It’s Monday, yay. Start of a new week, so excited. And I actually genuinely mean that. I used to listen to people that would go, “Oh, I’m hiving an awesome day. Yay, it’s Monday”, all that stuff. I would be, “Yeah, right. I know they don’t really feel like that at all.” But I do. I actually genuinely am happy it’s Monday, yay. So much to do so much to not see, experience, but so much to do. And hey, I’m not sick, nobody I love is sick, so them’s all bonuses after that point.
Today I wanted to talk about a little challenge that I’ve recently set for myself that I thought you might benefit from. Now, this is, okay, secret. I like to always have the last word. Now, I don’t mean that in a negative ‘I told you so say, see’ way. I mean, if there’s a text conversation or an email conversation or fun conversation and someone says something, I always want to go back and go, “I hope you have a great day”, or “I hope …” It’s always that last bit.
So, if someone says, “Thanks, Sam, that’s great”, I’ll go back and go, “My pleasure.” And you know what? A lot of the times it’s completely bloody unnecessary. So, sometimes the conversation just can finish. You don’t need to, if someone says thank you for something, you don’t need to always go back and go, “My pleasure”, because then they sometimes feel like coming back and going, “Oh”, with another response, and it goes around and around and around. Ask yourself how many times do you have a text conversation or an email conversation where it could have just stopped. Information was asked for, information was shared, could stop.
If you have a good working relationship or a good social relationship or a good familial relationship with someone, people know that you don’t need to do that extra step of that ‘you’re welcome’, ‘my pleasure’, ‘I hope you have a great day’, ‘hope that works’, all those extra bits. And I think sometimes it comes from a people-pleasing place. So, us, hands on our heart, people trying to stopping being people-pleasers, we want to keep giving that affirmation of ‘we’re here for you, we’re here for you. It’s all, okay, yeah. Thanks so much for having this conversation with me’.
So, I have been challenging myself recently when people have asked me a question via email and I’ve answered it and they’ve come back and said, “Thanks”, I haven’t gone back directly and gone, “Is there anything else I can help you with?” If I’ve had a text conversation with a friend and they’ve gone, “How’re you doing?” and I’ve gone, “Great, thanks. How are you?” And they’ve come, “Yeah, I’m great”, I haven’t gone back and gone, “Oh. But, but, but …” Sometimes a conversation can just end, and it doesn’t matter who got the last word in, it really doesn’t.
Sometimes I think one of the other reasons we do it for is to hold on to people. It’s, we want to hold onto that friendship, we want to hold on to that working relationship. And this fear feeds up, and we think if we don’t keep prodding that fire, if we don’t keep stroking it, it’s going to dissipate, it’s going to dissolve. They’re not going to think we care about them so much. If I don’t go back to that person that’s thanked me for something seeing if there’s anything else I can do for them, then they might not think that I want to help them anymore, and that would be really bad. It’s just not true. It’s really not true.
It’s a bit like, you can go back and look at the blog posts or the lives about the one I did about ‘sorries’ and just those automatic response to ‘sorries’, I think this, ‘the last word’ thing is a bit like the ‘sorries’ and the ‘justs’, and the ‘buts’, they’re the things we have to train ourselves out of. So, I want you to try and catch yourself today over the next few days, whatever, when you have, and I’m talking about this as a written thing, it’s not necessarily a conversational thing, because that would be really weird if you just stop the conversation, nobody knows what was happening. So, don’t do that. Don’t do it on that one today though. That’d be a bit strange.
But every time you have a text conversation or an email conversation or a messenger chat, anything like that with anybody today, I want you to check yourself and think, did I need to send that last bit? Were though those last words absolutely necessary? Because if they’re not, don’t do them. It’s blank space, it’s noisy space. You don’t need to do it, okay? Have a great Monday. Remember not to need to get in the last word. And I will see you all tomorrow. Bye.