Personal Blogs

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Confidence

At some point we are all asked to give feedback to at least one person. Many of us lie to our most intimate persons. ‘We ask OURSELVES what does this person want me to tell them? ‘You are a great singer, Ingrid, you should go on Britain’s Got Talent!’ Of, course Britain’s Got Talent is very well produced, so we really have no idea whether Ingrid really can sing, or if she has been set up by her malevolent family team. Yet, what if Ingrid lives at home with her parents and she is tone deaf and just will not shut up.

       ‘Shut up, Ingrid!’

       ‘But I love singing, and Vicki says I am really good.’

Her parents looked at each other, popcorn en-route to their mouths, and eyes rapidly returning to the dance troupe on the telly.

      ‘What she needs is a shock to set her straight.’

      ‘Yeah, let’s apply for Britain’s Got Talent on her behalf.’

It could happen. If Ingrid trusts her friend Vicki, who let’s face it, is not so pretty as Ingrid and works well as a wing-woman when they are out on the pull (you know, as a less attractive foil); then Ingrid is the leader of their team, while Vicki is always trying to keep up with the standards of someone she is convinced is superior to her, merely by dint of Ingrid’s looks getting more attention from intoxicated boys on Friday nights than Vicki normally gets.

Some years ago, I was very fortunate to be a secret player in an impromptu game I suddenly sprung on a young woman, Donna, the one who got the most attention from boys, and her friend Carla. Our first meeting was brief and we only swapped names; and, yes, I spoke to Donna before I addressed Carla that time. However, I knew we would meet again another weekend. ‘Carla’, I thought, ‘Remember her name! Carla.’

A couple of weeks later, Donna was more than a little bewildered the next time we met, when I spoke to Carla first.

      ‘Hello, Carla’

      ‘You remember my name!’ Eyes wide, bless her.

       ‘Of course. Who’s this?’ I already knew.

       ‘I’m Donna……!’

I interrupted her.

      ‘So, Carla, what you been up to? Do you wanna a drink?’

Such fun. Carla really was good to be with that night. I thought she would be. Unfortunately, she was in a team in which she was never the leader and her candle was always burning with a guttering flame. Her position, I am sure, is what she, not consciously, felt she deserved; to be eternally in second-place. I think she might have had some control, though, in not letting another good looking friend also join her and Donna's team.

A couple of years before I met Carla and Donna, I was already interested in magic; the type of magic that makes someone yawn when someone else yawns. I had also seen a teenage girl transform from an evergreen ivy to a beautiful lily because she felt loved; her love, she suddenly realised, was requited. Oh, how she tried to be kind while she struggled with her secret desires, and how vulnerable she felt until he one day said, ‘I really like you’. That is the type of magic I like. So, I was delighted to throw some magic at Carla, years later. She didn’t know it, but I was on her team and the leader of her new team, working behind the scenes with nobody recognising me or my efforts; but this was only for one night. Very much a Cinderella event. I hope Carla woke up the next day feeling at least a little bit special. If she did, she would, I suspect, have got a lot more deserved attention from then onwards.

What shape would you like feedback from your peers to take? We know that words with letters that have a hard sound to them serve to cause our minds to consider the thing associated with the sound of the word to have a similar shape. The sound of a ‘k’ for example is hard and jagged. It is, I am convinced, why we ‘see’ a sharp angle when we hear the word, ‘kink’. We also know, that the order that single words are used to describe a person changes our perception of that person.

Word Order

‘Interrogative, pedantic, diligent, focused, intelligent, inquisitive, open’

is a different person to:

‘Open, inquisitive, intelligent, focused, diligent, pedantic, interrogative’.

Yet the word order is the only thing that has changed.

Let us imagine these two characters in a story. Both are book-keepers. Plainly, the first is crotchety, irascible, and terse. The second, is polite, a good listener, and reliable. Given a task to impress a new manager who would get the team-leader role? And, who would find it hardest to recover from a problem that is ultimately revealed to the boss? I can hear the sneaky first person. closeted in a corner, quietly grumbling about the second one. ‘Oh, get a life’, I say, ‘You are grumbling about yourself. YOU have chosen which personal attribute you promote above another.’ 

If you discovered each of these attributes one by one over the course of a few chapters in a book, or scenes in a film, I think you might think these are two very different people.

In feedback to team members, then, we might look to a martial art style, from Chinese philosophy. Something like: Retreat, Strike, Defend, or Yin, Yang, Yin, which could be considered to be soft, hard, soft, though that is not the proper translation for Yin and Yang. In the Western world, we think of this as sandwiching a hard criticism between compliments. 

In returning to the earlier order of words to describe someone, which go from hard to soft for one person and soft to hard for the second person; and we change those words into insults and actual physical violence, and if we consider the hardest word to be an actual physical blow on a work colleague, it would be difficult to keep your job if you started with this action, but your point is painfully made. However, if the second person, in our scenario, is building towards this physical blow, the recipient may get the message of warning long before they are punched; both the work colleagues then get to keep their jobs.