Lately in office, we have been working on an impossible project with an even impossible deadline — such are corporates at times. There are close to 300 professionals working on this project, and everyone is showing signs of burnout and anxiety. People are failing to meet deadlines, and finger pointing is a common sight.

What I have observed is that such a stressful environment often makes people to react in an aggressive and unpleasant manner — either when they are defending themselves or when they try to shift the blame for a failed task. In either case, the office environment is not conducive for health.

Yet, in the midst of all this madness, there I am sitting totally unfazed by all of this. The office noise particularly peaks at 4 in the afternoon — I wear headphones and continue to work. It is better to hear ‘Celine Dion’ or ‘Beethoven symphonies’ and work rather than all the office chatter.

To survive in this environment, I exercise my three (3) yet-to-be-fully-developed superpowers that often do not go well with some of my other colleagues, especially with my manager 😃.

I. Silence

Someone just came and ranted at me a few days ago. A lot of people saw that, and felt bad for what was happening. I was not angry, and may be a bit of irritated, but a whole lot sad with such instance.

For a moment, I did not know what to do — so I chose to stay silent.

Whether someone is at fault or not, no one should be treated in a disrespectful manner. The person ranting at me continued to do that for some time, and sensing there was no response from me — was annoyed, closed the conversation and went past me. We did not talk about this instance any time again.

Retaliation could have started a huge argument, but silent just made him a bit more annoyed. I guess it was still the right thing to do.

II. Patience

I have come to realize that I have an invariably high degree of patience when it comes to office matters — that often people cannot cope up with. Once there was a deadline and things were not getting done. Everyone around me was panicking, except me. My manager was visibly annoyed why I was not sharing the same emotions as him — it made him think that I was not serious about the project.

I believe the answer is pretty simple — patience and calm mind will help you clean shit easier than a panicked mind. I captured this essence in an earlier blogpost here.

III. Optimism

You know deep down that situation is pretty bad — yet you always maintain the belief and outlook that all your work will be complete. And you accompany that with a big smile 😃.

Maybe this is fake optimism at its highest point, and I am guilty of doing this at times. And why I do that, because there is no other option to guide through this stressful period or to keep the team motivated — and your management may not always be aligned with this approach.

Based upon feedback from my senior colleagues, I once tried to change my approach — show a bit more aggression towards deadlines, but failed miserably. I guess it is just not for me. I stick to what I do best — patient, silent and optimistic.

It makes me wonder what I am doing wrong here. Maybe I am just the odd one out.
In an audience that cannot match your patience, they sure are bound to raise some questions at you — and we should know how to deal with it.
I guess such is life as well.

What positives I take from this instance — I came home from the office and am writing this blog post about my observations from such instance 😃, and cannot wait what my readers have to reflect on this. That is good enough for me.

Recap to remember:
 — Sometimes your good behavior may not go well with others. We must accept this, and learn to deal with this.
 —Even from the worst of situations, we should always try to extract the positives and move on.

Please share your thoughts about any such instance where people could not cope up with some of your good behavior, and what was your learning from the same.
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