The first and most important thing to remember is that it is not always possible to take time out of our busy lives to do so.
This is where the standard “don’t give bad news” excuse goes wrong. If something bad happened to you, you would probably be very upset. Maybe you would even be depressed. But if you have to wait a month to tell someone something, well you’re probably going to feel like crap.
The standard excuse is that all you have to do is wait a month and then tell them. What this really means is that you dont have to do it right then. You can wait until a later date if you want to. You can wait until the end or you can wait until you feel a little better.
Well, you might feel better but then you are just going to feel worse when you try to explain it to someone and you dont want to do it then, right? I think the best thing to do is to do it in advance and then ask that person to fill you in on what its like when you just wait.
That advice could sound harsh, but I would recommend doing it in advance. If you say something, you can always go back and say, “I can wait for as long as it takes.” You will be less likely to say, “I can wait for 1 month.” They will just say, “Alright, you wait for 3 days and then you can come in and tell me what you think.” That will make you feel better.
I like how it makes you feel like you’re getting the bad news but not the person who’s giving it to you. It’s also great for not letting a client walk away from a meeting feeling like he’s being forced to do something.
If you think that a request is too difficult to get done, but you feel you have to do it, you can always refuse. For example, if you work for a company that requires all of its employees to do a task, you can always say, I can just do it myself. That will make them feel more like they cant trust you. In this case, the worst scenario is that you give a person who asked you to do something a bad review.
That’s right, you can even take a bad review personally. If you feel that a business is not meeting its standards of ethics and morals, but they still ask you to do something, you can choose to just decline.
This is another very common reason that people say, “I can’t do that, but I don’t want to give them bad reviews.” They might not think the review is bad, but it could be, so they just want to avoid it. You can see this most often in social media posts.
