Probably the least helpful things my mother ever said to me were, "You don't mean that," and "You'll change your mind." It took me years to realize that it was okay for me to mean what I said and okay if I never changed my mind about it. Like telling people to relax because you're afraid they'll freak on you, my mother's words had unintended consequences. Despite "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me," words can be very powerful instruments for good or ill, depending on the way they are perceived by the person on the receiving end. Make sure that what you want to say and what you do say are aligned.
Steve Roesler
· 1 year ago
Robyn, isn't it kind of fascinating that the mixed messages that govern our behavior (until we figure out differently) often originate in the home.
Parents are so important. Which is why every generation probably looks back and says, "I'm not going to that one with my kids!" :-)
peter vajda
· 1 year ago
Hi, Steve,
What you’re pointing to, in my experience, Steve is the notion that we bring our "family" to work, our biography and our biology. Often in interactions at work (and at home, at play) in our interactions, if we are self-aware and conscious, we can sense we feel like a child, young, in the face of another person across from us. This other, in some way, often unconsciously, reminds us of the reactive, judgmental, critical parent or other authority ("expert") figure who criticized us when we were young.
It's important to remember, that in every interaction, in every relationship, we are always on a "parent-child" continuum, feeling as one or the other, depending on the dynamics of the relationship. So, I ask myself, "How old do I feel?" If I feel child-like, small, threatened, inadequate, “stupid, “bad” or “wrong,” I know I'm giving my power, my aliveness, my juiciness, my vitality, my "self" over to someone else to control, someone on whom I have projected a quality of a mother or father or primary caregiver.
For many, in childhood, very early on, when some children wanted to, or attempted to, express their aliveness, their thoughts, their juiciness, their "wisdom", their self, they were often met with resistance, first, from their parents or immediate care givers, then from extended family, then from their teachers, perhaps from clergy and others. This reactivity may have taken the form of:
"You think you're so smart!" (with a negative edge) "Little boys/girls should be seen and not heard" "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard" "What do you know!!" (with a negative dismissal) "Not now, I'm busy (i.e., what you have to say isn't important) "Who told you that?!" (skepticism) "Don't say such a thing" (how can you say such a thing!) "I don't believe you." "You better not talk like that" "God will punish you for saying/thinking that" "That's not a nice/good/ thing to say." "That's not true; you're stupid" "What a crazy idea!" "You don't make any sense" "You think you’re so smart!(sarcastically) "You don't think straight" "You're crazy!" "What makes you think that way!" "You don't have half a brain" "For someone so smart, you're really stupid!" "you're an idiot!"
and in this instance, “Relax!” the overbearing parent telling the child how to be when maybe the child needs to not be relaxed, needs to discharge some energy and not hold it in so it doesn’t remain in his/her cells and come into play later in life. In the scenarios you pose here, the employee is unconsciously seeing the manager or boss as a parent figure telling him/her how to be and the one hearing the suggestion or admoniion, feling like a child, naturally becomes reactive and resistant.
Steve Roesler
· 1 year ago
Peter,
This is a hugely useful example of how this dynamic works; I think a follow-up would be a public service.
Jackie Cameron
· 1 year ago
Telling someone how to feel - now there's something that never works. In my experience giving them space to reflect and articulate how they feel often works . If they are feeling stressed - or for that matter relaxed -whether they would choose to share how they feel with you is a matter of trust I suppose! Fascinating stuff Steve - thanks for sharing. Jackie
Steve Roesler
· 1 year ago
Jackie,
After pondering this a bit more, I thought: "We do we do this?"
I suppose there are at least a couple of reasons:
1. We simply don't want to see the other person feeling badly (if that's the issue)
2. We don't want to look at our part in why that person may actually be feeling a certain way
3. We don't feel like taking the time to be a genuine friend and do what you suggest: give them some time and space to reflect and return if they want to.
I wonder what prevents us from automatically being quiet and giving them time to reflect? It seems like the easiest alternative.
Jackie Cameron
· 1 year ago
Another thought on this Steve. I believe time and space is one of the best gifts you can give another person . By saying something like "I sense you are a bit tense " for example the person may think about how they actually feel and how this fits with what their body language is portraying. If we think we are seeing someone feeling badly it is worth asking if that is right!
