Say What You Think

- Love / expectations of the other person
- Concern for how something will be received
- Whether it would make someone uncomfortable
- Whether it would... yeah, make them uncomfortable or be hurtful or be rude
- Reshaping things to say the same thing but in a kinder less violent way takes time
- But this is something that I can get faster at with practice

Other reasons for not saying what I want to include:
- Concern about putting things on the permanent record; let's explore that one in more depth
- Concern about creating additional comms overhead (having to deal with replies, requests, disagreements, etc)
    - Even if ignoring and not responding to these, they still come with significant mental overhead.
- Concerns about confidentiality also stifle my saying what I think in a couple ways:
    - One is confidentiality for my employer
    - If something is a secret then I don't want to share it publicly
    - Especially since the merger this has been uncomfortable since so much is NTK now
    - And then on a more personal level, there are lots of things that I'd love to discuss that feel like they aren't mine to tell
    - They might involve saying something that could be perceived as negative about another person, or they might involve something that could be considered private by another person
        - (This could either be something intimate, or something they might not be ready to share like an idea they're working on in stealth, etc.)
        - Or maybe it just feels like it's their story, and they might want to tell it themselves on their own time.

- Another thing that can hold back my saying what I think is private-seeming things; things that are more emotional or intimate don't necessarily feel appropriate to share in most contexts.
    - Mental health coaching has been great.
    - It's created an atmosphere in which sharing is the default and so my inhibitions around sharing are dropped substantially there.
- Journalling on Go Note Go has also done wonders for dropping inhibitions toward writing.
    - And the snippets section of my website -- [writing for no audience](/snippets/2019-12-30-writing-for-no-audience/) -- has done wonders too.
- Oh, I'm reminded of yet another source of inhibition:
    - A fear of looking stupid (or, to use less judgemental language: a fear of revealing gaps in my knowledge and skillsets.)
    - I'm pretty good at not succumbing to this inhibition, but it's certainly there alongside all the rest.

- So, I've given a rather lengthy list of forces working against my desire to say what I think.
- And there are still more perhaps:
    - I'll reiterate the aversion to making others feel uncomfortable.
    - Conflict avoidance is another.
    - A natural inclination toward trying to help with what I perceive to be others' desires (including e.g. making space if I think someone doesn't want to talk to me :()
    - I might even have a length penalty, a bias against droning on, leading to compact speech that might lack important context or information.
    - And finally I'll add a note about vulnerability, which I think is what I was alluding to when I started out the brainstorming with the word "Love".

One I did not mention is thinking before speaking; Let's add that to the list.
Let's also add the difficulties (1) of knowing what I want to say and (2) of actually saying it.
And avoiding seeming petty or overly critical.
Rereading while writing (aka perfectionism or overthinking the details) can impede thinking about the high level / can be a form of self-censorship.

There are so many reasons to say what you think. What are they?
First major category is that then people know what you think!
They can't give you want you want or respect your preferences or stop doing annoying things that bother you
  if they don't know what you want, what your preferences are, or that they're doing an annoying thing that bothers you.
It can be easy to assume that people know these things about you.
But even when someone does know these things about you, they might not be top of mind.
Saying these things explicitly therefore serves at least two purposes:
(1) conveying the information, and
(2) bringing the information to the forefront of the other person's mind.

This brings us to benefit of saying what you think number (3):
  saying what you think helps you clarify what you think.
If you're merely thinking the thing, then it can remain a fuzzy neural idea.
Saying it forces you to concretize it into words, and words that make sense to other human beings to boot!
This is standard advice about writing: by forcing you to articulate your ideas they become more precise.
The same is true for conversation too.
And not only do the ideas get better through the internal processes of formulation for speech and articulation itself,
you get benefit number (4):
  other people think about what you've said.

