A loud-mouthed bully.

A couple of interesting articles hit Reddit today. In the US, people seem to become more withdrawn and isolated from each other, however, in various environments where we are compelled to co-exist, namely work and school, bullying can be a problem.

Bullying in the workplace, increases absenteeism and lowers productivity. If you are stupid enough to employ a bully or to be a bully yourself, you expose yourself needlessly to liability.

Workplace bullying is hard to deal with because it is often shameful for the target to admit to or cope with. It’s also hard to identify when you are being bullied, because it is outside of our normal experiences - this article from the invaluable Bullying Institute will help you identify when you are being bullied.

Excerpted

You Know You Are Bullied At Work When …

you attempt the obviously impossible task of doing a new job without training or time to learn new skills but that work is never good enough for the boss surprise meetings are called by your boss with no results other than further humiliation everything your tormenter does to you is arbitrary and capricious, working a personal agenda that undermines the employer’s legitimate business interests others at work have been told to stop working, talking or socializing with you you constantly feel agitated and anxious, experiencing a sense of doom, waiting for bad things to happen no matter what you do, you are never left alone to do your job without interference people feel justified screaming or yelling at you in front of others, but you are punished if you scream back HR tells you that your harassment isn’t illegal, that you have to “work it out between yourselves” you finally, firmly confront your tormentor to stop the abusive conduct, you are accused of harassment you are shocked when accused of incompetence despite a history of objective excellence, typically by someone who cannot do your job everyone — co-workers, senior bosses, HR — agrees (in person and orally) that your tormentor is a jerk, but there is nothing they will do about it (and deny saying what they said later when asked to support you) your request to transfer to an open position under another boss is mysteriously denied

Again,this can be difficult to admit or even to understand at all. Your friends and loved ones need to watch out or you because the effects of workplace bullying will also be visible in your personal life.

# you feel like throwing up the night before the start of your work week

# your frustrated family demands that you to stop obsessing about work at home

# your doctor asks what could be causing your skyrocketing blood pressure and recent health problems, and tells you to change jobs

# you feel too ashamed of being controlled by another person at work to tell your spouse or partner

# all your paid time off is used for “mental health breaks” from the misery

# days off are spent exhausted and lifeless, your desire to do anything is gone

# your favorite activities and fun with family are no longer appealing

# you begin to believe that you provoked the workplace cruelty

The bully’s success is predicate on making you feel powerless. One of my ex-business partners, a real sadist, described his negotiation style as “making what the other guy has seem worthless.” This is a powerful trick. It won’t work on everybody, but doubting your own abilities or accomplishments is quite common. Once the bully has that idea implanted,the next step is to control the environment by isolating the target. As I have warned you before,be immediately suspicious of anyone who tries to prohibit your contact with anyone else. There is almost no legitimate reason for doing this. If anyone ever asks you to do this, you would be wise to view any information about others that comes from this person with suspicion, because they have already given you a strong indication of deception in this area. Frequently, they will simply create fictional reasons why the other person doesn’t like you. The best step in this situation is to get this out in the open between all parties. One time, someone tried to convince me that another party disliked me because of my email signature. Of course,this is laughable on the face of it, but once you concede any power to these sort of people, you are potentially vulnerable to their manipulations. They will make you look stupid more often than you would ever admit comfortably.

Handling Tyrants and Bullies

This first article is poorly written but it includes some really good tactical tips for handling yourself in direct conflict with a petty tyrant. For example, avoiding any signs of submission:

- Break of eye contact.

- Change of colour.

- High pitching voice / defensiveness.

- Any jerky movement.

- Over blink.

- Any emotional reaction.

Bullies make their living based on the ability to bend others to their will. They don’t rely on any sort of intellectual construction or framework for why their coercion works for them. They’ve probably been doing it since they were children. Their techniques are going to be a little grab bag of threats and inducements, and they will watch you to see what is working. In effect, your reactions are a critical component of the success or failure of the bully. So, if you must deal with one, you must manage your reactions. Bullies can be smart or stupid. Smart bullies only try to coerce when they have leverage. Stupid bullies stupidly think they are always on top.

