This isn’t going to be a kinky post per se, although you can certainly take the lessons from it and apply them to kink.

Last week I had an issue with one of my employees, Employee A (in my non-writer life, I lead a team at a large corporation). She got salty and butthurt over the fact that she didn’t get promoted while one of our other employees, Employee B, did.

There are some pretty valid reasons why Employee A didn’t get promoted. They’re 99% due to her lack of soft skills and 0% due to her work ethic or ability. But not only did she get upset, she also threw a tantrum. She didn’t participate in meetings, she spoke snarkily when it was not warranted, and she told Employee B some things that Employee B later told me which are very concerning about Employee A in general.

I have pretty good instincts about people. When it comes to the professional world, I’ve been wrong about hiring folks exactly once, and that was in 2005. Every other time I’ve hired someone, my instincts have been right.

In 2016 my old boss hired an employee, Employee Z, that eventually became my subordinate (when I got promoted). During the hiring process I warned my old boss that I felt Employee Z would be bored and unmotivated at the job. He started out okay, but his interest quickly waned, as did his reliability. The day after he quit I found five tickets he’d been sitting on for weeks that I resolved in two days.

In 2018, I got hired to a new management role, and my soon-to-be boss sent me the resumes of Employees A, B, and C, so I’d know who he was considering for my team. I didn’t have any feelings one way or the other about Employee B, and Employee C was a distant third to the other two anyway, but there was just something that rubbed me wrong about Employee A, and I told my boss that. He hired her anyway, and while she is, as I said, amazing at her job and has a work ethic that is literally second to none, her attitude is and has always been terrible.

This is why I trust my instincts when I’m hiring people. I know I’m not perfect, but I am a good manager and my soft skills and interview skills are great. If I think someone’s going to be a problem, I don’t hire them, no matter how qualified they are. I have a specific list of questions I ask when interviewing candidates that give me a good holistic view of them as people, and it informs my instincts.

You probably have built up your own instincts over the years. Trust them, unless you have reason not to. Whether it’s work, interpersonal, sexual, kinky, whatever… if someone gives you a bad feeling, trust yourself. Don’t push through just because they are hot or good at rope or whatever. We have instincts for a reason.