Tag: problems

Gentleness

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Understanding what is happening within has one sole purpose.

Gentleness.

When it becomes clear where your actions and reactions come from, what’s behind the patterns you keep falling in, why it is so difficult to be a certain way and do a certain thing. Then you can relax.

That is not the same as giving up, or finding excuses. Actually, the moment you accept the trigger for what it is (a thought, a situation, a feeling, a sensation) and refuse to label it as “me” and “reality”, is the moment you can open to proactivity. Good thing will come from it.

There’s a time for everything

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In the past, we used to go the office from 9 to 5. Most had very little responsibilities, as they were told what to do. Our professional life was figured out at graduation (for some, even earlier), and the personal life was fairly standard for the majority of people. We were closely in touch with our colleagues, friends and family, and the number of acquaintances was quite low. The most we got into an argument was probably once a year, perhaps at Christmas over some sport-related topic.

Today our lives are infinitely more fluid. Personal and professional are mixed. We answer work emails while we sit on the sofa close to our dear one, watching the latest episode of True Detective. At the same time we have an ongoing conversation on Instagram with a friend we have not met since high school, and we are arguing on Twitter on who is the best Democratic candidate for 2020. We are acquainted to many more people than we are closely in touch with, and we are constantly asked to make decisions, take responsibilities, change who we are and the context in which we live.

In this scenario, we have to be careful to pick only the battles that make sense for us in a specific period, as we cannot deplete our mental and physical energy on many different fronts simultaneously. Chances are that if you are going through a divorce, or having a kid, or moving to a new town, you will not be able to give your best at work or to come up with the ultimate idea for your next novel. The opposite is true as well.

The bad news is, there’s not time for everything.

The good news is, there’s a time for everything.

Despite what the sense of urgency that is imposed on us for any little unimportant thing, if we can discern what really matters and give it our attention to the highest possible level, we’ll eventually get it done and be able to pass on to what’s next. And of course, we need to be able to say a whole lot of “no, thanks”. Some things are simply not for us. It is ok to be able to say it out loud.

First principles

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If you get stuck with a problem, it’s good to go back to the foundations of the problem itself to see if you are approaching it the best possible way.

One example. If you want to grow your business, one common way to go about it is to get some funding and hire more people. Of course, hiring more people brings more business in, and for this to be sustained, you need even more people. And even more funding.

On the other hand, one could go to the foundations of the problem, its first principles, and try to understand the type of growth the company needs (not all of the new business that comes in, for example, will be profitable or valuable), or if it needs growth at all, or if growth could be achieved in a healthier way by re-structuring the company, or improving the service, or re-designing the processes.

Another example is reducing car usage. Local governments, for very good reasons, tend to think at the problem mainly in terms of disincentive. Taxes on cars, increase cost of parking, lanes reserved to public transport only, additional fees to access certain areas of the city

On the other hand, the foundation of the problem is that people need to move from one place to another multiple times a day. What are the alternatives we provide to meet this need? Could we make them cheaper (or free) instead of continuosly raising their costs? Could we make them more easily accessible? And the same could go for addressing the fact that to many people a car is a status symbol.

When you go back to first principles thinking, you unlock a whole new spectrum of possibilities you had not considered at first simply because you were thinking by analogy.

Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn’t be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach.

Elon Musk

The practice of empathy

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A while back, I have written about empathy and about how it is not something that comes natural to most people (me included).

But what does empathy look like in practice?

It is certainly not to feel sorrow for someone’s issues. When we do, we tend to approach the relationship from a position of strength, it is kind of a top-down feeling. We do not really empathize with the other person, as we are not in the same “frame of reference”. Feeling sorry is more sympathy or compassion, and as Brené Brown brilliantly puts it, it is not something someone who is in trouble wants to receive.

Empathy is also not giving people a free pass for their problems. Again, this is an approach that assumes a position of power, and it is not fundamentally different from sympathy: we feel sorry for our colleague, and therefore we close an eye to the fact they are making a poor job.

Empathy is acknowledging the other person’s situation from a neutral, non judgemental position. In Ed Batista’s words, “we comprehend their perspective and emotions, and we are able to envision ourselves experiencing that perspective and those emotions under similar circumstances”.

And then, it is suspending our natural inclination to suggest a course of action, or give an advice to “fix” the situation based on our own experience. We stay there in their world, and we acknowledge it as it is. And if the time comes when it is expected of us to say something, paraphrasing a beautiful thought by Seth Godin, we do that from their own place.

When you have to do with somebody, you have no idea how many times this person has been kicked in the teeth. All you know is that they act in ways you would not. If you care about the outcome, the question is not ‘What would I do?’. The question is ‘If I had been exposed to what you have been exposed to, what story would resonate with me?’

It is possible to get better at empathy, and by doing that you will find you can establish more meaningful and stable connections. It is an investment worth doing.

 

 

 

Labelling

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Labels stick.

This is why we get defensive when we are assigned one we do not like, as well as why we should be careful when assigning one to others.

It happens a lot when we deliver feedback. Things like “it does not seem you are committed enough” (label = “indifferent”), or “you could do so much more if only..” (label = “underperformer”), or “you are very aggressive in meetings”, trigger defensiveness in others. And they tend to be profoundly ineffective. After all, would you be motivated in changing your behaviour if somebody would tell you that, or would you rather assume a defensive stance?

And unfortunately it is a tendency permeating much of the public discussion nowadays, both online and offline. More and more, we see people attacking each others on a personal level, labelling each others for life, defining each others’ set of values, beliefs, needs and motives based on a single action or word. In most circumstances, this is gratuitous.

It’s worth remembering that when we interact with somebody, all we see is what they do, all we hear is what they say and, in the case of the internet, all we know is what they write. We have no way to know their intentions. If we want to create some type of change, it might be more effective to approach the issue from our perspective, and elaborate on what we actually feel. This is the only other thing that we know.

When I hear that, I feel like my heritage and history is not being respected.
If I come across that type of comments, I feel sadness as we might never find a common way.
When I see a behaviour that does not respect others’ boundaries, I feel as if mine have been violated as well.

P.S.: today’s thought was sparked by this post of Ed Batista on feedback, and by the work of David Bradford and Mary Ann Huckabay on the metaphor of “the net”.