Recognizing Hurtful Dismissiveness

When we're dismissive towards others, they can experience pain. Retaliation, bad decisions, depressed performance, and broken relationships can follow. Dismissing others might feel satisfying, but it's expensive to the organization. If it's a repeated pattern of behavior, it's a performance issue.

Some offenders intend to throw their targets off balance, to inflict pain, or to gain advantage in debate. Others are unintentionally dismissive, but the results can be serious nonetheless.

Targets of dismissiveness usually cannot control the behavior of offenders, but they can learn to remain centered. There is a 3-R recipe for dealing with hurtful dismissiveness: Recognize the offense, Reframe the offense, and Reaffirm your own humanity.

Recognition begins with becoming familiar with the words offenders use. Because most of the examples below do have legitimate uses, both style of delivery and context determine whether they're being used offensively. For instance, "Forget it," in response to an apology can mean, "Apology accepted." But in response to a request for an explanation, it can be a dismissive rejection.

Here's a little catalog of dismissive remarks. Add more as you encounter them.

• Never mind.
• Don't worry about it.
• Talk to me later (or sometime).
• Sorry, gotta go.
• Not your (my) concern (affair, problem, worry).
• Stay focused.
• Not now. Maybe later.
• Ask me later.
• Let's not.
• Send me mail on that.
• It's complicated.
• You're overreacting.
• Welcome to the nineties.
• Let's not be panicky.
• Aren't you clever.
• Could be.
• Who knows? Or cares?
• [Interrupting] Yeah, yeah, I get it.
• Here we go again.
• Not again.
• Oh, that. Let's move on.
• There you go (she goes, he goes, they go) again.
• <laughs><changes subject>
• Stop the presses.
• Hold your horses.
• I hear you. (repeatedly)
• I take your point. (repeatedly)
• Yeah, I heard that.
• Yeah, I heard that yesterday (last week, last month).
• Everyone knows that.
• That's not news.
• I don't think it's quite that bad (serious).
• Get over it.
• You're making (way) too much of it.
• That's just the way she is (he is, they are).
• That's life.
• Get used to it.
• Only joking.
• Cool your jets.
• Chill.
• Take it easy.
• Take five.
• Give it a rest.
• Hold on there, Targets of dismissiveness usually
  cannot control the behavior
  of offenders, but they can
  learn to remain centeredchief (pal).
• Big deal.
• I've (we've, you've, they've, he's, she's) done worse.
• You just can't leave it alone, can you?
• Nothing I (we, you) can do about that.
• Why does that matter?
• What's the difference?
• It doesn't really matter.
• Either way.
• Next!
• Sucks to be you.
• Don't be so sensitive.
• Take a number.

Next time we'll explore techniques for reframing dismissive remarks.   Next issue in this series   Top    Next Issue

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Dismissive Gestures: II

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Preventing the Hurt of Hurtful Dismissiveness

When we use the hurtfully dismissive remarks of others to make ourselves feel bad, there are techniques for recovering relatively quickly. But we can also learn to respond to these remarks altogether differently. When we do that, recovery is unnecessary.

That Was a Yes-or-No Question: I

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A cognitive bias known as the Overconfidence Effect causes us to overestimate the reliability of our judgments. Decisions we make based on those judgments are therefore suspect. But there are steps we can take to make our confidence levels more realistic, and thus make our decisions more reliable. Available here and by RSS on May 14.

And on May 21: Mismanaging Project Managers

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