head. I don't know.
On the other hand, I have this annoying habit of trying to finish other people's sentences - although this only applies to people that I know well. I hate it when I do it, but I can't seem to stop myself. Maybe I should also put more stock into waiting for someone to finish talking before opening my mouth to respond. Dealing with people who aren't frustrated is always a bonus.
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