What you permit is what you promote.

During a heart-to-heart talk with a co-worker, she said: “You are passive-aggressive.” Source of the heated truth-telling dialogue was an e-mail answer I had sent.

It was my abbreviated electronic response to a topic I was rather annoyed about that had started this conversation. I was tired of a specific theme not getting resolved and felt stuck. Frazzled and unable (read: unwilling) to navigate the situation I replied on this occasion not with a fully formulated explanation, but with a staccato riposte. I wanted to make a point to express my discontentment. I followed the infuriating example of extremely short statement replies I had gotten so often from other people. Clients, Suppliers, Partners, Project or Team Members who -as I felt- couldn’t even be bothered to formulate a complete sentence by just coming back with: “Yes”. “No”. “Maybe”. “TTYL”.

I get it, they had other things on their mind and my fully formulated approach to an issue wasn’t their top priority to respond to. Taking a short-cut saying “OK” to a nicely (or in their eyes lengthy or unnecessary) built up introduction to a topic was their way of saying: “Get back in line; I have other things to worry about. This answer is all I can afford right now.” Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe that’s just what I was reading into it. Point is you don’t know and staccato answers are leaving it up to you to interpret someone else’s emotional set up; or personal circumstances; or professional situation; or boredom; or disrespectfulness; or simple time management shortcomings on their side. Who knows?

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Thinking now that simply reproducing what other people do is okay for you to do, too, though is a firm source of conflict. We are acting in social context and the old but true motto applies every time: What you permit is what you promote.

Yeah, please read that again. What you permit is what you promote.

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Every minute we do and act, we are setting a precedent. We form a pattern of what we want others to expect from us. On most occasions we don’t do that intentionally. We just act on autopilot.

In our day-to-day business of existence, there’s no time to contemplate every response or every reaction we are formulating. Life’s too short and too busy to be so considerate that we can afford to negotiate that very notion of every answer to never-ending requests, sometimes pointless questions or daring challenges. It’s difficult to navigate the dense jungle of all those floods of demands life requests from us.

Some people do that day-to-day negotiation very well as they have a deep sense of entitlement or have been trained from very young to be or pretend to be self-assertive or have no issue with conflict. Some people even embrace conflict; it’s their way of feeling alive. Some of us might feel overwhelmed or alienated by constant challenges of asserting their place in those tiny daily request and response battles.

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Issue is that if you are then suddenly diverting from your usual response pattern, trying to tear down the impermeable wall of habit, you are at first not doing yourself a favour. You deviate from your expectation path. Expectation you have set yourself and now you are changing direction. That’s annoying for others as they suddenly have to re-think their response pattern, too. You ask others to spend energy on stuff they haven’t planned for. You demand change, and that’s not cool to begin with.

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It reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with a local London council. I think I was applying for a visitor’s parking permit. My usual self is patient. Understanding that we all have things to do, places to go, and one needs patience to make other people understand what it is that you want so they do what you are asking for.

So there I was, hanging on the telephone patiently waiting my turn to speak with the local council. And hurrah! I finally got through to a council employee. Patience to explain the bored-slash-stressed person on the other side what I want. I know it isn’t a dream job to work in a call centre for the council. Patience to go through the explanation she gave me what to do to get what I wanted. Patience to respond to all the lengthy procedure for a simple request.

And then she asked THE question: “So, is it Miss or Mrs.?”

Beg your pardon? What?

Silence on the other end. Yeeees, she responds. Weeeell, are you married or not?

“Now”, she asks again, ”is it Miss or Mrs.”? 

Knowing somehow that the antiquated “Miss” means a female person is unmarried and “Mrs.” means that she is married, I have a shock second. When I later google I learn there’s also “Ms.” when you are not sure of a woman’s marital status, if the woman is unmarried and over 30 or if she prefers being addressed with a marital-status neutral title.

I break my pattern of polite autopilot responses and almost scream: “Are you serious? Who cares if I am married or not. I just want to apply and pay for a visitor’s parking permit!”

“Now then,” the local government robot responds, “if you cannot tell me if your title is Miss or Mrs., I am afraid we cannot proceed.”

I am paying taxes, I have my own bank account, I am spending my own money, it’s the 21st century and you are asking me if I am married or not to get a parking permit. Come again? I was so baffled I just responded I am not married. Right then, Miss, there you go with your parking permit.

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I know that I should have insisted on getting this right, not making my marital status part of a belittling parking-permit-obtaining-exercise. Hindsight is always a beautiful soul-torturing invention. I let myself off the hook for this one. I am a pragmatic creature so let’s move on.

To however mark that degrading conversation and to remind myself that I shouldn’t allow to get patronised over it ever again, I then wilfully chose my new e-mail address integrating the German word for “Miss” into my email name. Just so we are clear.

One could call that passive-aggressive. I call it a F.O.C.K.U. (= Foreseeing Objective Considerately Kind reminding Unit).