The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Can someone who has worked in customer service please explain to me how to be less irritating to service workers? I am socially anxious and awkward and am repeatedly finding myself in situations where I feel like I'm making service workers uneasy and it makes me feel terrible. I have never worked a public facing job before so I don't know what to do or avoid doing to help make their jobs easier and I can tell that they get irritated with me when I do things that I have no idea are going to be irritating to them. It seems to be getting worse the older I am as well, when I was in my teens and 20s people were much more patient with me but now in my 30s I seem to be more intimidating to people and they're less forgiving toward me. Growing up I always admired my dad and grandfather for being able to talk to anyone and make them feel comfortable but this is a skill I never learned. Does anyone have advice on how to develop this skill?
Alternately, can someone give advice on how to stop ruminating about recent socially awkward situations? I can try to improve my behaviors but at the same time I can't change how other people perceive me so even if I did everything 100% right there would probably still be times where I was seen as irritating to people. I'd like to just forget these situations once they happen, if I can't stop them from happening altogether.
Having worked a number of customer facing roles in fast food/shops etc my take is that there are very few really bad customers, but when you've got 5 other tasks that need doing even a nice customer is an interruption (maybe I'm an oddity here, some people love spending 10 minutes chatting to customers) so just be clear about what you want so I can do it without having to think too hard. If it helps this also means that they're not really paying attention to you and the frustration they may be showing isn't primarily caused by you, so less reason to feel self-conscious.
I think there's another factor in that modern service work environments are less forgiving of this kind of thing these days. You still get the old man trying to talk about his day like he used to, but things on the worker's end are more fast paced than they used to be. I can still go to a family butchers and notice how the interactions with staff differ from those at the supermarket chain.
I haven't fully solved this problem myself but I find it helpful to remind myself that people are more concerned with themselves than they are of you. I recently saw a coworker give a nervous powerpoint presentation to the team, exactly the way I have done it, and it was clear how little anyone cared.
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