Teflon
‘How to develop a thick skin at work without being obnoxious.’ (Experteer)
The article title made me smile. We often think of people with thick skin as tough, resilient and, at times, insensitive to others. It’s as if thick-skinned people are able to handle high levels of relational tension or conflict without feeling hurt or bruised. A similar personal-relational metaphor we sometimes hear is Teflon. If you are unfamiliar with it, Teflon is a material with ‘an extremely low coefficient of friction’ (Urban Dictionary). If something is coated with Teflon, stuff doesn’t stick to it. Tensions and conflict simply slide off, leaving a Teflon person unaffected by relational stress.
Whilst thick-skinned or Teflon people may be insensitive to criticism or insults, other people may be overly-sensitive, feeling hurt by relational tension or allowing conflict to penetrate into their soul. A pastoral friend, Nikki Eastwood, uses a blotting paper metaphor to characterise this. If you are unfamiliar with it, blotting paper is an absorbent material, used to soak up excess ink when writing with a traditional ink pen. If we allow ourselves to absorb all the hurt, pain, frustrations etc. of other people, including that projected onto us, we can become debilitated, stressed and exhausted.
I worked for most of my life in human rights work and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Faced, at times, with unspeakable suffering of others, I became very run down. Eventually, I spoke with an insightful therapist, Shona Adams, who challenged my risk of over-empathising. In my desire to feel and communicate genuine contact with others, I learned that sometimes I stepped so far into others’ shoes that I stepped out of my own. It was as if I was experiencing others’ traumas vicariously, yet without the resilience that people in such situations often develop or discover.
So, what can we do to build healthy, constructive relationships that are neither too Teflon to the point of insensitive arrogance on the one hand or too over-empathetic to the point of unhealthy confluence on the other? How can we develop emotional intelligence and resilience? Firstly, listen actively for expressed and unexpressed feelings of others. If you’re unaware or unsure, be curious and inquire. Secondly, establish and maintain a clear psychological boundary and relationship between your experiences and those of others. It may be about you but it’s not only about you.
If you would like help with creating and sustaining healthy, inspiring and effective relationships at work, get in touch! info@nick-wright.com
Career Advisor at Achiever Network
5yHi Nick. Good Day! It's really a good fortune for me of reading your article, well written about "Teflon" Thanks for this post. Thanks Halen
Helping complicated people simplify mental health, relationships, and careers.
5yNick, I see resilience as another innate resource (along with laughter, creativity, spontaneity, playfulness, confidence, curiosity, the capacity to learn and grow, and many others). Watching babies discover how to walk illustrates this. They repeatedly fall down but never beat themselves up, start calling themselves losers, or decide to quit trying. That's because they are already resilient. As adults we still have unconditional access to all of these resources. Sometimes we see this and sometimes we don't. Just as we may get a joke right away or it could take a moment, in either case, we also have the ability to laugh on purpose, which our bodies treat as real. So in my work, I use intentional laughter as a learning vehicle helping people to enjoy discovering their other innate resources. One more such example is auto correction. Like the delayed reaction to a joke, it requires no effort or doing. Once we insightfully see we're not feeling the past, the future, or even present circumstances, and instead realize we only ever feel our thinking in real time, then our minds automatically restore a default sense of peace, calm and clarity. This is important for clients to understand in their bodies, not just their minds. To facilitate that, we as coaches must know it this way too. When we do, we see it is not possible to "take on" what others feel. We are thinking about others and feeling that thinking. The stickiness you wrote about reflects how long we stay tricked by our minds blaming the feelings elsewhere, or how quickly our embodied understanding reminds us we've just innocently and temporarily misunderstood where our feelings are coming from. #InsideOutUnderstanding #SubtractivePsychology
Thanks Nick. It seems to me that maintaining the balance between teflon and blotting paper is a key part of our humanity. We all need both empathy and a certain amount of resilience in order to function in a dynamic world. I wonder if we all have a tendency for one or the other and part of a journey of awareness is about getting the sweet spot! Thanks for a great article as ever.
Registered Clinical Counsellor
5yWhat do you think of using the metaphor of a colander or a sieve: oftentimes there is/are important nuggets of info even in nasty comments... Like even the thickest sin has pores, it could prove useful to let some material pass through while briefly holding on to some of the other stuff to learn a thing or two or use it to help shift perspective...