Steve Roesler
· 1 year ago
Jackie,
Your example is one of those that could be helpful to working people in all situations.
Time and space are great neutralizers of sudden and overwhelming emotions as well as important ingredients in decision making. With the kind of pressures people are expressing about work, that kind of "time out" can go a long way in both individual and group situations.
Wally Bock
· 1 year ago
Parental messages sometimes aren't so clear and explicit. In the early part of my adult life I noticed that I could get very close to a business goal and then not want to push on and complete what I thought I wanted. After some analysis, it was clear that what was happening only occurred with business goals, not personal goals, not goals in other parts of life.
A wise counselor suggested that I write down all the things I remembered hearing as a youth about business people. I made a list over several days, then we looked at the list together.
Every single comment I could remember my father making about business people included a comment about some ethical or moral failing. No one every said, "Business people are immoral" or "I don't want you to go into business" or anything similar. It was all in the phrasing and side comments that I didn't even remember until I went looking for them.
Being able to recognize the issue made it possible to deal with it. But the fascinating thing to me is that I'm sure that if you asked my father about how he felt about business people he would have said that he liked them just fine and, in fact, had many friends among them. I don't think he recognized the prejudice either.
Steve Roesler
· 1 year ago
Wally,
I hadn't thought of that total dynamic until you laid out the entire sequence.
Certainly as youngsters we don't always have the capacity, experiences, and context (or maybe even the inclination) to really think about what we're hearing from our folks. At the same time, we may even be hearing snippets of conversations and don't necessarily question more deeply what we're hearing. So, we go off into life operating, in part, on snippets.
Perhaps the real learning for all of us is: take time to sit down with a wise counselor.
Jim Stroup
· 1 year ago
Hi Steve,
What a sneaky post - almost disturbingly thought-provoking.
It seems to me there are two things here:
1 - Disciplining your words to the occasion. For example, your multitasking during quality time vignette is an example of breezily dismissing the meaning of your words, the implications of the actions you describe. 2 - Grounding your words in the occasion. You should talk about the events that generate the discussion. If you genuinely believe your conversant should feel a certain way, you should not simply say that, but rather you should offer a credible assessment of those events that supports your feeling about what they mean. Guide the conversant to a range of positive feelings that you feel are realistic from the perspective of the organization. Then let him or her determine how he or she actually does feel. Listen carefully to the response, and reconsider your assessment.
Particularly in management, I certainly agree with you that the best way to treat people is as adults, responsible for and capable of shouldering their duties, as well as objective and thoughtful critiques of how they are discharging them. I like to find a way to end such conversations with a positive assessment - say, positive accomplishments, then negative ones, then positive expectations of future performance, as an overly simplistic example. If that's not doable, then end with just a statement of confidence that the conversant is fully capable of using the critique constructively, and that I look forward to observing that happen in the coming months.
The idea isn't to tell them how they should feel, but to tell them the facts, structure your commentary about those facts in a way that suggests the most realistically constructive way they might feel about them, and then leave them to determine how they will actually feel - there is useful managerial feedback in that, as well.
I don't know how on-topic I've been here, but I do know that you've provoked some interesting (to me) thinking - thanks!
Steve Roesler
· 1 year ago
Jim, I think this is on-topic.
And I'm going to think more about your ideas of "Disciplining and Grounding your words to the occasion." That's a useful framework in which to think about conversations, especially ones that could easily arouse sensitivities.
The other thing that occurs to me after re-reading your comment is this: The action orientation most of us have when we're doing business leads us to feel obligated to end most conversations with some kind of commitment to action or a decision. In these cases, maybe the best action you can ask for is that you and the other person think about the conversation and then get back together to see if the time and space turned up any new ways of thinking about the situation--whatever it was. This way, both have responsibility and there isn't any pressure to make some kind of decision in the moment.
As I get ready to publish this, it seems that in the instance of emotional conversations, time and space are the common denominators.
peter vajda
· 1 year ago
Hi, Steve,
You say, "Certainly as youngsters we don't always have the capacity, experiences, and context (or maybe even the inclination) to really think about what we're hearing from our folks. At the same time, we may even be hearing snippets of conversations and don't necessarily question more deeply what we're hearing. So, we go off into life operating, in part, on snippets. Perhaps the real learning for all of us is: take time to sit down with a wise counselor."
