I had coffee with a friend and ex-colleague yesterday, and they were talking about the new management and how "intimidating" many people find them. By all reports (since I haven't met them) they are not the nicest of people and treat others quite poorly. However, are they intimidating?
intimidating
/ɪnˈtɪmɪdeɪtɪŋ/Something that is intimidating makes others feel frightened, nervous, or less confident. It often stems from a perceived power imbalance, a dominating presence, or a situation that feels overwhelmingly difficult or daunting.
I think that because of the lack of physical threat, in the case of intimidation at work, the operative word in the description is "perceived" power imbalance, because it only has a psychological basis. And I believe that the intimidation is largely self-inflicted, especially in this case with my friend, since the management is in the US, and they are working in Finland. The worst that can happen after standing up to management, is being pushed out with a settlement package.
Physical intimidation is different of course, because there is a very real threat to the person, as well as the ego. Walking down the street can lead to feelings of threat, especially for many women who feel they do not have the power to overcome an attacker. There is a book called "The gift of fear" that people should read to understand their own fear reactions, intuitions and what to do in those situations, because of the real threat.
But a lot of our life is dominated by perceived threats to our person, because we are very bad at teasing apart who we actually are. That seems like a silly statement because we all know ourselves the best, right? But at the end of the day, our brain can't really tell whether the feeling we are experiencing is a threat to our body, or our ego.
This has been confused even more by the depth of digital experience we now gather, where we feel threatened, despite there not being any physical threat at all. and we have taken it to an extreme where now we believe that we should be protected from the thoughts of others, as if what we hear could inflict a mortal wound upon us, taking our life with it. We not only protect ourselves from hearing and seeing what we don't want, but we expect others to protect us as well, by not saying anything that might offend us.
Yet simultaneously, due to the lack of physical consequence in the digital space, we feel brave enough to insult, to pile on bandwagons to attack and intimidate those we don't like, and inflict pain on the people we feel deserve it. In the digital space, we feel empowered to intimidate, even if in the physical world we do not have the strength and power to back up our words.
Without physical consequence, we become emboldened to treat people poorly, even if all things remained equal, we would be inequal and incapable. It is likely part of the reason why royalty treat their servants so poorly, despite being physically inferior. Or why celebrities believe they have the right to act the way they do, even if they otherwise have no leg to stand on. There is a perceived power imbalance, and when we think we have it, many of us will use it to gain advantage, even if it does harm to others.
We see this often in the workplace too, and there seems to be a rule for instance that a man can't date a woman who is lower in the organisational chart. However, this makes an assumption that power imbalance only comes down to the hierarchy of the company and workplace opportunity. It doesn't factor in that a relationship like this can have no coercion whatsoever, or that the power imbalance might be the other way, with factors that lay outside business activities. It assumes that women are weak and will do whatever based on work opportunity.
Is that true?
I don't think so.
As adults, we should be able to have the mental and emotional skills to be able to understand power dynamics and make informed decisions on how influential they are in our behaviours. Yet, I think that because we have been told to put so much faith in our feelings, we end up acting without enough thought, which means we will feel intimidated, or we will be influenced by perception, even in situations where it is unwarranted. And then, when things go awry for whatever reason, rather than looking at our own behaviours, we can fall back on the "someone else's fault" position and feign victimhood. We want it both ways, where we have the benefits, but we will not face any risks.
Risk is a funny thing, because we feel it as a physical reaction, even when there is no immediate threat to our body. The loss of money for instance, however small triggers a bodily reaction, and a larger loss can cause extreme reactions, *even if there is still no actual threat to the person, now or in the future. It might be a bit different if that loss was for the next meal, but if it is just on paper, what should it matter?
To me at least, a a lot of the intimidation and fear people feel today is in their head alone, but it is causing the same physical reactions as if we are standing on a precipice, with a sheer drop onto jagged stones. Our evaluation of what is important, what is dangerous, and what is frightening has been warped by all kinds of external influences that have skewed our perceptions to create imaginary triggers.
We all experience fear, so perhaps we should validate the cause.
Taraz
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