“Get over yourself.”

I recently sat in on a training based on Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Advantage.

The first couple of slides were on “assume positive intent” and openness to building relationships.

And honestly, my lived experience makes me wary of both of these things.

A colleague with blindness recently shared an article on how assuming positive intent actually undermines people who face bias in the workplace.

For example, I am pretty consistently mansplained to. Even men who I consider friends or equals offer advice that is or verges on insulting.

I know that their intent is positive: they want to help and inform me, but it ignores or overlooks my own experience and knowledge. It assumes that I don’t know, that I couldn’t possibly know.

This looks like everything from four of my male college friends telling me that women pee out of their vaginas, or more recently, a fellow vanpool member telling me how to drive (“be careful, people go down that hill [that you turn onto every day] really fast.” “turn your lights on in the tunnel.”)

Or they try to answer questions I didn’t ask, assuming I can’t see the big picture.

I was tasked with producing a podcast at work last year. Not knowing where to start, I brought a bunch of ideas to my team to help me narrow them down. One man, a director of strategy, would not acknowledge my very specific question, asking only, “how are you going to measure the results?”

Buddy, the result is that your boss wants a podcast. (But yes I have and will continue to think about this. OBVIOUSLY.)

And I’ve talked AT LENGTH about the manipulative, creepy vibes dude at work who wanted to feel better about himself by taking on me, a 34-year-old woman from Silicon Valley with an established communications career and a Masters of… Communication, as a Women in Tech project. (But only if I proved I really needed him.)

These things don’t happen every day, but it happens enough to notice and feel the effects.

An extreme example of this is a study-abroad classmate who had a mental breakdown. He started messaging me on Facebook with these really out there conspiracy theories (“Obama has a machine that he uses to control the weather.” “Obama wants a race war.” “I am in communication with the governments of 22 nations.” “the authorities want to keep me from my girlfriend.”) but the tone of it all was teacher (him) and pupil (me).

At first I thought it was amusing, and then I got a little scared. He saw me as some sort of secret confidant to pass his wisdom along to. Since he clearly thought he and I had a relationship that we didn’t have, and he wasn’t firing on all cylinders, who was to say that he wasn’t going to show up on my doorstep to have an in-person session?

Personal safety concerns aside, he talked about politicians a lot. He disliked Maria Cantwell in particular. A smart mutual acquaintance told me that this aspect of his paranoia was possibly true, the authorities could have been tracking him, but I sorta wanted to keep an eye on the situation. If he was confiding things in me, I could at least let someone know if there was a problem. It seems arrogant to put myself in this position now, but aside from reporting him to the police or FBI and (worst case) risk getting a mentally ill man shot, I didn’t really know what to do.

Eventually, I hid his messages, and checked them less and less frequently.

This went on for a year. An. entire. year. of daily messaging with no response from me.

Eventually I found his brother, messaged him, and ended up just blocking the friend altogether, knowing he was being monitored by family.

Was this the best course of action? I don’t know, but that’s not the point.

The point is that this weird thing randomly happened with a friend that put him (in his mind at least) in a position of higher power than me. If it happened once, who’s to say it couldn’t happen again? I locked down my Facebook privacy as a result.

Okay. So that’s intent. And intent also relates to the “openness to building relationships” aspect of the training.

And here’s the thing: I am approachable. I’m slim but am of average (or maybe less than) attractiveness. I hate awkward silence, and while shy and very introverted, like to engage in friendly conversation.

This friendliness gets misinterpreted by shy, introverted dudes as interest.

And what’s more: she’s kinda ugly so she’s actually attainable! Huzzah!

Now, “shy and introverted” applies to a lot of dudes in the vegan community. I would go to a vegan event, meet a boy, who would then friend me on Facebook, and either start commenting on my posts or messaging me. Eventually there would be a suggestion to grab dinner or something.

This happened once, and then twice, and then three times, and then a fourth.

