Killing with Kindness; a Strategy

We were at a function and saw the usual hecklers.   We were planning strategies when a particular speaker decided to go first.

She began, the heckler started, and she was so nice, it was nauseating.   The heckler settled, and she continued, and we all took a page from her book.

After, she used the term; “Kill with Kindness”.

Basically, if someone jumps up in your face with a kind of animosity, it is ‘normal’ for you to respond with the same animosity.

It is normal for you to see the threat and to try to over play.

However, if you respond softly, compassionately, acting as if you don’t understand, deferring to the attacker for explanation, he has been as deflated as were he a balloon punctured by a pin.

Playing someone’s game means you lose.   They set the rules, they set the parameters, and they toss the first volley.  You join in, tossing the second, fitting into their constructs.

If one has their own game, and plays it, the attacker is either going to continue in his lane, and you continue in yours which doesn’t give him a win.   So what’s the point?

Years ago, on a writing site, this troll attacked my item.  I didn’t respond to the troll directly.  I repeated my points in my response.   The troll went again, and again I responded in ‘my lane’.   Others began to react to the troll, which allowed him to attack them.   Some agreed with the Troll.

I continued to make my responses as if I had never read their items.

The comment section was getting longer and longer by the hour.

I began going to the top, and deleting a few of the Troll’s early responses.   This did not effect my revenue.  The Troll had ten posts, I deleted seven of the earlier ones.

I was making a lot of money from his posts, until he realised what I was doing.

The other day a person went to insult a friend of mine who didn’t hear what he said completely, and smiled and thanked him, because she had heard otherwise.   Or so we thought.   She heard him very well, but deleted the negative so that what she claimed to have heard was the obverse of what he said.

The fact is, if you play by someone else’s rules, you lose.