Title : If Only I’d Listened
link : If Only I’d Listened
If Only I’d Listened
Below is a story/presentation I told/gave at Juneau's Mudrooms last night. Mudrooms is a story-telling event where 7 different people in the community tell a 7 minute story each month and proceeds go to different charitable causes. This was my third time speaking at Mudrooms. The theme this time was "If Only I'd Listened."
My take on the theme wasn't a traditional story with a narrative arc, but kind of veered off into the Ted-Talk-y/motivational speaking arena. From that standpoint, I'm not sure how it was received (always hard to tell). But in keeping with what I say below, I'm trying not to dwell too much on that.
Okay, so I have a confession to make. I had a really hard time with tonight’s theme. I tried to think of a funny story about some time I’d gotten into trouble or some grand Alaskan adventure where hilarity ensued because I didn’t heed a concrete warning about not doing something stupid.
But despite having done lots of stupid things in my life, I couldn’t think of anything that really worked, and then I realized that the answer was right in front of me.
It was four words of advice that my mom gave me about human relationships and interactions that I wish I’d listened to and internalized a long time ago, and those four words were:
It’s not about you.
Countless moments in my life would have been easier, and felt less upsetting, if only I’d listened to those four words and believed them. Not just on a rational level, but on a gut level of true emotional insight.
I used to be really sensitive. I used to get offended by things people did and said. I used to be disappointed when people failed to meet my expectations. But over time I stopped feeling that way, because I started to listen—I mean REALLY listen—to my mom’s advice that when a person behaves in a way that upsets you, it’s not actually about you.
Here’s what I mean by that.
When you meet someone new, it’s a mistake to assume that the other person is operating by the rules that you’re familiar with. In fact, you can assume you know almost nothing about who the other person is. Gut reactions to what an unfamiliar person is doing are actually a distraction from experiencing curiosity about why the other person is behaving in a particular way.
It’s a lost opportunity to learn about someone else. Who have I just met? How does this person think? What are their values? What did they mean by what they just said? Where did they learn to do things that feel strange or unacceptable in the world I’m familiar with?
Whether it’s a new romantic relationship, a friendship, a colleague, or someone you’re encountering in a superficial way online, each adult human being enters every relationship and transaction as a fully formed person whose behavioral repertoire was mostly scripted before you ever met them.
They’ve each learned how to behave in relationships through early life experiences within a unique family and culture that operated according to implicit rules and theories about social discourse.
Tens of thousands of interactions teach us how the world works. And then add in all the personal variables through which we filter what we observe and experience like race, gender, temperament, birth order and whether to abide by logic or emotion, and it’s no wonder that each of us is utterly unique.
My mother taught me how to listen by controlling my gut reactions and my own emotions in service of learning who another person is, and then using that knowledge to improve my interpersonal relationships and achieve serenity around them.
She taught me the value of being dispassionate.
When I get angry at someone, or someone gets angry at me, I try to notice my feelings in order to better understand how the other person is thinking and what they’re feeling. Regardless of whether someone responded to me in a way that feels wrong, or if I could have been more tactful, all of that takes a backseat to my trying to understand the interaction I’ve just had.
I try to make that person the center of attention rather than focusing on my own performance as a friend or spouse or co-worker, because it’s not about me.
It’s about cultivating a certain level of dispassionate empathy. And I don’t mean cold detachment. Being dispassionate is not incompatible with being passionate exactly. It’s just a skill, like any other skill. If it’s not about you, then it’s about the other person, who learned how to behave long before they ever met you.
And since it’s about the other person, there’s nothing more powerful or more useful than understanding where someone else is coming from. It’s a tool to guide strategic action and applies to every aspect of our human interactions.
Trying to understand how another person’s mind works lets you stay more calm and focused than having kneejerk emotional reactions. And in that calmer state of mind, you can dispassionately plan a strategy for a more productive interpersonal interaction. You could say that’s manipulative, but the idea behind “it’s not about you” is to understand someone else and take constructive action based on acquired knowledge.
Knowing that it’s not about you improves your tolerance for other people’s idiosyncrasies and makes you a better listener. By contrast, believing that another person’s behavior is about you leads you to the mistaken conclusion that you have the power to change them.
But it’s never in your power to change another adult’s behavior.
A person can choose to emulate you or learn from you, but then that person is choosing to change themselves. By adulthood, most behavior is automatic and requires both motivation and focused conscious effort to change.
People around you are continuously doing things that irritate you: cutting you off in traffic, voting for politicians you consider hideous, letting their kids be mean to your kids, calling you names, acting like they’re entitled to special treatment, whispering so you can barely hear what they’re saying, showing up late, etc.
Whether you choose to ignore or respond to each of these perceived provocations, knowing that the only person who can change an annoying behavior is the person who’s doing it really helps maintain perspective.
You don’t need to mindlessly and fruitlessly try to teach people lessons about just how mistaken they are.
For me, listening to my mom’s “it’s not about you” advice has gotten easier over time. With each passing year, I’ve been able to step back further to become more objective about how the world works.
But even then, it’s not always easy to stay on the “it’s not about you” path. We all have times when this path seems impossible, and I think we are collectively in one of those times right now.
Truly, I think we are facing one of the greatest existential threats to our civic life as we know it. To our American constitutional democracy as we know it. We’re under a daily siege of confusing misinformation. We are made to turn on each other. It feels rudderless. It feels disempowering. It feels impossible to hear the signal for the noise.
But it’s not productive to turn a deaf ear to each other. More than anything else, I think, empathetic and dispassionate listening, coupled with constructive action, will help us navigate this dark time. It’ll help us generate our own light. And in doing that, I think, we’ll be able to deliver to ourselves our own salvation.
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