Rewire Intrusion - Agree Strategy

COVID19 is ensuring that working from home is mandatory for many and is likely to become more embedded in organizations as an acceptable working approach moving forward. As all of us now have experienced, working from home brings different challenges into our life. From the feeling of being intruded upon in our private life's as the video conference streams our homes as background to all our colleagues, to balancing work and family time without clear borders.

Working from home provides great opportunities for some and provide feelings of being intruded on for others. How to deal with situations and people that we feel intruded upon by? Placing a virtual background on your digital meeting creates a clear boundary and might make you feel safe, it can make other people feel uncomfortable and is it always possible to exclude behavior through barriers?

 Rewire Intrusion – The strategic manual for building positive relations with intrusive people

 In stead of disagreeing with the feeling of intrusion of digital meetings and trying to rebuild boundaries; what if we embrace the ambiguity and agree to the benefits or look for alternatives that we can agree on?

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Agree to quick wins.

You know that feeling when an intrusive person asks you something and you want to say “No, I disagree” just because it is this “annoying person” that you do not like? You probably have at least one colleague, one friend, one family member that you treat like that. Basically, before they even asked, before they said anything, your answer is “No, I disagree”. Well, I have been on the receiving end of that one with a person who continuously, standard and without exception used the phrase “go away”, before I could even approach in a roughly five meter radius. I can guarantee you, it is a relationship killer. And no matter how intrusive or annoying someone is, this approach will not work. It destroys the relationship and the receiving end, no matter how hard they work to remain positive (I worked really hard there), will be affected in their mood and sooner or later they cannot help themselves and a pent up reaction of emotion will explode like a bomb and destroy the relationship, unless they read chapter one of this book. I had not, and I exploded, which is not a good thing and I damaged the relationship beyond repair. For me, I should have applied a grateful and viewpoint strategy to prevent that. For the other person involved there was an easy quick win that would have prevented it all: instead of trying to save a few minutes by saying “go away”, “no”, “I disagree” continuously just because it was me, spend a few minutes of saying “yes, let me listen to you”, “yes, let me think about it”, “I agree that something needs to be done” etc.    

The “Agree” strategy quick win is to know which are the easy, low time and energy consuming things and always directly agree to that!

A few things we can advise you to always agree to is listed below, please have a look at them.

Make time for yourself and others (could be at a different time than requested) like:

o  Your wife / husband / partner / family (family first!)

o  Your colleagues

o  Your friends

A simple example here is when team-members come to my desk and ask for my time but I am really not available due to whatever reason:

“Yes, we should make time for that as it is important, unfortunately right now is not feasible, how about after 30min/tomorrow/next week?”

Can you see how I agree and say yes?

Warning: never say “Yes, but….”, this is perceived and understood in most cases as a no. It is then better to start with a No and end with a possible alternative, for example:

“No, not right now. But tomorrow I am available at 10am, is that feasible for you?”

Can you see the difference?  

Your health.

Health is not negotiable, if your body gives you signals, listen to them and say yes to them. There were moments I did not and ended up with chronicle pains that took a long time to recover. Never be intrusive to yourself, mind or body!

If the effort to disagree is significantly larger than the effort to agree, and it is within the scope of your own values, why disagree?

Can you remember the example that I am a few minutes late and my dad just has to say I am late? Well, what is the point to disagree with that? Not only is it factually right (I am by the timing of the clock later then the intentional time), even if with a lot of effort I do manage to convince my dad that I am not, what do I gain? Nothing. So I just agree. This takes me one second, and we can all move on to do the thing we decided to do in a happy way instead of starting with a half an hour argument that will destroy the mood regardless of the final consensus! Just like when your aunties with a family dinner are pushing you to get married and sprout offspring: “yes, I agree” gets you through the ordeal with minimum effort – they will not change their minds anyway!

The third alternative!

The third alternative is finding the things in the request you can say yes to, and focus on these!

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This is especially helpful in working from home and digital calls as it supports the creation of a supportive environment. Can you imagine being the whole day in meetings from home and only hearing what is not possible to do?

And it also applies to your family. What do family members experience if you are working from home and not spending time with them? Denying them access to you. There is no clear boundary at home that says you are now at work, so why not step out of that call for a few minutes to say yes to your family? Why not show in your call that they are there and need you as well?

I did a call on my mobile phone with the camera turned off, audio muted, blue-tooth headphone on and ... cleaning my apartment. Of course, when I had to contribute, I unmuted and contributed.

Disagreeing and setting boundaries can be very important, at the same time keep in mind that:

“One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.”

- 老子 Lǎozǐ