The easiest way to deal with a bully is peer pressure. This always shuts them down. However,the bully is often interacting with other members of your peer group in a similar fashion, and it is terribly frustrating when you realize that everyone else knows exactly what you are saying but take no action. I spent several years in a culture that strongly rewarded bullies and one of the bullies was a raving drunk. It was a daily issue and a huge problem, because when the bully has a secret, then they bully to prevent the possibility of the secret ever being revealed. Whenever any group within the culture began to coalesce around the idea of dealing with the problem, you find that everyone wants to do something but no one really wants to do something, if you know what I mean.

What you absolutely have to do though, is keep your dignity and don’t allow the bully to own you, especially in public. Not only does that change others’ perception of you, it can enable the bully to get more compliance from others. Personally,I think the easiest way is to give as good as you get in public,which is easy to do, bullies are filled with shame inside,that’s why they have to pull you down. This fellow has given a lot of thought to how to handle insults in the workplace. Some of it is a bit aggressive, and he warns you about it, but some of it is exactly the right tone to take with aggressive morons.

Craig was not his boss, but simply a peer at the same level. During the meeting, his aggressor leant into the table and said:

“Tony. I’m not all that happy with this. This company hires professionals, and even though other’s may like your work, I have a higher expectation of what I consider ‘professional’. I don’t like it. I feel like we hired some kid out of school to do this.”

This was said in a meeting with 15 of Tony’s peers, including myself and his project manager.

Expressionless, Tony simply said:

“Can I get a quick show of hands? How many people here have received a compliment on their work from Craig in the last six months?”

No hands were raised.

“How many people received a negative comment regarding their work?”

Half of the table raised their hands.

“How many people felt that the negative comment was justified in some way?”

No more hands were left raised.

Tony then looked Craig right in the eyes and very politely said:

“Craig. There is clearly a pattern here. I would normally respect your opinion, but it seems you are impossible to please. You’re flattering yourself if you think that your feedback will be taken onboard.”

Needless to say I didn’t need coffee to stay awake at this meeting. By reducing Craig down to a negative-Nancy, he effectively reduced the impact of the insult. By identifying a common pattern, Tony turned the tables on his aggressor. Craig was attempting to portray the image of seniority, in hopes that he would be promoted to a lead role or a manager. By going about this in an aggressive way, he opened himself up to a brilliant attack.

You can’t really change a bully, you can’t really reform a petty tyrant. They are pretty easy to scare, and even easier to keep at a distance, but don’t hold out any hope for the bully getting better. If it’s your boss and you can’t get any help within the organization: leave. I’ve had the unfortunate need to tell a few to shove off in the last few years, but I’ve fortunately had the ability to do so without fear, because I knew I was creating value and could continue that, if not where I was, then somewhere else. If you didn’t have value, they wouldn’t need to tear you down. Believe me on this one:every time I kicked one to the curb, my life has only gotten better.

Well, two things, as referenced previously, I’m exploring the new, new SEO 2.0 techniques with a bridal shower favors site.

So in that regard, we are doing a lot of work with Google Base

and a flickr photoset for our wedding favor images

Quick Analysis - Google Base drives outstanding traffic….flickr needs a lot more care and attention

In other news, I have a job — I am the E-Catalog Manager for a catalog retailer in a great specialty market that wants to get more web-aware. I don’t think I’m blogging company names for this right now…but it’s a real good thing across the board, if you ask me…once I got serious about getting a job, I learned a lot about the job hunting process. Now that I’ve put some numbers on the board, and had a couple of measly accomplishments, my initial contacts with employers were met with a lot more enthusiasm than in the past, and it became less of a crapshoot and more about my ability to define myself for the employers and project myself into the envisioned role. It was cool, and I worked with recruiters, which is a weird eperience but at the end of the day, pretty pleasant. Also, I discovered the pleasure/pain experience of LinkedIn.

