Barking Dog

Something crosses a line and you are already loud. You skip the pause where other people work out whether it is worth mentioning; you mention it, at full volume, and the line gets defended inside four seconds. Every group needs one of you. Most of what quietly goes wrong in a team goes wrong because nobody said the thing at the moment it happened.

The cost is that your volume does not vary. A real breach and a mild irritation come out at the same level, so the people around you lose the ability to tell them apart, and eventually they discount all of it. You also fire before you have the whole story often enough to have apologised for it more than once, and a fair share of what you were defending was never under attack in the first place. That is not protectiveness. That is a smoke alarm that goes off when somebody makes toast.

Keep the reflex, and put one question in front of it: is anything actually being taken from me here? Ask it, and wait for the answer before you open your mouth. On the occasions you are right you will be right at full volume and people will move, because you will have stopped spending the volume on toast.