Taking Offense vs. Disagreeing: Understanding the Key Differences & How They Impact Your Leadership

Episode 78: Taking Offense vs. Disagreeing: Understanding the Key Differences and How They Impact Your Leadership

In this episode, Holly Hibbard - Executive Leadership Coach & Corporate Relationship Consultant - shares with you...

• how emotional intelligence (EQ) plays a vital role in navigating disagreements and managing personal reactions effectively, leading to healthier communication patterns in both personal and professional settings. (Understanding Emotional Intelligence)

• the impact of social media interactions on your mindset and leadership, and learn strategies for maintaining constructive dialogue while minimizing misunderstandings and offense. (Navigating Social Media Dynamics)

• the secrets to clear and factual communication that fosters empathy and compassion, ensuring your conversations are productive and free from misinterpretations. (Fact-Based Communication Techniques)

If you like what you've read so far, I’d love it if you’d SUBSCRIBE to the show, and TURN ON your notifications so you don’t miss a future episode.

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WORK WITH HOLLY IN FEBRUARY, 2025 //

• Ready to elevate your impact? Hire Holly to be your coach and mentor! Book a quick call with me here: https://tidycal.com/thehollyhibbard/quick

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#Leadership #MindsetMatters #GrowthMindset #SelfLeadership #PersonalGrowth #LeadershipDevelopment #OvercomingFear #GrowthJourney #EmotionalIntelligence #LeadershipSkills #ConfidenceBuilding #MindsetShift

