10 things to do if you are not understood at work

10 things to do when you are not understood at work.

Da-Silva Johnson,

Lead Director and Consultant, HEI, Nigeria.

Many people wants to work and more people wants to be comfortable and happy doing their job. It can be stressful and frustrating when you are in a place of work that most of your intentions and actions are misinterpreted or misunderstood. You need to know how to manage yourself in any work environment. When you are misunderstood at work, do not get frustrated or get pissed up. It is actually the best time to behave yourself. These are things you can do at such a critical time or day.

1.  Calm down. Do not get pissed-off. Do not get irritated or angry. Calm down and be coordinated before other steps.
2. Do a Self-Assessment. Secondly, you need to take an honest look at how you communicate your intentions. Communications of intentions is what is basically called actions. Check it. Assess yourself. How do you conduct your affairs and how do you do your work in general.
3. Ditch Your Assumptions and Ask questions. You need to take an honest step of meeting the concern people for polite interrogation. Find out what you might be doing wrong and dismiss assumption. You might even be shocked that you might be understood but due to the expressions you are noticing, you might conclude lack of understanding.
4. Do overview check of character. Normally, people do not like bad mannered person and once you are taken to an ill behaved person, nothing good you do would easily be embraced. Are you lazy. Are you rude? Are you a forward person? check the general conduct of the work environment too. What is the prevailing organizational culture? it might be what is affecting you and every other persons.
5. Define Your Expectations. What really do you want? How do you want to be treated or understood? Who really do you expect to understand you and to what extend? It maybe difficult to get everyone understand you.

6. You should Listen. You might need to be attentive to possible explanations you might be given during interrogations. You might also need to listen to other verbal expressions around your work place so you can pick the valuable ones in the information.

7. Establish a System of Feedback. You need to ensure that you get the reactions of other staff around you. Their views would help you understand the real situations and reasons why you are not understood.

8. Be Human and Real. You have to be real in your thoughts and reasoning. You also must know that not everything of you or from you must be accepted. You must know that people have feelings and reasoning ability while view would always differ.

9. Accept Situations. Yes. You might not be understood and you might be but whatever is the situation, you must embrace yourself and the situation. Do not reject yourself even when others reject you. If you do not embrace yourself, unhappiness, regret and depression would set in and this would soon affect your effectiveness and productivity at work and in your private life.

10. Re-strategize. If the methods you have been using have not been productive, it is expected that you change methods. You may need to move from verbal to written, from ‘A’ to ‘B’ and you might simply continue good works without expecting any approval or commendation while your good doing can silence any other rejection, antagonism and rejection.

You must understand yourself and bother less on who do not understand you. You are not for everyone. Do your things as long as you are doing the right thing. With time, you would be embraced.