First and foremost, please understand that I absolutely see the irony in someone who is a publicist, not to mention the host of a weekly (close to one-hour) podcast telling people, “The less said, the better.” Yes, I get it. I’m a professional communicator who, in a roundabout way, talks for a living, you could say, and yet here I am writing a blog under a headline that seems awfully contradictory.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, though, let’s move on to the fact that I have witnessed firsthand how valuable this approach will be to you – in both your personal and professional life.
Let’s dive right into some examples because you’ll also notice that a lot of this could easily be seen as also just fitting into The Golden Rule (do unto others as you’d have them do unto you).
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Someone received my weekly e-newsletter and hit the Reply button and wrote to me with, “Stay the %$*& out of my inbox.” First of all, they could’ve just used the Unsubscribe option and moved on with their day. But secondly, because this is an email, I can see who this is that wrote it! Now you’re putting yourself in a position for people to form a less than flattering opinion of you.
In another example of overdoing it and thus putting yourself in a bad position, there was a candidate for a position that I was trying to fill with Now Hear This, Inc. who really went over the top. This individual proceeded to not only besiege me with emails, but text messages as well, to the point where I didn’t want to respond to any of them at all. They had just come on too strong at that juncture and it was way too much. There’s a difference between being enthusiastic and annoying. You need to be professional about it and know where to draw the line.
In this day and age of technology and what can be done with a Google search or even something as routine as doing a search within your email client, within the proverbial blink of an eye you can put your fingers on something that – if they had thought it through – the sender would probably rather have back.
I’ve heard it said that when you get something you want to respond negatively to, you should type it elsewhere just to get it out of your system, but then, of course, never actually send it. Do not, I repeat, do not act in the moment and let your emotions overtake you. If you react in the heat of battle, you’ll more than likely say something that you’ll end up regretting. I like to walk away and “sleep on it” so that I (here's another cliché that’s appropriate) let cooler heads prevail.
There is also a temptation to go way over the top and explain something to someone that opens itself (and thus you) up to too much room for questions and unwanted feedback. Rather than tell every single thing that went on, err on the side of “the less said the better.”
When you’re able to think before you speak (usually when answering an email or text or social media DM), you can think of the possible ramifications of ‘what if (you) were to say (insert first reaction here).’ That’s when you’ll see that not only are you going to be better off thinking things through, but, that the less you say back, the better off you’ll be.
Keep in mind that everything you’ve read to this point also applies to social media interaction. If you see a post that you don’t like, what’s the harm in just moving on and scrolling to the next post, rather than stopping to post a negative comment? In this case, the less said the better is you saying nothing at all!
This is all very timely as it relates to this being the first full week of Mental Health Awareness Month. We are living in very trying times. You never know what someone is going through, and you don’t want your excessive answer to them (lashing back) to be what puts them over the edge. It will likely haunt you too for some time to come.
Again, it bears repeating. A lot of ‘the less said the better’ comes back to The Golden Rule.
I have just activated FeaturedUp.com so as to give listeners of my weekly “Now Hear This Entertainment” podcast a unique (free) way to send in questions after hearing an episode of the show. I would argue that you can also use it to provide me with feedback about this blog or questions about your creator career, to take advantage of my twenty years of helping indie music artists, authors, actors, entrepreneurs, small business owners, podcasters, and more.