Don't Show Frustration
The Fastest Way to Harsh the Vibe
Think about how many times you’ve had a leader start talking to you about how the project your team has been handed is useless and a waste of time, or that now you’re screwed because a timeline has shifted and they can’t control it. Does it make you want to work on that project?
No.
You’ve seen that you’re working on something hopeless, or that the leadership above you doesn’t have your back and you’re wasting your time. That exact principal applies here: think of every mission as a micro project planned out in 15 minutes and executed over an hour. If you start complaining about how pointless your task is, is that going to make your team want to keep playing?
Frustration is something you will feel, and it’s something you’re going to have to work with, but letting your team see or hear your frustration in the heat of the moment is the greatest way to kill your team’s morale and drastically affect everyone’s enjoyment of the session.
We as leaders are not advocating for you to bottle it up or sit on it, only to channel your frustration in a way that helps you and the team.
Shit Sucks, Lets Work Through It
In Saving Private Ryan, CPT. Miller talks to his team about how “the bitching only goes up.” Why? His team isn’t in any position to solve the strategic problems he’s been handed, and to saddle them with that is to take away from their responsibility acting as an extension of his plan.
Any griping about what’s going on should be saved for your fellow leadership elements, the ones who have control over the mission, and kept away from those who don’t really have a say in it.
And, of course, we have to burn off that frustration after. There’s no better way than to vent to a friend in voice, draft up feedback to post later, or grouse about it while you’re chilling with your significant other (if you’re so lucky, but you’re reading this, so we both know the answer to that).
There’s a reason that those frustrations have been built up, and that’s because problems arose during session that got into our animal brains and need to be fixed.
That’s the core of it, though: they need to be fixed. We’re going to be playing with these same members in the future and so if we just blame them and leave it at that, we’re dooming ourselves to more frustration. The key is to find polite and constructive ways to identify the problem that occurred and collaborate to fix it.
Think of it as helping the other person. We were all at a point in our lives where we didn’t know how to do something, but the only way we got better was by having a kind word from a friend point out what went wrong. That way we could identify the problem, fix it, and have a better time next time. That’s what we as leaders are trying to facilitate.
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