WE can’t deny it. There are instances in our daily life that we want to avoid a person or a situation. We bumped onto a college pal you have not seen for years, who with nary a trace of embarrassment on his face borrows money from you. Or we got an invitation, from an in-law to spend the weekend in their place, but we don’t exactly like what seems to be an insincere summon. Or we are in a cocktail party and a former client whom we are not exactly fond of engages us in small talk.
Looking back, we may also remember our friends, officemates or relatives calling or texting us 10 or even more times a day. Sometimes, they even leave a nagging message in our answering machine asking, “Are you there? Please pick up. Are you there?” Or we have encountered people who keep egging us to volunteer in their clubs, but we just have no spare time left. It makes us feel guilty not texting back, returning calls or not honoring an invitation, but there is surely a variety of ways to say no or to use civilized excuses to get out of anything. For whatever reason, we have to move out of an unscheduled meet up, end a conversation immediately, put a stop to an argumentation, or escape a talk trap. In other words, we want to dodge without appearing rude.
Dodging is fleeing, ducking, evicting or evading. Others look at it as lying that’s colored white. It means navigating smoothly around life’s minor obstacles. Lest we make the mistaken notion, dodging does not mean lying on our resume, running away from civic citizenship, or hiding from the law enforcers. Call it by any name, but dodging anyone and anything can be a daily challenge—PR and marketing people, politicians, celebrities or ordinary citizens like you and me do it.
Author Jeanne Martinet has recognized the need to cleverly confront unwanted face-offs and has provided her readers with Artful Dodging, a basic, nippy and amusing guide on how to charmingly disentangle ourselves from not too pleasing and uncomfortable circumstances. At the onset, Martinet’s work can be misconstrued as an effort that encourages lying. But then again, who can categorically say that one tells the truth every time? As can be posed, who among the people we know tell the truth about everything to everyone, every time?
There are two basic motives for dodging people: to protect ourselves or to shield others from harm’s way, or a combination of both. Martinet articulated that a person’s dodging impulse is triggered by altruism (self-preservation is the noblest reason to dodge), semi-altruism (gently dodge to get extricated from unwanted entanglement), self-defense (dodge, baby, dodge to survive), face-saving (we don’t want to lose somebody’s good opinion of us), butt-covering (when people tell us they never lie, they are lying), protecting our privacy (guard our personal space), hedging our bets (shielding against present and future injurious repercussions), time saving (protection for life’s little emergencies), boredom (when we are among bores, pests pontificators and the likes it’s okay to dodge), fear and paranoia (never dodge, when we are nervous about something that is potentially rewarding) and revenge (extremely bad for our karma).
Artful Dodging offers a broad assortment of approaches for freeing ourselves from awkward state of affairs that require no repertory training to pull off. It also provides ways to prevent the need to dodge, such as the preemptive strike. Her anecdotes of these strategies in action, both working and backfiring, provide great humor and make it a quick read.
The seven dodging sins
WHATEVER strategy or tactic we use for dodging, Martinet underscored that the following contraventions must not be committed, especially if we are doing PR work.
1 Not returning phone calls. This is not an acceptable dodging technique. To most, it can be an appalling behavior. In my book, it is offensive, nasty and a totally pointless infringement of what good manners should be. Since it makes people angry and likely to worsen one’s predicament, this course of inaction is inefficient. The strict “call back rule” has exceptions, though. It is understandable that we don’t return the call of pesky callers, or worse, suspected card-carrying psychopaths. We may also ignore the calls of strangers who dial up with no personal references or when we get wrong numbers.
2 Standing someone up. Nobody is entitled to do this. It may be excusable to be a “no show” in large parties or assemblies as long as you apologize convincingly after.
3 Failing to RSVP. Basic good manners and right conduct dictate that when invited, you must do an RSVP, whether you are begging off or attending the event. It may look like an inconsequential point of propriety, but its seeming smallness precisely makes it a “no-no.” Not doing an RSVP is like saying the inviting party is not worth our precious time, and if we do it often enough, we may find ourselves not getting invited to other events later.
4 Dodging big stuff. Artful dodging does not mean cheating on our taxes, our exams, or our partner. Lying about anything important (our status, our state of health) is not tolerable. For the most part, dodging is for getting out of a college reunion or a lunch meeting with favor seekers. It is not an act of wickedness or unlawfulness.
5 Breaking a promise. When you don’t come through, it is a promise broken. It may sound childish, but that is exactly how it is. It is bad for client-agency relationship and damaging to our reputation. A promise, is a promise, is a promise. Flouting it is not a sound dodging strategy. It can bring us nowhere.
6 Accusing someone of dodging us. It takes one to know one. We know a dodger if we are dodgers ourselves. In any business and life situation, suspicion or mistrust is an awfully distasteful value and we should steer clear of it at all costs. As Martinet said, “There are certain things in society about which one is never supposed to speak. Dodging is one of these.”
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Confessing to the dodgee we have dodged him. Not talking about it s part of the reason dodging works. Secrecy is part of the system. To reveal our dodges would cause a breakdown of the intricate interactive infrastructure; people don’t like it when we take away their social conventions.
Why on earth would we need for Artful Dodging? The answer is simple. We need the ability to regularly dish out potentially painful truths, to express our real take on an issue, to disagree on a decision that has been considered or to just say no.
PR Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the UK-based International Public Relations Association, the world’s premier organization for PR professionals around the world. Bong Osorio is the communications consultant and spokesman of ABS-CBN Corp.
We are devoting a special column each month to answer our readers’ questions about public relations. Send your questions or comments to askipraphil@gmail.com.