Really hard to overstate the value of number (4).
One way to frame it is that you're putting other people's computation to work on your own problems.
I guess I'm writing as a software engineer now.
It's parallelization!
By saying what you think to someone else, you might immediately double the processing power being devoted to the idea expressed.
Give a talk to a group of ten, and you're now using human processing power unobtainable even in a week's timeframe if working alone. Wild!
A less computation-centric way to frame this is that you get feedback from others.
That's really valuable for honing your ideas, deciding on future directions, finding collaborators, figuring out what makes others tick, etc.

To recap we've already uncovered a trove of benefits to SWYT:
* communicating information
* people can know/meet/actively-consider your needs/wants/etc
* clarify your own thinking
* getting other people's insights.
But there's so much more! Let's brainstorm onward.

* Practice: By saying what you think, you get better at saying what you think! This means you can get all those other benefits we've listed out more readily.
* Storytelling, forming connection with others, getting to know one another and learning new things. Being vulnerable and opening up might be difficult and scary at first, but can be rewarding too!
* Not implicitly projecting agreement through silence.
* Inspiring others
* Earning people's respect and trust
* Shaping the focus and attention of the audience and their circles
* Feeling connection, staving off loneliness
* Cheering someone up, expressing gratitude

I worry the brainstorm might have broadened too much;
  there sure are a lot of reasons to *communicate*,
but I'm specifically interested in reasons for saying what you think when it might otherwise be difficult.
There are times when I might naturally choose not to say what I think and instead stay quiet
(or worse, implicitly suggest something opposed with what I actually think, e.g. to avoid conflict!).
My goal with this brainstorm is to enumerate the reasons in favor of saying what I think in these situations.

* Honesty; staying true to myself
* Not being a pushover, not conceding ground simply because someone else is louder or more confident
* Promoting intellectual discussions, and an honest battle of ideas

I think I can sometimes assume people see things the same way I do even when that is not actually the case,
  e.g. because I assume my own belief is an obvious one.
But I've learned since that when someone says they disagree, they generally actually do.
They aren't usually being silly or joking or sarcastic. And so it can be valuable to explore that disagreement.

* Avoiding being misleading (see "Not implicitly projecting agreement through silence"; perhaps this is a generalization of that.) E.g. it can include not seeming like you're agreeing to do something when you actually don't intend to do it.
* In the case of expressing a preference about someone's behavior, it can be tempting not to say what you think because the situation seemingly has already passed.
But saying what you think can prevent future situations that bother you in the same way from coming about again.
<-- This brings up a reason against saying what you think that I didn't think of in the first brainstorm: avoiding seeming petty or overly critical. I'll go up and add that there now.

Solid brainstorm! Moving on.
Well, not quite yet. After some additional writing, I resumed brainstorming mode for a moment longer:

* Getting my needs met?'
  (I never did understand the idea of "needs". Update: I've learned the term universal motivators and may prefer that.)
* Letting people know what I'm thinking about
  -> Then people can share related ideas, introduce me to people who might be thinking about or working on related things, invite me to things I might enjoy
Can also establish connection between me and the other person.
It also makes it so much easier for people to respect my preferences if they know what they are.
(And doubly so if they're top of mind; a preference known but not present in the attention is little better than a preference unknown at all.)

I've oft had an aversion to the notion of "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", especially in situations when the grease is something evenly desirable to all wheels. What if a wheel isn't being squeaky out of respect for the needs of the other wheels, and for a belief in the fairness of the grease distributor? This was my thinking, but I'm slowly moving away from this as I realize the truth of this aphorism might be out of our control. I don't know. On the one hand, we could teach all the wheels to be squeaky, and that would resolve the fairness concerns. But there is a long tail of wheels, and surely some wheels needing grease or other attention simply won't squeak. And all that extra squeaking doesn't sound super desirable to begin with.
Perhaps far better than teaching the wheels to squeak is to teach them what we can about the grease distributor. Then if beliefs in the fairness of the grease distributor are unsound, perhaps such beliefs won't develop as readily.

Okay, that concludes the brainstorming.