We have the education, but not the Etiquette


 

Some of these statistics are blowing my mind.  The majority of people who have their own cell phone are higher educated people, but it appears we have no social decency and etiquette when it comes to handling ourselves in public.  I mean, at what point did we decide we were too important to be present in a conversation or a meeting or WHILE WE ARE DRIVING? 

What’s even crazier is that when we are with someone who pulls out their phone to use it in our presence we often feel offended, but are the first ones to pull out our own phone when we are then in the presence of someone else.  I can’t help but wonder why this is.  Do we believe that we are really that important and that every text, call and email must receive a response right away?  But, we are not able to reciprocate that feeling towards others who use their phone in our company? 

So far I am simply talking about social gatherings, but have you been in a situation where you find yourself in a professional setting and the so called professional pulls out their cell phone?  Not only has this happened to me on more than one occasion I find that I do it as well when I am the professional!  So, I get it.  I can be sitting with a client or a clients family member and they ask me to remind them to do something or they need a person’s phone number (or one of many other things) and in an effort to be efficient, I will pull out my phone and do it then, but all I have really let them know is that I’m afraid I will forget, that I don’t actually think about them or their needs when they are not in my presence, or that I am too busy to wait a moment. 

Here we are.  Educated professionals.  We have taken obvious rude behavior and normalized it to the point that it’s common.  Educated professionals.  Normalizing bad behavior for the mere sake of justifying it.  Who are we and what are we doing? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When a phone was just a phone-

  Dopamine- sometimes known as the “feel-good neurotransmitter”.   We all need it, we crave it, we function at a much more excited level when we have it.   Would it blow your mind to know that we get a surge of dopamine when we check our phones?   It’s a pleasure.   It excites us.   What happens when we’re bored?   We pick up our phone.   When we have lost time throughout the day, it’s usually because we’ve gotten lost in a whirlwind of “stuff” on our phone.   We are a generation of addicts.   Not only are we addicted, we can’t get enough.   It’s the last thing we do at night, the first thing we do in the morning, hell when we wake up in the middle of the night we check our phones.   We have new terminology that is based solely on our phone addictions.   Words like ‘nomophobia’ which is the fear of not having your phone, ‘textaphrenia’ is the fear of not being able to send or receive texts, and ‘phantom vibrations’ which i...
Read more

Lets Disconnect, Together....

About 6 months ago, I got hooked listening to Ted Talks during my morning and afternoon commutes to and from work.  I could listen to all sorts of Ted conversations and it all started with Simon Sinek (thank you Dr. Padgett).  I started out listening to speakers discuss leadership roles and hot=w to find your why or purpose and I ended up in this cycle of stories going on about how connected we are to one another now that we have so much instant access to everyone and everything, but the question that was continually raised was “is this actually causing us more loneliness”? The answer was always different because it can go both ways. At some point we all have to ask ourselves if we are connecting with others for the sake of connection (the number of facebook friends or instagram followers) or are we truly making connections with others.  Teenagers today seem to be lacking a lot of true connecting skills.  It’s more about how many likes or shares or retweets than it i...
Read more

I have a dream, do you?

Is it just that time of year, or am I the only one who feels like they’ve been hit by a bus recently? This weeks topic has had my mind running in a million different directions and I’ve loved it, but I have had zero time to sit down and formulate or organize a single thought.   Leadership and vision.  What a crazy concept that the two must go hand in hand.  I love this. Of course a leader needs vision and any vision needs a leader.  It makes perfect sense. Leadership without a vision is merely management.  How have I not realized this before now? It’s kind of beautiful when we pick up on those blatantly obvious things, isn’t it?  Every great leader has had a vision. Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Ronald Regan, John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela all had a beautiful vision and without that vision would have been great leaders whose name you would have never known.   For example, if Martin Luther King ...
Read more