On being considerate and constructive

by bruno

Part of my life is pretty much exposed to everyone. I’m registered and active in social networks sites and I have a couple of websites. One of them is this personal blog and the other is a very public blog aggregator for science blogs written in Portuguese called Divulgarciencia, http://divulgarciencia.com.

Being exposed, public and fairly vocal about some issues, I’ve long been exposed to all kinds of emails. They can almost be clustered into two main groups: kind ones saying why they support me or not in different situations and really nasty ones that are generally offensive and question my integrity and ethics.

I normally try and reply to all emails except the really extreme cases of the latter group. When I get a nasty email I normally try to reply in a kind way saying that it may have been better to address the issue more calmly and perhaps in a more considerate manner. I emphasize this behavior carries with it a higher chance of promoting better communications and understanding among two parties. More often than not, after the second reply, things either get on track or they really get nasty. And that’s when I stop replying.

People often fail to understand the real power of being constructive. That means not only during in an argument, carefully laying out the arguments on the table, but also by being pro-active. Probably the best way to earn someone’s respect is by doing things that are respected by what they are and not by who makes them. That adds a lot to your arguments in terms of starting value because you have shown elsewhere that you either care about an issue enough to do something about it but also – and this is of utmost importance – that you’re not putting yourself in a position to only criticize in a non-construtive way. Think about it: Why bother debating things with someone that will never help any cause?

I’ve just described what I do relative to emails of people I normally don’t know but it applies to all parts of life: personal and professional. I was motivated to write this post because after several nasty emails over the years I needed to create one post to send people to when I feel there’s no point in continuing to argue over email.

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  1. Emails de alto nivel