Beware Energy Vampires!

Have you ever been involved in a draining social or work interaction, where you felt the energy just being sucked out of your body? According to new social dynamics research from Northwestern University, as reported in an article for Medical News Today, high-maintenance or difficult interactions can, in fact, drain energy and have serious consequences.

Perhaps you've felt like you and a co-worker just never "clicked", you could not communicate easily or you just rubbed each other the wrong way. That impacted your mood and productivity on the job, and your work suffered. Compound this effect if you are part of a project team that has varying degrees of social interaction mis-match, and you have the A-number-one formula for getting no where.

Eli FInkel, assistent professor of psychology at Northwestern and chief researcher, asserts, "...there are plenty of inefficient interpersonal interactions that we engage in every day, and those draining dynamics have significant consequences".

If your co-workers, or even your boss, leave you psychically, emotionally, and physically exhausted at the end of the day, and those days pile into months and years, what kind of productivity can you expect of yourself on the job? And if you push yourself to achieve productivity, where will that leave your mental and physical health?

All in all, draining social interactions, including those at work, are dangerous to your career as well as your health. So beware of folks who drain you. Those high-maintenance people are more than a pain in the neck...they may just prove to be a pain for your career.

Comments

[Yvonne LaRose]

While this could be viewed as a personality conflict or a problem co-worker, there's another dimension to this. Two people with differing value systems who have been thrown together, in close proximity, and neither is communicating very well with the other. They haven't mapped out an agenda nor delineated who will work on what given their contrasting strengths.

It could be that they are an ideal match. But one of them needs to take the first step in speaking up.

To beat a dead horse, maybe one is a belt and suspenders, triple check, zero-factor for errors type and their partner (as my business instructor called them) is a beer drinker -- also known as "that'll do." The latter is good for quick and dirty. Most likely the trial run or the brainstorming sessions. The other makes certain (to the company's benefit) that all the loose ends are tied and the presentation is fined tuned to High C quality.

Most likely the intense one is intense in a lot of areas. Have you gone against them on the handball court? Be prepared! ;~)