It's the Simple Things..... That Are So Hard

The Power of Simple and Sincere Praise

Sometimes it's the small things that count.  I have a client who recently transferred to a new group with a "mentor" who was making him miserable.  In listening to him, the causes and solutions became clear.

The cause?  She raced along at breakneck speed, such that Michaelangelo or Einstein couldn't have kept up - and used an exasperated tone of voice when anyone asked a question or even asked her to slow down.  You can understand his pissossity at the meta-communication that he was an idiot.  You can understand why he wanted the basic respect that he deserved as a highly-regarded professional.

I started by getting him to reframe the situation from anger to an understanding that this young thing just didn't know how to teach.  When he was sure that no sane person would actually think he's an idiot, he was able to hear that, and shift his energy from defense to commiseration.  Who doesn't remember what a jerk they were when they were 20-something?

Then I got him to manage her - with praise. The first time he thanked her and praised her for her knowledge and thanked her again for her efforts (all very sincerely), he saw the first smile he'd ever seen on her face.  "She walked away with a spring in her step," he marveled.  A month later, he has no trouble interacting with her.  She will probably continue to not know how to teach anything, but the exasperated bad manners are gone - and in any case, my client knows how to interpret her bad manners.  Reframing it as her incompetence at teaching [“these young folks,” he tells himself] allows him to genuinely praise the things she does well. 

His stress level (and all the bad effects that brings) is way down, so it’s another example of how healing minds heals bodies.....  The next time someone insults instead of mentoring you, or you feel legitimate anger arising, stop, take a deep breath, and consider the possibility that your "enemy" is just incompetent - and we've all suffered from that disease.  The same person who has literally saved lives can't figure out her GoPro, allegedly the simplest camera on the planet.  I need compassion.  We all do.