“I wish I were you.”
When an acquaintance said that to me recently, it felt like chalk on a blackboard. The comment stayed with me. I mentioned the interaction to a colleague at elevate Health & Performance™. They responded that they understood my annoyance and that “You have a perfect life” did it for them.
We noodled around what bothered us and arrived at this:
The speakers don’t know enough about our lives to want to be us or declare our lives perfect.
They are making assumptions filtered through the lens of their life experiences. The compliment may be well intended, but in part they made it to make them feel good without considering us.
This musing led us to talk about the fact that we’re giving feedback, we can get off track by making assumptions. These include:
- We have a full picture of what’s going on.
- The recipients have a sense that they’ve gone off track.
- We have the best answer/solution.
Experience has taught me that any of these assumptions can lead to very uncomfortable interactions.
What to do?
I’ve been test-driving these approaches to help have more effective and less awkward feedback sessions with colleagues and friends:
- Make it about what you know about them and how that informs your perception of the challenge.
- Explain how you see the challenge impacting the business and ask how – not if – that makes sense to them.
- Craft a truly collaborative solution that includes the other person’s knowledge, skills, and point of view.
A client suggested that this seems too easy. Perhaps, but I’ve found that it has taken practice – a lot – to focus and effectively use only what we know.
If you’d like to chat about that, Contact Us.
P.S. Daniel Abrahams’ infographic about why you should be kind – posted by Adam Grant – nicely illustrates the extent of what we know about someone’s life.