Transcript

Hey, everyone.
Welcome to the Holly Hibbard Show.
My name is Holly.
I am your host, and I want to share with you today something that I was thinking about as I was scrolling or doomscrolling maybe social media today, and that is what is the difference, the distinction between disagreeing with someone and taking offense to something.
I wanna share with you my thoughts on what I've noticed about social media interactions and therefore from a leadership, a mindset, and a growth perspective.
I assume that, again, we take us everywhere we go that these similar dynamics are showing up in our professional spaces and likely in our personal spaces as well, both in the interweb social media, atmosphere, but also in our homes and interpersonal life.
So I wanted to break apart some of these distinctions.
Before I begin with that, I wanna give you a quick life update.
If you are a person who listens to the show on YouTube and watches the video, first of all, thank you.
2nd of all, if you're not, please go check it out on YouTube sometime.
And 3rd of all, in in advance, thanks for subscribing to my YouTube channel.
I am actively really trying to grow my channel.
So if you listen to the show on your podcatcher or Spotify, cool.
You do you.
The best thing for you, but I am actively growing, my YouTube channel.
So thank you to all of you who tune in there or at minimum subscribe.
Now, if you're watching it on YouTube today, you're going to notice there is no video with today's episode and there will be video coming up in the next month or so, but I want to be really honest about what's happening in my personal life.
Everything, it's positive.
It's good change.
My family purchased our dream home.
I'm so over the moon excited about this.
I can't even.
I can't even.
And with, however, the the stress and the busyness and the shambles of, packing up our current space and also getting to our new space and getting it sorted out.
My new home office is going to be gorgeous and there's so much better lighting.
And I'm so excited because I'll be able to film this show in so many different places in the house and give a better viewing experience in terms of quality of the video aspect of it.
In the meantime, however, I want to I'm recording this at the end of January 2025.
I need about a month.
I cannot, at this time, commit to doing the video component of the show because I'm I'm I'm committed to doing the show regularly and I'm finding that, in order for me to do that in the easiest way possible and continue to give you 2 episodes a week, giving you an audio only version that, yes, you'll be able to listen to on your podcatcher apps and also listen to just the audio over on YouTube as well.
It's going to fit easier into my schedule with everything I have going on.
And also I won't have to worry about my aesthetic all the time.
Right?
Like right now I am in full mom garb because I I have my coaching career and then my consulting career, and I'm also a stay at home mom.
And I am going to the hardware store in a minute to buy 5 gallons of paint.
So I'm just sneaking this in while I'm inspired.
And so thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you in advance for tuning in on YouTube, subscribing on YouTube, and my video component of the show will come back.
So you have a still image for now, and thank you for being patient with me.
Because like I said, I have so many messages and ideas I want to do episodes about.
That is an endless fountain of content that I can provide to all of you to support you in your leadership growth, your professional life, your personal life, your mindset.
And I don't want my, my self limiting beliefs or my worries about what my aesthetic looks like in the middle of this chaos in both houses.
I don't want that to stop me from keeping the ball rolling.
Alright?
So this particular week, I'm putting one episode out of the show.
I'll be back to 2 episodes a week next week.
And like I said, won't be have the video aspect for a minute.
Okay.
But that's the life update.
So now that that is out of the way, let's talk about the topic that I already mentioned.
I have just been, oh my gosh, I don't want to call it doomscrolling because I genuinely enjoy scrolling social media and reading what people are up to and I'll be honest in that when I do that, my social media feed is very curated, meaning I'm very particular about who I follow.
I have lots of social media friends, however, and that doesn't mean that I follow everybody because I wanna make sure that my experience when I'm scrolling social media is one where not that everything is the same opinion as me, because that would be boring and that's not the world that I want to live in, but things that I find are intellectually stimulating are interesting, that people are having conversations and not just creating drama.
If I wanna sit and watch drama for hours, I will watch The Real Housewives or I will scroll on TikToks for the time being that it is back.
So I was scrolling namely on Facebook, and this morning I was noticing there is so much dialogue about politics.
No surprise there because, January 20th, Anoggation Day, was just a couple days ago, and I don't want to go into politics on my show.
However, I do wanna say that the the context, the vibe, the feeling of the interactions amongst people online and in person when it comes to topics such as politics, but also religion, and gender, and sexual orientation, and all the things that in our personal life might get spoken about openly, but in our professional life, we leave those things off the table because we don't feel like being called down to HR, or we just don't care to speak about those things with people.
So my point is, these things are being talked about.
So could they be spoken about in your professional setting?
Yes.
They're definitely all over social and people in their professional life oftentimes have their social media nearby or on a lunch break or whatever it is.
So I'm noticing in the dialogue where people are discussing political things, there is a lot of offense being taken, a lot of people that are expressing that their feelings are hurt or they feel that other people don't respect their opinion or don't honor their life choice or, some folks feel like their life experience is invalid.
