Have you ever wished you could retract the words you have said or written…I certainly have….spoken and unspoken! What we say and how we say it produces a positive or negative reaction…and I hate it when words that come out of my mouth or onto paper create a reaction that I ever intended…has it happened to you? Today email and Instant Message impact the way we communicate in a huge way.
Instant Message can be a great thing….ITS INSTANT…unless the person on the other end reads more into a message than is intended…Once you hit “Send” there is no way to retract the message…I can live with that if it is just a misspelled word…the more important issue is the content that is forever accessible…something to always remember!
How about being so angry with someone you decided to send an email rather than directly talking to them about the issue …have you ever thought you could hide your anger in an email and then you get a zinger of an email in return! This can be an issue when working in the business world….remember you never want to burn bridges. One thing I learned to do years ago was to save the email as a draft and sleep on it over night. In the morning, I would wake and re-read the email to see if I still wanted to send it….most often than not I would rewrite the email and then send it off.
The art of writing letters is becoming a thing of the past… that we might consider reviving…at least when you hand write a letter you can read it before you send it….maybe that is why we see people in the classic black and white movies writing a letter with mounds of paper on the floor showing the editing process! My father, Big D, was a great letter writer. Anyone that brought a gift to the house received a thank you note….Daddy would have dinner at my house and the next day I would receive a lovely note about the special evening he had enjoyed. He didn’t write just kind notes, but he would express his political views regularly to his congressmen. He felt it was his duty to share his thoughts. He wrote and rewrote to ensure that it would not be tossed in the trash…I try to remember that saying…”You can catch more bees with honey” or “Kill your competitor with kindness”.
Tips from Tina:
Choose your words wisely
Save an angry email for 24 hrs before sending
Read and re-read before sending
Pick up the phone for a conversation before sending a text or email
Apologize when you should