A reader commented on a post I wrote recently. She said that she just went to work in a dental office at the front desk. She was surprised, and I think dismayed, at the amount of personal information her office manager discussed throughout the day. She said she is 50. I'll turn 52 next week and I've noticed the same thing and I wondered if it's a generational thing. I don't remember co-workers being quite as open about their personal lives when I first started working 34 years ago. I do think that people share much more than they used to at work
Here's the problem: when you tell too much at work, you are inviting people to judge you. I remember working with a very pretty young woman a few years ago, who seemed compelled to report on her personal life every morning. It got to the point that staff members were waiting at the front desk for her to arrive so they could hear all the details of whatever she had done the night before. Now, these details were extremely personal, always racy, and often demeaning, even though she didn't seem to realize that. It started to bother me to see what it was doing to our staff. These nice, very down to earth ladies were becoming voyeurs. A voyeur is defined as an obsessive observer of sordid or sensational subjects. Not what I wanted to see our staff dissolve into. My first step was to talk to our staff members and help them see how they were contributing to her degradation by encouraging her to talk about these things. Once they realized what was happening, they agreed to stop their part in it. I then talked to her and told her that they weren't asking because they admired what she was doing. They were titillated by it. She was becoming a living, breathing soap opera. She seemed to get the picture and said she'd stop. Within a week she was talking again. I realized that it made her feel important. She didn't have anything to replace it with that would enable her to reproduce the feeling of popularity and importance she got when she opened the door into her personal life.
I've noticed that people get competitive with this kind of talk. They seem to have a need to top each other with something more bizarre or shocking. It escalates because no one objects, no one says, "Enough." Even when we know it's wrong to encourage someone to talk in a way that demeans them, we want to know more, we want to be shocked, maybe we want to feel superior. When we urge someone to tell more, we need to stop and ask ourselves why we are doing that. We need to learn to tactfully guide the conversation to a more dignified subject. I know I sound like an old fart, but that's ok, as long as you believe me and do the right thing.
It's a bad feeling to go home and know that you've revealed too much about your personal life. Once it's out, it's out. What you put out about yourself, is the information that will shape people's opinion of you. If you want to be respected, use discretion. If you want to be interesting in the long term, use discretion, leave them wanting more, rather than giving them something to talk about.
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