I kinda stopped going to vegan events because of this. There’s nothing wrong with meeting someone and wanting to date them, but when there’s a predictable pattern, you learn to avoid it.

You know who else is shy and introverted? Tech Dudes!

Again, the manipulative, creepy vibes dude at work started as a randomly selected interviewee for persona building, and then quickly went to asking me to lunch every week and hitting me up on Slack after I thought he would be good to have as a professional connection.

Or the very nice dude who I met in a work-sponsored First Aid class, and sorta used that class as a foot in the door. He’s super nice… but isn’t in my group, isn’t in my field, and just wanted to talk about personal stuff. (Which is fine, I love that shit, but only when I know someone’s end game.)

I’m sure there are other examples of all of these things, but these are the ones that have stuck with me.

And I’m lucky: 1 out of 5 American women as been sexually assaulted. I’m (knock on wood) very fortunate that this hasn’t happened to me.

I’m hella privileged too: as a cis white woman, I know I’m spared a lot of the misery of my trans, POC, and other marginalized/combination of marginalized sisters.

So, I brought this up in the training: how do you factor unconscious social biases into blanket advice for professional situations? How can I assume positive intent when the impact often hurts me so much? How can I just be open to grabbing coffee with someone when I’ve had this turn so badly?

A pretty influential VP was in the room, and his response was essentially, “why can’t you just take the criticism? Aren’t you open to feedback? If someone wants to help, they just want to help!”

The look on his face was, “where do you get off thinking you’re hot stuff that everyone wants to bone?”

Aaaaaaand another dude chimed in with how to better accept feedback and appreciate it, before my new best dude work friend told them that it was actually all of their jobs as men to be better.

The session moved on, until we got to the actual feedback part. The facilitator (a man) said, “And Helen brought up accepting feedback earlier.”

THAT IS NOT WHAT I SAID, I said.

Again, my new best dude work friend (the bar for white men is so low but this dude is actually that cool) stepped in to say “Helen was talking about the advice form of catcalling,” which is my new favorite term for unwanted, unsolicited, unneeded, actually offensive advice.

ANYHOW, I guess one point of this is that everyone in leadership needs bias training.

And tools like Facebook and Slack make it easier to communicate but also reeeeally easy to slide into someone’s life. Don’t.

And OMG REAL ALLIES ARE SO IMPORTANT.

And that it shouldn’t matter if someone had one exceptionally awful experience or a million: one is enough.

I liken it to ANOTHER EXPERIENCE OF DUDES BEING TERRIBLE a while back in Peru with three lady friends. A little tipsy off of beach beers, we decided to walk through a relatively abandoned part of the town to get to the main square. There was no one around, so I had my DSLR around my neck (stupid).

Two men walked past us, said hi (in Spanish)… and a minute later returned to rob us. I felt a tug as one of them tried to yank my camera from my neck.

Being tipsy and not so smart (did not check for a knife), I grabbed on to the camera (my vacation memories!!) while my two Peruvian friends yelled for help. My American friend tried to fight one but was too tipsy to make contact and swung around. We still laugh about it.

The struggle stopped and they ran away with my friend’s Blackberry, before throwing it back at us as our brave American friend chased after them. After spending the afternoon in a tiny police station, we got an armed escort back to our house.

I got a small knick on my hand out of it, but was otherwise physically unharmed.

However, to this day, if I’m walking down an empty street and a man passes me, I get pretty agitated. I carry pepper spray and have an intimidating dog, but you just never know what split-second decision a stranger is going to make.

It makes sense that one altercation with a stranger (does it count as mugging if they didn’t take anything?) would modify your perception, right?

Then why is it that I have to prove that no, I don’t think I’m hot shit (the opposite, actually: just plain old approachable shit.) and yes, this actually happens frequently and impactfully enough to warrant caution but one single time should be enough?

Believe what people tell you. Don’t let your biases get in the way of someone else’s lived experience. If you think someone is talking about gender, disability, racism, etc in the workplace too much, maybe this actually means something. The issue might be with you.