For me, and many of those with whom I work and support, the real gift is the opportunity and challenge to sit down with our parents, or primary caregivers, over time, and compassionately ask: " What was it like growing up for you?" around work, money, health, fun, appearance, learning, having children (me), your relationship with one another (can be asked separately, first mother, then father, in different settings), etc., etc., etc.
This huge, wonderful and often painful opportunity will allow one to uncover many of the indoctrinating beliefs, preconceptions, assumptions, and misperceptions, etc. about the world and the people in it, we (their children) took on and which became rarified in our brains and became the lenses with which we observe the world, never knowing, until now, these often self-destructive and self-sabotaging views and values are not "us" but "our parents" — that we can unfreeze and unload our self-defeating stories, and work towards true change and transformation, if we choose to look inside and rediscover our True and Real self...not a(n unconscious) copy of our parents.
All Comments
Parents are so important. Which is why every generation probably looks back and says, "I'm not going to that one with my kids!" :-)
What you’re pointing to, in my experience, Steve is the notion that we bring our "family" to work, our biography and our biology. Often in interactions at work (and at home, at play) in our interactions, if we are self-aware and conscious, we can sense we feel like a child, young, in the face of another person across from us. This other, in some way, often unconsciously, reminds us of the reactive, judgmental, critical parent or other authority ("expert") figure who criticized us when we were young.
It's important to remember, that in every interaction, in every relationship, we are always on a "parent-child" continuum, feeling as one or the other, depending on the dynamics of the relationship. So, I ask myself, "How old do I feel?" If I feel child-like, small, threatened, inadequate, “stupid, “bad” or “wrong,” I know I'm giving my power, my aliveness, my juiciness, my vitality, my "self" over to someone else to control, someone on whom I have projected a quality of a mother or father or primary caregiver.
For many, in childhood, very early on, when some children wanted to, or attempted to, express their aliveness, their thoughts, their juiciness, their "wisdom", their self, they were often met with resistance, first, from their parents or immediate care givers, then from extended family, then from their teachers, perhaps from clergy and others. This reactivity may have taken the form of:
"You think you're so smart!" (with a negative edge)
"Little boys/girls should be seen and not heard"
"That's the craziest thing I've ever heard"
"What do you know!!" (with a negative dismissal)
"Not now, I'm busy (i.e., what you have to say isn't important)
"Who told you that?!" (skepticism)
"Don't say such a thing" (how can you say such a thing!)
"I don't believe you."
"You better not talk like that"
"God will punish you for saying/thinking that"
"That's not a nice/good/ thing to say."
"That's not true; you're stupid"
"What a crazy idea!"
"You don't make any sense"
"You think you’re so smart!(sarcastically)
"You don't think straight"
"You're crazy!"
"What makes you think that way!"
"You don't have half a brain"
"For someone so smart, you're really stupid!"
"you're an idiot!"
and in this instance, “Relax!” the overbearing parent telling the child how to be when maybe the child needs to not be relaxed, needs to discharge some energy and not hold it in so it doesn’t remain in his/her cells and come into play later in life. In the scenarios you pose here, the employee is unconsciously seeing the manager or boss as a parent figure telling him/her how to be and the one hearing the suggestion or admoniion, feling like a child, naturally becomes reactive and resistant.
This is a hugely useful example of how this dynamic works; I think a follow-up would be a public service.
Jackie
After pondering this a bit more, I thought: "We do we do this?"
I suppose there are at least a couple of reasons:
1. We simply don't want to see the other person feeling badly (if that's the issue)
2. We don't want to look at our part in why that person may actually be feeling a certain way
3. We don't feel like taking the time to be a genuine friend and do what you suggest: give them some time and space to reflect and return if they want to.
I wonder what prevents us from automatically being quiet and giving them time to reflect? It seems like the easiest alternative.
Your example is one of those that could be helpful to working people in all situations.
Time and space are great neutralizers of sudden and overwhelming emotions as well as important ingredients in decision making. With the kind of pressures people are expressing about work, that kind of "time out" can go a long way in both individual and group situations.
A wise counselor suggested that I write down all the things I remembered hearing as a youth about business people. I made a list over several days, then we looked at the list together.
