You just made what you believed to be a brilliant suggestion in a staff meeting, and you catch your coworker giving you a big old eye roll.
So what’s your next move? Let me help. We’ll make it a multiple choice question:
- Ignore the eye roll and proceed to sell your suggestion.
- Ask the eye roller, “What do you think about my suggestion?”
- Say to the person who gave you the eye roll, “Do you have some sort of problem with your eyes?”
- Grab the person after the meeting and say, “I saw the eye roll you gave me, and I didn’t appreciate it one bit.”
- Say to the person, “It looks like you might have a concern with my suggestion. Am I reading you right?”
- An option better than the five I’ve provided. Describe it now.
Got your answer? Read on to figure out if your choice is the best option.
An eye roll is a fight starter
There are lots of ways to start fights with coworkers. Responding to their ideas and actions with an eye roll is right up there near the top.
Of course the person doing the eye roll rarely sees it that way. When I talk to eye rollers after getting one directed at me, I’m often met with a supposedly innocent question, “Did I just roll my eyes? Wow, I had no idea.”
If I was to stay in the spirit of passive-aggressive communication, my response would be a sarcastic, “Yeah, right.” And then maybe punctuate it with an eye roll of my own.
You’ll notice I didn’t include that as one of possible responses in the multiple choice test.
Your response to an eye roll is based on your interpretation (And that may be wrong)
My somewhat snotty response would be the result of my interpretation, and it’s here that the whole eye roll problem gets tricky.
Whenever I do a communication workshop, I typically pose the question “What does an eye roll mean?” After giving folks a moment to think, I survey the room for answers. I’m always surprised by how many distinctly different answers I hear.
While everyone agrees that an eye roll is projecting negativity, there is very little agreement on the specifics. The list of possible interpretations I’ve heard include:
- Disbelief
- Disdain
- Frustration
- Contempt
- Dismissal
Some believe the negativity to be directed at the idea while others say it’s directed at the person.
Here’s the problem. Few, if any of us, would ever consider the possibility that an eye roll could mean anything other than our original interpretation. We see it. We are certain of its meaning. More times than not we are wrong.
Because so much information is conveyed via body language, our ability to be effective in this area means getting much better at correctly interpreting what we see.
Pay attention
My advice is simple. Pay attention, but don’t make assumptions.
When you notice something that you believe has meaning, use it as a springboard for more conversation.
An example
Let’s say you are talking with someone, and after making a suggestion, you see an expression come over the other person’s face that you interpret as dislike for your idea. Now you might be right or maybe not. Even if you are, do you know why the person doesn’t like your suggestion? That could be important information.
Instead of proceeding based on your belief that the person is now against you, open up a conversation based on your guess about what you observed. You could say something like, “Looks like maybe you’re not crazy about what I just said. Am I reading you right? I’d like to know more about what you are thinking.”
Your goal is to encourage more conversation so clarity increases with the exchange of language.
Caution, don’t make my mistake
As a warning, you have to be careful about when and how you pursue these conversations. Once I was presenting a workshop and noticed a participant cut loose a big eye roll in response to something I had just said. Or at least that was my assumption.
I decided to engage, and said, “Now that was quite the eye roll. What would you like to say?” She ignored my offer, and I moved on, feeling slightly confused.
After the meeting, she invited me to chat in the hall. I knew I was in trouble.
It turns out my assumption was wrong. I thought her eye roll was directed at me. In reality it was meant for a friend across the table, and the goal was to mock another person who was in the room.
She was upset that I outed her and probably alerted the person she was mocking to the bad behavior. Funny that she didn’t even consider that maybe not doing the eye roll in the first place would have been the better option.
Followup for better results
I follow up on many body language hunches. Some are confirmed. Others show my assumptions to be wrong. Most work out just fine.
With my one caution in mind, I encourage you to start paying more attention to body language. Ask about what you notice. It’s the best way I know to increase understanding.