Another reason I was so excited was because she was asking for a shopping cart. I had seen Magento-a fantastic new open source shopping cart a few months ago, that’s one of the big advantages of wasting my life on the internet.

Magento is way further along then you would think a 1.0 oscommerce competitor would be, and its outstanding. It has great SEO features, plenty of stuff I have paid money to have added to other platforms. Great image handling. Slick and fast. The world’s best admin. It is not for the absolute beginner right noe, but believe me I aint far from there and its kind of running.

As I requested of one friend today, please start marrying off your children.

Anyway, Aaron Wall has released the first SEO tool in a while that I have thought was well-made and useful and it helps with this activity. You can Download the SEOBook.com Rank Checker here.

• Firefox Extension
• Add Multiple Keywords at Once\
• Checks Multiple Keywords at once
• Export to CSV

Here’s a quick backgrounder on longevity research.

Aubrey DeGray is the most familiar face of the longevity research movement, Longevity research seems to be an extremely fruitful and possible line of research and one of the best ways to improve the human condition, but many people are reluctant to support it.

I think there is great resistance to goofing around with the natural order of things - people get sensitive about the edge cases of birth and death especially. I also think that older people do not look forward to the decrepitude part of getting old and can’t imagine extending that out forever. Eternal life is such a myth, and since, we are  self-absorbed as a species, so our own death would tend to fascinate us, it stays that way.

But, we are really just talking about cell death

It’s a process, and researchers are working it, but will it end up in the same kind of pigeonhole that cloning finds itself in, where it interferes with the natural order of things. Think about it, because if you are like me you hadn’t up until now and you realize that this research has a strong, inherent appeal of its own. It sounds like a fantasy because it was a fantasy as long as we have been thinking animals. But those elemental expressions of hopes and fears also predate cell theory and cell pathology and now we can look at conditions that cause the complex we refer to as “aging” and possibly suppress those conditions. How could you not want that? Honestly, it points to a paradox that people reach a certain level of sophistication where they can possibly enact these amazing feats but at the same time reach an obnoxious distance from their own instincts that they suppress their instinct for self-preservation.

Anyway, if you use Gmail A LOT, like I do, and you make filters every so now and then, maybe you’re a 4 hour work week type guy maybe you just need to manage your workflow. There are good ways to manage Gmail filters but what I want to talk about is maintaining Gmail filters.

I’ve had a gmail account for years and years and it acts as my primary contact point. The other day I was looking at my filters to see if I was inadvertantly filtering out a message I was expecting but didn’t receive, when I discovered that I had probably 50 filters currently running and a lot of them were no longer desirable, harmful even. Sending stuff to old business partners, sending Amazon emails to my wife (I guess that’s why she’s so hard to surprise), deleting a ton of things without reading them (I must have been in a  bad mood for a month or so). Anyway, it’s the old Law of Unintended Consequences — Unintended consequences will overwhelm the intended ones.  Basically, the stuff I had set up to automate and streamline my workflow, had long passed their point of usefulness and now was running out of control, hindering or possibly harming me.

It’s very easy to clean out your Gmail filters, just click on the Settings link in the upper right and then filters is one of the links across the top of the main pane.

You do not talk about your profitable niche.

The second rule of SEO Fight Club is -

you DO NOT talk about your profitable niche.

I’m serious, keep it to yourself! When you have a new one, turn off your stupid webmaster blog. Put it in maintenance mode. And Get to Work. What a lot of you don’t understand is that, those of us making a living with web sites, arent making money with our crappy little webmaster/seo/I Heart John Chow blogs. We are making money with niche websites.

Chow.com

Then I realized there was no “John” in front of it.

Happy New Year! Here’s a photo of my worst blind date ever..

I have a wishlist for Weebly as long as my arm, but a lot of them are in the pipeline I’m sure. At this point we’re still waiting for the ability to make (and thus customize) themes.  I’ll post some info here about my Weebly efforts soon.

The  Weebly founder, David Rusenko, has an interesting blog. A useful post for my audience is his 6 Easy Tips to Prevent Downtime, which is useful if you are responsible for site administration for a small or smallish company.