The Joy of Changing Shoes
Dear Reader,
Are you like me, do you also have people, that for some reason, get under your skin? It may be a colleague or a family member - it may be anyone - but it's just something in the way that you interact with them, and they interact with you, that just doesn't work.
I recently had an encounter with someone like this. Afterwards, I thought to myself, how can I be better next time? And then I thought, okay, maybe I should think of this three step process - easy to remember: L.O.L. And no, it's not ‘Laughing Out Loud’ in their faces. That's not going to work.
The first 'L' is to just simply stop talking, stop interacting and just LISTEN. Listen much more than you normally would, because there's something going on here that's triggering you. So listen first, and then observe.
OBSERVE what they are doing, observe their days. Put yourself in their shoes for a day. Think about this and see if you can see what's going on in their days. What is making them do what they do?
The third thing is LEARN - get curious, start thinking: What is this person doing during the day? What is making them say what they say? Why is this triggering me, what is that relationship? And what can I do about it?
If we then sit back and work with a little bit of empathy, maybe we can all be better in the next encounter with this person, who for some reason, gets under our skin.
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