So there's various ways that people will quote take offense.
And then I'm noticing and some people are very forthcoming with that, where they'll say, I'm really hurt by this.
I don't feel represented in this.
I, there's a myriad of, of ways that this comes out.
There's also a dialogue where people are saying that I disagree with this.
I don't feel the same way as this.
My point of view, my POV is just not the same as this person or this politician.
And some people then say, well, if you disagree, I'm sorry your feelings are hurt.
And I'm giving a muddy example of the 2 because it's a muddy situation and it's a muddy dialogue.
And I just, I had this thought where I recognized that if we look at taking offense to something as a distinction, distinct from agreeing or disagreeing with someone.
I recognized when I was scrolling social this morning, wow, we have collapsed those two words.
We have no longer made in the social media space namely, and again, social media likely permeates into our professional life and our personal life, we no longer are separating a difference of opinion from taking offense to something.
And this comes back to an individual's emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence, not their intellect, not how smart they are, not their IQ.
Their emotional intelligence is their EQ.
It's their ability to notice, to have the mindfulness, the ability to pause, and instead of react, instead to respond and say, okay.
I recognize that in this moment, this person here has said something that I am offended by.
So in that moment, if I am the person offended, as an example, I could write back, I'm offended by this, I am hurt by this, and that would be an honest description of my human experience in this example.
But that takes a very self aware person to put it that way, to put the ownership of the emotion on me, if I am the one experiencing it.
So if I reply and say, I'm offended by this, I'm hurt by this, I don't feel seen.
I don't feel in this in my experience right now, I feel as if people don't care.
Again, there's so many ways that a person could respond to a post or a dialogue or a conversation on social media or elsewhere.
And they're simply stating their life, their human experience.
They're simply stating their feelings and every person is entitled to their feelings.
And their feelings, however, and this is where emotional intelligence comes in, their feelings are theirs.
So in the same example, if I am saying I am hurt, I am offended, I don't feel seen, I don't feel heard, I don't feel understood, those feelings are mine.
And as part of ownership of my feelings is also the willingness to recognize that the person who is hurting me, in my eyes, the person who is offending me, in my opinion, it's not their responsibility to change how I feel.
It is my responsibility to change how I feel.
That is the difference between owning your feelings and blaming how you feel on someone else.
Again, we're all entitled to our own emotional experience, including moments where we feel like we've been offended.
We're all entitled to have that emotional experience.
And in the US freedom of speech, we have the ability to say, this is how I feel.
However, it is not the person who offended you.
It is not their responsibility to make you feel less offended.
In a utopian society, that would be fantastic, but that is not the world that we live in.
It is also as part of ownership of your feeling, in this example of being offended by something you've read or something you've heard or something that somebody said to you, it is not your responsibility to convince the person who hurt you that they need to do things differently.
Now that person, if you're lucky in a professional setting, in a personal setting, in a social media setting, that person may be the kind of person who will hear from you that you are offended or hurt or don't feel seen or don't feel heard.
That person might be the kind of person who wants to grow their emotional intelligence and they may say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Listen, I want to understand.
I want you to feel like you're seen.
I apologize if what I said came off as offensive and I want to correct it or improve it in some way because maybe their delivery of what they had to say in writing or verbally, maybe it's terrible.
Because you can be offended by what someone says, but that doesn't mean that their intention was to hurt you.
People are terrible communicators.
Again, communication is part of emotional intelligence.
People are not taught how to communicate.
They're told to be better communicators, but they're not taught how to.
And this is a step in if you are committed to being a better communicator, then it is imperative.
It is important for you to say to a person who's just shared with you that something you shared has hurt them or offended them.
It's important for you to say to them, I am willing to improve.
Teach me.
Give me an example.
Tell me how I could have phrased it better, or tell me if I should have not broached that topic with you.
But in terms of being offended, if you are hurt and you you get to own your human experience, you get to respond in a way where you can share your human experience.
But again, it is not the other party's responsibility to make you feel a different thing.
If they're willing to and they say that they are willing to, we're not gonna assume they're willing to.
But if they say they are willing to improve their communication, they are willing to grow their level of empathy, they want to be a more understanding person, then absolutely have that dialogue with them.
But they don't owe that to you.
Again, Utopian society, that would be wonderful if everybody was committed to that and not everyone is committed to that and not everyone prioritizes that.
So that means that it's outside of your circle of control if you are taking offense to someone or something or what they write.
So in a professional setting, it may not be something really sensitive, like political or religious, but you might take offense in, let's say, a meeting in your department to the way that somebody speaks.
Maybe their tone is really harsh.