Every single comment I could remember my father making about business people included a comment about some ethical or moral failing. No one every said, "Business people are immoral" or "I don't want you to go into business" or anything similar. It was all in the phrasing and side comments that I didn't even remember until I went looking for them.
Being able to recognize the issue made it possible to deal with it. But the fascinating thing to me is that I'm sure that if you asked my father about how he felt about business people he would have said that he liked them just fine and, in fact, had many friends among them. I don't think he recognized the prejudice either.
I hadn't thought of that total dynamic until you laid out the entire sequence.
Certainly as youngsters we don't always have the capacity, experiences, and context (or maybe even the inclination) to really think about what we're hearing from our folks. At the same time, we may even be hearing snippets of conversations and don't necessarily question more deeply what we're hearing. So, we go off into life operating, in part, on snippets.
Perhaps the real learning for all of us is: take time to sit down with a wise counselor.
What a sneaky post - almost disturbingly thought-provoking.
It seems to me there are two things here:
1 - Disciplining your words to the occasion. For example, your multitasking during quality time vignette is an example of breezily dismissing the meaning of your words, the implications of the actions you describe.
2 - Grounding your words in the occasion. You should talk about the events that generate the discussion. If you genuinely believe your conversant should feel a certain way, you should not simply say that, but rather you should offer a credible assessment of those events that supports your feeling about what they mean. Guide the conversant to a range of positive feelings that you feel are realistic from the perspective of the organization. Then let him or her determine how he or she actually does feel. Listen carefully to the response, and reconsider your assessment.
Particularly in management, I certainly agree with you that the best way to treat people is as adults, responsible for and capable of shouldering their duties, as well as objective and thoughtful critiques of how they are discharging them. I like to find a way to end such conversations with a positive assessment - say, positive accomplishments, then negative ones, then positive expectations of future performance, as an overly simplistic example. If that's not doable, then end with just a statement of confidence that the conversant is fully capable of using the critique constructively, and that I look forward to observing that happen in the coming months.
The idea isn't to tell them how they should feel, but to tell them the facts, structure your commentary about those facts in a way that suggests the most realistically constructive way they might feel about them, and then leave them to determine how they will actually feel - there is useful managerial feedback in that, as well.
I don't know how on-topic I've been here, but I do know that you've provoked some interesting (to me) thinking - thanks!
And I'm going to think more about your ideas of "Disciplining and Grounding your words to the occasion." That's a useful framework in which to think about conversations, especially ones that could easily arouse sensitivities.
The other thing that occurs to me after re-reading your comment is this: The action orientation most of us have when we're doing business leads us to feel obligated to end most conversations with some kind of commitment to action or a decision. In these cases, maybe the best action you can ask for is that you and the other person think about the conversation and then get back together to see if the time and space turned up any new ways of thinking about the situation--whatever it was. This way, both have responsibility and there isn't any pressure to make some kind of decision in the moment.
As I get ready to publish this, it seems that in the instance of emotional conversations, time and space are the common denominators.
You say, "Certainly as youngsters we don't always have the capacity, experiences, and context (or maybe even the inclination) to really think about what we're hearing from our folks. At the same time, we may even be hearing snippets of conversations and don't necessarily question more deeply what we're hearing. So, we go off into life operating, in part, on snippets. Perhaps the real learning for all of us is: take time to sit down with a wise counselor."
For me, and many of those with whom I work and support, the real gift is the opportunity and challenge to sit down with our parents, or primary caregivers, over time, and compassionately ask: " What was it like growing up for you?" around work, money, health, fun, appearance, learning, having children (me), your relationship with one another (can be asked separately, first mother, then father, in different settings), etc., etc., etc.
This huge, wonderful and often painful opportunity will allow one to uncover many of the indoctrinating beliefs, preconceptions, assumptions, and misperceptions, etc. about the world and the people in it, we (their children) took on and which became rarified in our brains and became the lenses with which we observe the world, never knowing, until now, these often self-destructive and self-sabotaging views and values are not "us" but "our parents" — that we can unfreeze and unload our self-defeating stories, and work towards true change and transformation, if we choose to look inside and rediscover our True and Real self...not a(n unconscious) copy of our parents.
Go right to the source?
Ah, the simplicity of truth.