Author Archives: Jaya Saxena

How To Take Criticism

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thecriticI’m going to break it to you now and tell you that you aren’t perfect. I know, it’s hard to hear, but it’s okay because no one expects you to be. People know you’re trying your best, and will mess up sometimes. But the best way to remind them that you indeed are trying your best is to learn to take criticism well.

Taking criticism overall means listening to what the other person has to say and seriously considering it before deciding whether you agree or not. You don’t have to agree completely, but consider the source. Is the person criticizing your work someone who knows the field? Is your friend criticizing you someone whose opinion you generally trust? Is it just another human who seems to care about the issue at hand, and should be treated with respect?

There are two main reactions to being criticized: getting defensive, and getting mopey. Both are terrible and you should do your best to avoid them, but both are understandable. Who hasn’t gotten defensive at being criticized? Your thoughts and actions are precious and special, and also probably reasonable! You want to protect them! Perhaps you start down the road of justification, explaining why you said what you said or did what you did, in hopes that the other person just didn’t understand what you were going for. Perhaps you accuse them of being ignorant, or illogical, or just mean. Yes, there are people who just like to be mean, or are seriously ignorant about things, but mainly if someone is taking the time to give you some constructive criticism it’s because they care. Listen, and really try to see if their criticism is meanspirited or if you’re just hurt that you’re getting called out.

The other reaction, which sometimes comes after getting defensive, is getting sad and mopey or mean to the point where the person criticizing you now feels that it’s their job to comfort you and tell you it’s not your fault. This may not be intentional, but in a way it’s a worse move than getting defensive, because now the blame is on the person who criticized you and hurt your feelings, instead of you for most likely doing something wrong in the first place. Symptoms of mopey-ness include: self pity, needless guilt, and endless apologizing.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t feel guilty and apologize, but that you don’t want those emotions to turn into the focus of the conversation. And the thing is, few people actually want you to feel bad about yourself when giving constructive criticism. They just want you to stop doing the one thing you were doing.

So what should you do? Well, if you see how you were wrong, you should apologize and vow to not make the same mistake moving forward. And then you should…not make the same mistake moving forward. It’s that easy! You don’t have to say anything else! Actually, you probably shouldn’t say anything else. Maybe you can ask how you can remedy the situation immediately, if you happened to offend someone, but otherwise just make the required changes and get on with your life.

Every once in a while you may receive criticism you honestly don’t agree with, even after considering the source and doing deep soul-searching about your own biases and opinions and such. Then, and only then, do you not have to apologize. You probably shouldn’t even respond, and if you do, it can be along the lines of “thank you for your input.”

 

Rude Things You Will Do While Planning A Wedding

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We talk a lot about weddings here, because for many adults it’s the first time the World of Etiquette descends on them in such a massive way. I’m having a wedding tomorrow. I’m sure it will be lovely, and I used much of Victoria’s and my own advice in planning it in as polite a way as possible.

But I have a secret for you–even if you’re the editor of a minor etiquette blog, you will fuck up. You will do some tactless things and commit some faux pases. Some will be out of thoughtlessness, and some will come after you’ve thought everything through and said “fuck it,” and you will not know if it goes unnoticed but you also will not care. Here are a few things we did:

  • Got overexcited and emailed a bunch of friends for their addresses with the hint that it was for invitations, before we were solid on how many people we could invite, and then didn’t invite some people on that list.
  • Threw an impromptu “engagement party” by inviting a bunch of local friends to a bar, including people who were ultimately not invited to the wedding. (I justify it in that it was clearly not an Official Wedding Event.)
  • Had an engagement party thrown for us (by my grandmother) which included guests not invited to the wedding. (This was an Official Wedding Event, but we did not have control over it.)
  • Asked people to turn of their phones/not take pictures during the ceremony (which some people think is rude but Victoria assures me is not.)
  • Invited people and not their spouses or long-term partners.
  • Invited some people within one “tier” of relation and not others.
  • Had a B-list.
  • Not had seating charts, which is apparently Not Done if you have over 50 guests. The justification is that we went to a wedding of 120 with no seats and everyone figured it out just fine.
  • Not realized we had to actually tell people our plans about day-after breakfast or afterparties or anything.
  • Ignored emails with helpful “suggestions” from family members.