Maybe they don't go into enough detail despite the fact that you have asked them to be more specific countless times.
You could take offense to that and feel unheard, unseen, disrespected.
All of those are ways that you could feel offended in the moment.
And in that moment, if it keeps happening, again, like I just said, you get to own your human experience and recognize, Wow.
Okay.
This is really bothering me.
You can talk about it and say what your human experience is.
You can respond.
If that person is willing to correct it, fantastic.
But in a professional setting, we are looking for effectiveness in a corporate setting or in a business, and we're also looking for efficiency.
So the next question is, do you have the have the conversation with that person again?
Do they owe it to you to hear you out and hear about your human experience?
In our personal life, like I said, no, they don't owe it to you.
But in a professional setting, my advice would be, if what they are saying is offending you okay.
Got it.
We've talked about that.
But if the way they are saying it or what they are doing is offending you and and is taking away from the company's ability to be effective and or efficient, then a conversation must be had.
Not because you're offended, but because the effectiveness and or the efficiency of the organization is being impacted by this communication breakdown, by this disconnect.
So I hope you're starting to see so far here that I'm uncollapsing.
I'm I'm pulling apart for you the difference between you being offended and the other person's role in that conversation.
What are they responsible for in that dialogue with you?
What are you responsible for in that dialogue?
Also, what is in your circle of control?
Because that is really the only thing that you can do anything about is what you have control over.
Your emotional response, your verbal response, your physical response, your mental response.
You have control over that.
That doesn't mean you have a 100% control and you can live your life blissfully every single day.
You're going to have speed bumps.
You're going to have things that bother you, tick you off.
But with time and practice, you can become more aware of those feelings that you have and learn new habits, both in how you emotionally handle things and in how you communicate.
You learn those new habits that are gonna help you to bring back to your personal life and or your professional life effectiveness, efficiency, connection to a to an inappropriate level.
So let's go to the other distinction.
So I already mentioned moments where people are taking offense and what people owe you, what they don't, what you get to own in those conversations.
I really love looking at the world and when there are disagreements, miscommunications, arguments, I love the challenge of asking myself, how can I or how can we neutralize this conversation?
Because when there is an incident, when there is a disagreement, that's the other component of this episode is we talked about defense like being offended, but now let's talk about disagreeing.
When someone is disagreeing with you, we get to make this as black and white as possible.
Is it based on facts?
First of all, if they are disagreeing with you, are you responding or reacting to them because you are offended?
Or are you responding or reacting because you disagree with what they have to say?
If you notice that your reaction is probably more emotional than it is black and white, agree, disagree, yes, no, then go back to what I just talked about for the last 10 minutes.
Sort through the emotions, remind yourself what you're responsible for, Notice what you are offended by or bothered by.
Now if that is off to the side, then we can come to agree and disagree.
You and the people that you work with are likely never, likely never, going to agree on 100% of the things 100% of the time.
It is simply not probable.
Possible?
I guess.
But is it probable?
Likely no.
And there to create an emotionally safe, psychologically safe place in your culture, in your company, in your organization.
It is so important that everyone feel that these open dialogues where they can share their input and whether they agree or disagree when needed, it's important that people feel safe enough to share those things without there being a fear of retaliation or someone getting moody or somebody taking offense.
And we can do that, have those dialogues by keeping things as neutral as possible, sticking to facts and not your personal interpretation as much as possible.
This is where when people are communicating in person, things can be taken really the wrong way because folks may communicate with their body language and be completely unaware of it.
And while they may agree with the person that they're in a conversation with, their body language or their facial expressions say something entirely different.
Or there are people who are not conscious of their facial expressions or their body language at all, and they're saying they agree and the person that they're talking to says, well, you don't look like you agree.
You don't sound like you agree.
So how do we neutralize that?
We neutralize it by taking it word for word.
So if they actually say, I agree with you.
That sounds good.
Let's do that.
Follow that.
Let's try to do our best to take away our interpretations of their facial expressions, of their nonverbal communication, really.
Now if there is a disagreement and everybody feels and the culture creates a space where people can verbalize when they see things the same way and when they don't, then the next step here is when there is a disagreement, Oh, that's gonna bug me.
So one way to neutralize these conversations is to recognize for yourself if you are allowing your own interpretation of the person's nonverbal, whatever, to dictate how you are hearing them or how you are recognizing what they have to say.
I just want it completely all through.
Now that's in a verbal conversation, person to person, but let's say the conversation is through a text message or through email or through social media.
It can become actually easier to keep to the facts and keep things black and white when it is in writing.
