One of the adverts was from Forbes with a suggestive title about keeping your thoughts to yourself in the workplace. Which is good advice in almost every situation. Work "friends" don't need to know what's going on in your life, or the things you're deciding about when it comes to your career. One easy example was not sharing your thoughts about your job being not challenging enough for you. You might make them feel bad because it's a challenge for them. Ok, while I don't buy into the whole "making people feel bad" genre - I think that pendulum has swung too far to the right, and that in reality sometimes life is hard, and it makes a person feel bad. We have to learn to deal with that part of life as well.
But the best advice came near the end of the article:
- The worse the environment, the more tight-lipped you have to be with your coworkers.
- If things get so bad at your workplace that you can’t safely talk about much beyond the weather, that’s a sure sign it’s time to go!
Yeah. That's the point that I'm at with coworkers. I don't discuss any part of my life outside of work with them, because I have coworkers who tend to gossip. Correction. Who "get off" on sharing gossip, no matter how true or not. Even my weird Elvis will take a nugget of information and create it into this hairy piece of gossip .... What's even funnier in this case is that he's 10 years older than I am. And who says it's only women who spread gossip????? lol
I have one younger coworker who has decided to make retail his career ... which is awesome! And I was taking him "under my wing", giving him some up front knowledge that if utilized correctly could make him and his position valuable when it comes to changes in the future. But I've come to realize that he has the tendency to gossip just as much as some of the females. So I've learned the hard way what can and cannot be shared.
I started my own working career at a company with only 60 employees, we grew to 80, but it was a privately owned company, and we were a family. Leaving that kind of work environment for the retail sector ..... was SO difficult. But I can't keep wishing for something that doesn't and won't exist in my world any longer.
I found this short little article about "Testing for Gossip":
In ancient Greece, Socrates was reputed to hold knowledge in high esteem. One day an acquaintance met the great philosopher and said, “Do you know what I just heard about your friend?”
“Hold on a minute”, Socrates replied. “Before telling me anything I’d like you to pass a little test. It’s called the Triple Filter Test.”
“Triple filter?”
“That’s right”, Socrates continued. “Before you talk to me about my friend, it might be a good idea to take a moment and filter what you’re going to say. That’s why I call it the triple filter test. The first filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”
“No,” the man said, “Actually I just heard about it and …”
“All right”, said Socrates. “So you don’t really know if it’s true or not. Now let’s try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my friend something good?”
“No, on the contrary.”
“So”, Socrates continued, “you want to tell me something bad about him, but you’re not certain it’s true. You may still pass the test though, because there’s one filter left: The filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my friend going to be useful to me?”
“No, not really.”
“Well”, concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither true nor good nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?”
That's a good story, a good approach to take when someone wants to give you some juicy gossip. If it's not true, good or useful, why listen to it???
And while it seems I'm taking the high road today, I tend to fall back into bad habits from time to time. Hopefully, it will be less often if I take a moment to think before I actually listen.
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