More than the actual rude actions though, there have been rude feelings, which I hope you know are okay to have. It’s okay to wish that you could spend the day drinking and partying and not having to say hi to every person. It’s okay to realize that after a year of planning, if you had to do it over, you might not have a wedding in the first place, but accept that that would be impossible feel that way without having planned it already. It’s okay to not have a vegan cake option (sorry, Steve). Make every effort to ensure people have a nice time, but remember that you can’t please everyone. Just don’t apologize for not having wedding favors.

How To Be A Respectful Traveler

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Don’t steal important monuments

We’ve already covered some points of hotel and hostel etiquette, but where you sleep is just one aspect of how you travel. If you’re one of those people who books a package tour, gets carted around in a bus and never interacts with anyone actually from the country you’re visiting, fine, keep doing what you do because you probably aren’t self-conscious about how you come off anyway. But for the rest of us, travel is an opportunity to meet new people, see new things, and understand new cultures.

The basic idea is that you need to adapt yourself to the local culture, not the other way around. Do this by researching the area. What are the tipping customs? Do you have dietary restrictions or other medical needs you need to be on top of? Can you learn some basic words in the local language? You don’t have to know everything, but you really have no excuse to not even attempt “hello” and “thank you.” Most people just appreciate the effort, and will do their best to help you out if they know you’re trying.

Also, do you need to dress differently? That last one definitely (unfortunately) applies to women. I’m going on my honeymoon to Sri Lanka and have been stocking up on light but covering clothing, since tank tops and shorts don’t really fly there. I could be all pissed about the pervasive idea that women’s bodies are inherently sexual and thus crude, and the double standard when compared to men, but I’d rather just buy some linen pants and hang out in Buddhist ruins. I’m not ready to start any revolutions yet.

Aside from knowing the rules and languages of where you’re traveling, and in general just being polite and considerate, there are also some larger political things to consider. For instance, there’s the issue of “voluntourism” and how helpful a group of well-meaning but poorly-trained westerners attempting to build houses in a remote Costa Rican village actually is. Much has been said of this, but this essay sums up the core issue well:

Our mission while at the orphanage [in Tanzania] was to build a library. Turns out that we, a group of highly educated private boarding school students were so bad at the most basic construction work that each night the men had to take down the structurally unsound bricks we had laid and rebuild the structure so that, when we woke up in the morning, we would be unaware of our failure. It is likely that this was a daily ritual. Us mixing cement and laying bricks for 6+ hours, them undoing our work after the sun set, re-laying the bricks, and then acting as if nothing had happened so that the cycle could continue.

This really does have to do with etiquette, because when you travel, you are a guest in another country. You are welcome to explore and learn and do what you want, but like any good guest, you should be leaving the place as you found it, perhaps even better than you found it. And being rude or ignoring local customs or making people rebuild your well-intentioned charity project is not leaving it as you found it.

 

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Thank Goodness We Don’t Have To Be Constantly Worried About Walking

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These pigs seem to have it figured out

These pigs seem to have it figured out

There are few places in life where you really need to worry about how you come off, and one of those instances is plain ol’ walking around. As long as you don’t bump into people or disrupt sidewalk traffic, who could possibly judge you? People who wrote etiquette books in 1893, that’s who.

In Etiquette of Good Society, Lady Gertrude Elizabeth Campbell has a whole section dedicated to walking, writing that “servants can be distinguished by the short abrupt steps they take, so doubtless a true lady can be discovered by her manner of walking.” This does not bode well for me. She goes on to quote a Frenchman who wrote about walking in the 13th century:

“Do not trot or run, and as you walk look straight before you with eyelid slow and fixed, looking forward to the ground at five toises (thirty feet) before you not looking at or turning your eyes to man or woman who may be to your right or left, nor looking upwards, nor changing your look from one place to another, nor laughing, nor stopping to speak to anybody.”

Lady Campbell expands on that notion, saying for women “let her step be firm and her gait steady, let her not walk in too great a hurry, nor yet drag slowly along. Let her arms move with the natural motion of the body, they must neither swing to and fro nor dangle by the side.” You know, just act natural. You know how easy that is once you start thinking about it? Right. Moving on.