And especially if you take a moment to go back and reread what you wrote, you also can make sure that what you are laying out for the other person has bullet points to it and only talks about what has actually happened in the past, not what could.
And if you do talk about, well, here is a possibility of how this could turn out, it's important that you let the person know that this is my opinion.
This is my prediction.
This is my concern that this could happen.
By saying just those couple little words before stating your concern, it puts the ownership of that opinion on you, the interpretation of what has happened or what could happen or what did happen back on you.
Instead of saying, this is going to happen in the future.
You don't know that.
You can't predict the future.
But if you say, this is my concern, this is a possible thing that could happen and also addresses that possible thing, probable or not?
Keeping quantity, keeping number in mind when you communicate, looking at the re the keep it again as neutral as possible, as fact based as possible, as much black and white data.
I know I keep saying that as possible helps us when we are communicating.
Yes, professionally, but also personally with touchy subjects, it helps us to ensure that people can take offense to less things.
It also releases any cloudiness on our judgments.
Because if we are say if we are muddying the water with detail that is not necessary, or we are muddying the water of our communication with our own interpretations that we have put through our own filters of our own life and not just sticking to the facts, keeping things black and white, having it be bullet points, having it be as linear as possible, all that muddiness creates more opportunity for people to take offense, misunderstand.
And again, when that stuff happens, we are losing efficiency and we could be losing effectiveness as a result as well.
And I mentioned that this is good for your personal life as well because how often can we get into an argument with our significant other, our spouse, our kids, our parents, and had we just removed the emotional component and only stated the facts.
And you can state a fact as, I feel this way.
For you, that is a fact, and you can be very, clear with them, the person that you're speaking to and say, I feel this way.
That is a fact for me.
That is my personal life experience in this moment.
But then when you're talking about the dialogue, this is what you said to me or this is how you reacted to me.
You were you were all mad at me.
You don't know that?
You don't know that.
You don't know if they were mad at you unless they said the words, I am mad at you.
Right?
Otherwise, it's all your interpretation.
So the more you can take it back to, these are the words that were spoken, actually the words, literally the words that were spoken.
These were the things that were said verbatim and recognize that you're putting your own spin on things, not because you're malicious, but because you're human.
We are all interpretation machines every minute of every day, and we're all going to be interpreting things completely differently.
You might even be listening to this episode right now and thinking, this is not how I see the world at all.
And that's great, because you have a completely different lens than I do.
But you also might hear something that I am saying and go, Wow, I never saw it that way before, and if I start or put a practice in place, that might make our communication better.
That might make our organization more culturally sound.
And when an organization is more culturally sound with a higher emotional intelligence, it boosts creativity, it boosts productivity, it boosts efficiency, it boosts retention, and when you have a great reputation as an organization, it boosts your recruitment as well.
Check, check, check.
So I hope this episode was helpful for you today.
Again, this is all inspired by my scroll on social media.
And I wanted to lay out for you all that it is absolutely okay to disagree with someone, and that doesn't mean that you take offense to it.
And it's also okay to take offense to something, but it's really important to recognize that you feeling offended is something within your wheelhouse of control and your responsibility.
If we're choosing to live as emotionally intelligent people who are self aware and make choices that are going to benefit us and our individual emotional health, mental health, spiritual health, physical health.
And also we get to release that others are not like us.
Every single person is different.
So expecting that someone should respond a certain way to you or should agree, that's not fair and that would make the world really boring, actually.
So how can we neutralize our communication?
How can we practice neutralizing those moments when our emotions start to flare up and we're going to say something that we shouldn't?
But just because you disagree doesn't mean that you need to be offended by something.
And just because somebody is offended by something you said doesn't mean that they disagree with it.
They might agree with it, but maybe their delivery, like I said, is just terrible.
And that happens.
There are people with great intentions who are just awful communicators and it comes out the total wrong way and it hurts people in the process.
I'm not talking about abusive situations.
I'm talking about foot in mouth syndrome, like open mouth, stick foot in it, and there you go.
You've said the wrong thing and oopsie, not maliciously, but simply because communication is not your forte.
And that's okay too.
So all this creates empathy and compassion as well instead of saying, you know, my response is your fault, because it isn't.
I hope this episode was supportive.
I would love to hear from you in the comments, what your takeaway was from the show today.
What do you have more of a challenge with?
Having a disagreement go smoothly or getting through situations and not feeling offended?
I'd love to hear from you in the comments.
Again, thank you for being patient with me as the video situation sorts out over the next month or so.
Once my new office is unpacked and and settled in and I moved, video will be back, in the meantime.
And thank you again for subscribing to my YouTube channel if you haven't yet already.
Thank you for listening to the show, and until next time.
I'll talk to you next time.