The art of naming office elephants

the most uncomfortable conversations bearable. It might just be the most underrated superpower you're not using. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor Amantha imber So. A few weeks ago, I promised a close friend to go with her to Chatston Shopping Center on a Sunday. Is unfamiliar with the

retail labyrinth that is Chatty. Imagine if someone took every shop in Melbourne, stuffed them into a giant pressure cooker, added a generous sprinkle of hengry children, and topped it with a parking system designed by a supervillain who failed architecture school. Oh and on this day it was also thirty six degrees. Now I brought with me a mood that could only be described as Melbourne hipster meets instant coffee.

I'd spent hours staring at my computer screen that morning, trying to make progress on a writing project that was simply refusing to cooperate. I tried to hide my mood. The reality was I failed spectacularly. And that is when my friend, bless her truth telling soul, hit me with Amantha, you seem off. My first thought was, ah, has she

broken the sacred social contract of pretending everything's fine? My second thought, all right, this is the friend who once told me that my new haircut made me look like I'd take an inspiration from a YouTube tutorial titled how to cut your own hair, not clickbait. Honesty is how kind of thing. So I admitted it. Yes, I was

being about as pleasant as a paper cut. Yes, my morning had been as productive as trying to teach a cat to fetch, And yes I knew I could have canceled, but my anti flakiness programming runs very deep in my DNA. And then, like magic or basic human psychology, the cloud lifted, being called out for being grumpy mcgrump face actually made me less grumpy at work. We have mastered the art

of pretending to ignore the obvious. We sit in meetings where eye rolling is visible from space, where tension between teams is thick enough to cut with a knife, and what do we do? We save it all for later, buried in carefully worded slack messages with just the right amount of passive aggressive emojis. But what if instead of this elaborate dance of denial, someone just said, Hey, I'm

noticing some tension here, shall we talk about it. You might be familiar with the Feeling's wheel, something I've written about before, where it's a wheel that lists out, gosh, about one hundred different feelings and it's really great for identifying in the moment what are we actually feeling and putting a name to it. So you can think about this strategy as its extroverted cousin. Instead of naming just your own emotions, you're naming the elephant in the room.

The beautiful thing about naming what's happening is it's like popping a balloon full of awkwardness. Sure, there's a brief moment of oh God, somebody actually said it, but then comes the relief. It's like finally admitting to everyone that, yes, we can all smell the fish someone microwave for lunch and know we're not okay with it. So here's my challenge to you. Next time you're in a situation where the unspoken is louder than what's being said, be the

person who names it. Be my friend at chatty. Just maybe pick a better location than a crowded shopping center in the middle of summer, because some revelations are better had with air conditioning and a convenient car park. If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes dropped. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Cooler Nation. A big thank you to Martinimmer for doing the sound mix.