I’m always right.
I don’t mean that I’m going around being this uber-cocky, ego-driven maniac, I mean that I look at life through my own perspective. A perspective that I think is the right one.
Everybody does.
It’s natural for human beings and it makes sense. We live inside our own head and our own perspective is all we see.
But that it’s natural doesn’t mean that my perspective is right for someone else.
And my solutions to their problems are probably wrong as well, or at the very least, they won’t be an exact fit.
Luckily though, I’ve found an incredible, long-forgotten technique to step out of my own perspective when I choose to. It’s not easy but it can be developed, trained, and practiced.
You might have heard of it. It’s called listening.
Resistance
I teach coaching skills to people who aren’t looking to coach professionally, but see the importance of being excellent communicators in their professional and personal lives.
Together we explore what it means to communicate supportively.
In a nutshell, being supportive in your communication is more about listening than it is about presenting others with your ideas (even if your ideas are exceptionally good).
And in my experience, every time that I break this concept to my students, it’s a bitter pill to swallow.
‘Yeah but…’
Ah, there it is. The all too familiar resistance.
One of my students is shifting in their seats, her eyes nervously moving, her brow furrowed. She wants to say something. She wants to object. She wants to disagree.
Finally she blurts it out: ‘But what if we have a better idea than the person we’re talking to? Why shouldn’t we share it with them?’
It’s the million dollar question.
And I totally get it. I asked exactly the same question in my first month of coach training. Verbatim.
Sacrifice looking smart
I wasn’t ready to let go.
Let go of my ego, how smart I thought myself to be, and the brilliant solutions and life lessons I wanted to share with people.
Yes, I came to coaching to help others, but secretly I also wanted them to think I’m smart and for them to admire my great ideas.
Embracing this new concept of listening vs. sharing ideas was forcing me to let go of that.
I felt the same resistance I see in my students now.
I had to sacrifice the opportunity to show that I’m smart in order to discover how coaching really works.
Trusting that people already possess the solutions to their problems instead of believing they need mine.
Choosing to believe
In every conversation, I have a choice. And it’s pretty binary.
I can either believe I know better, or I can believe they know better. If I want to be supportive, I really only have one option.
It’s pretty obvious that I could never know better how to live their life and how to make their decisions than they can but this realization might not be top of mind at any given moment.
As I told my student above, I fell into this trap too and still do. When I’m in a conversation, I have to make a conscious decision to change my attitude and switch into another mode of being.
The mode of listening, paying attention, and believing they might actually have a better solution than all of the ideas I can come up with
Even though I might think I’m ‘right’ and the solution I think of is better from my perspective, I’m simply not them. The best solution depends on someone's personal context, background, and experience. All of which I don’t have access to.
We are not the experts in other people’s lives. They are.
So if you want to help fix someone else’s problem, stop the impulse to fix it. Make the conscious decision to believe that they have something in them that will provide the fix. Listen, let them talk, and let it bubble up naturally.
You know I’m right.
Love it!