Context Switching in Human Relations....

It's been an interesting dynamic changing from my old team at my work place to the new one. There are some marked differences between the two teams, some good and some bad on each side.

What I'm more interested in, however, is not the team dynamic but the dynamic of how I fit into both. I've never been one to sit back and quietly watch if I feel something is going drastically in the wrong direction, but I do try to offer either constructive criticism or find out what I'm missing that makes things seem like they're headed towards a cliff.

The challenge in doing either of those, for me it seems, has been in curbing my naturally aggressive communication style. The good news, in this aspect though, is that this is *not* a communication style I want, nor is it something I'm content to just leave be and hope it sorts itself out. Some problems that I'm having in rectifying this though is recognizing the effect certain speech patterns I use have on others and trying to break those habits, as well as taking a breath, pausing, and re-thinking ways to say certain things when in the middle of a disagreement.

One thing I do think I have going in my favour for this self improvement, however, is that even if I'm not able to read people completely, I do at least notice facial expression changes, body language changes and changes in stance. Unfortunately these changes are usually post-point when they would have been useful, however they indicate something which either worked well or poorly in my conversation and can be filed away for reference at a future point in time.

All in all though, I feel as though I've been making progress in this area. Perhaps not as much as I would like, but at least a small baby step. The things I'm really working on doing for 2009 in this area, though, are:

1) Toning down sarcasm;
2) Think, then speak;
3) Help others avoid my mistakes.

There are a lot of talented people on the new team I'm on. The one concern I have is that a lot of them have the same style of communication I've been told time and again is hampering me / giving a negative impression to certain people. If nothing else comes of 2009, I'm hoping that I'll in some way be able to help the other members of my team be able to avoid creating the perceptions of themselves that I've created for myself. Time will tell though.