“A man’s walk should differ from a woman’s,” explains Lady Campbell, “in that he should take a longer step, but steadiness of carriage and firmness of tread are as necessary in the one as in the other. Horace Walpole is described as always entering a room with knees bent and feet on tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor, but we are told that this affected style was quite a la mode in his day.” Men: bring back the Horace Walpole.

If worrying about the way your body looked while you walked wasn’t enough, you also had to worry about what to do when you encountered other walking people. Here are a few tips from American Etiquette and Rules of Politeness by Walter Raleigh Houghton:

  • “Do not try to ‘show yourself off’ upon the streets. The true secret of street deportment is to do so as nearly as other people do.” [STREET DEPORTMENT???]
  • “No one, while walking in the streets, should fail, either through carelessness or willful neglect, to recognize acquaintances.”
  • “Persons walking together on the street should keep step.” [Still accurate]
  • “A gentleman walking with a lady may take either side of the walk, but he will always give her the preferred side or that on which she will be least exposed to crowding, usually the side toward the wall.”
  • “Look in the way you are going both to avoid collisions and because it is bad manners to stare in any other direction. If you chance to see an acquaintance at a window you should bow but by all means do not stare into houses. Avoid looking full into the faces of strangers whom you meet especially of ladies.” [Did this really need to be said?]
  • “No gentleman is ever guilty of standing in public places and offensively gazing at ladies as they pass.”

So go walk freely and un-self-consciously!

Should We Even Bother With Social Media Etiquette?

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What Would Tom Do?

What Would Tom Do?

I keep thinking that there needs to be a guide to social media etiquette, because there are some people that are just insufferable, but I can hear the backlash now: “If someone’s annoying just stop following them!” “You can block people you know.” “I found a complicated way to mute everything someone says but still make it look like you’re listening.” Yes, we all know that social media is pretty optional and if you don’t like looking at a hundred photos of your elementary school best friend’s new baby you can just unfriend her. But social media has also wedged its way into our lives to a point that I felt actively left out of my chosen career by not being on Twitter. Since many of us feel strong societal pulls to engage in social media, let’s see if there are ways to make it a slightly nicer place.

  • Try not to post all the time– Of course one of the main reasons everyone is on Facebook or Twitter is so we can share articles, photos, and thoughts with each other, but you never want to clog someone else’s feed. This happens on Twitter a lot, especially when someone not only posts a lot, but retweets every single response they get.
  • Don’t get into arguments on Twitter – This sort of goes for Facebook, but at least there you don’t have character limits, and can let your arguments be as wordy and thought out as you want. I have never seen an argument on Twitter turn out well for either party, no matter how intelligent the argument, because there is just no way to achieve any nuance in 140 characters. You’re going to come off sounding like you don’t know what you’re talking about, even if you do, so just avoid it. No one ever thinks “wow, he’s super smart, but I wish he would argue more on Twitter.”
  • Don’t be a mommyjacker– This doesn’t just go for moms! We all know that person who turns every post into something about their baby, but people do this for all sorts of topics and it’s frustrating as hell. Try not to comment on photos or statuses with something completely unrelated to the topic, or to make it all about you.
  • Ask permission before tagging photos of people/quoting people– I know you desperately want to post that photo of you and your little brother in the bathtub together for Throwback Thursday, but not everybody wants everything they do online. I’ve been really frustrated when people post something on Twitter that I’ve said to them in private, or posted tons of unflattering photos from a drunken night out. And yes, you can always untag yourself, but the photo is still there. So maybe send your friend a quick text asking them if it’s okay, or don’t get mad if you post something and they ask you to remove it. This goes double for posting photos of babies and children, since they can’t really tell you they don’t want their photo broadcast to the world.
  • Don’t be on your phone/computer/tablet all the time– This expands a bit to general social etiquette, but the number of times I’ve been out to dinner and something funny happened in the conversation and someone whips out their phone and says “omg I’m tweeting that” is entirely too many. This is not the fault of social media or millenials or anything–my grandfather was the type to constantly make us re-enact candid moments so he could take photographs, instead of just living in the moment. But if you’re with other people, try to stay engaged with them, instead of turning to your phone or tablet or camera.

What happens on social media that frustrates you? Tell us!