Listening to difficult feedback
I spend a lot of time encouraging people to improve their listening skills. Listening skills are more challenging than people appreciate, and often emotion and neurochemical responses get in the way. It is now widely accepted that almost anyone can improve at almost anything IF they can listen to feedback with open ears and an open mind.
When I deliver training on listening, I am occasionally moved to tell a deeply personal, but actually rather funny story of a failure of my listening, which had quite extraordinary consequences.
And with some reservation, I’ve decided to share it here. So the story is about one of the great loves of my life. I’ve not had many, I assure you. She is the most wonderful person, and her name is Nita.
I met her in Indonesia where I was teaching English as a gap year project. So I was 18 or 19. I was totally and utterly smitten with this amazing young lady.
I was culturally a Christiam. She was a Christian, but Indonesia, of course, is Islamic, and her culture was very much associated with the values of that faith.
Her view was that physical attraction was of very minor relevance in a relationship. It was about the beauty of the person on the inside. It meant that never once did she say anything nice to me about how I looked. She thought that such comments were shallow and would rather undermine the relationship rather than add to it. And as a 19-year-old Western lad, this took a bit of getting used to.
Similarly, she was very cross with me if I ever complimented her looks. It would make her worried that my values were shallow and that I was in the relationship for the wrong reasons.
And it was hard to argue that she wasn’t right.
Let’s fast-forward. We’ve been together for 2 years, and I don’t compliment her, she does not compliment me, at least on our looks. And I was sort of getting the hang of that, and understood it, and was beginning to even think it was a good thing.
So one day, I decided to tackle the topic and tell Nita how happy I was about the progress I had made in deepening my thoughts about what was important in a relationship. But I couldn’t help my curiosity. I still wanted to know if she thought that I was handsome. So I asked, ever so gently, just out of curiosity, if she thought that I was handsome or not.
“James,” she said to me in a slightly cross tone, “I love you even though you are ugly.”
Whilst I thought I really didn’t care about looks any more, in truth it was still a shock. I tried not to show it, but I was a little bit disappointed. I hid it, and I changed the subject.
For the next 2 years, I kept up on my journey of dealing with having a partner who loved me, but found me ugly. It was a humbling journey, and actually a rather spiritually beautiful one. And by the end of it, I felt so incredibly secure that nothing would ever shake her love for me. Even if I lost my looks, it would not make a scrap of difference.
Having eventually really found peace with her comment, I dared to bring it up again. So I said, “Nita, uh, this has been such an extraordinary journey we’ve been on. And perhaps the greatest gift I’ve learned is to feel that I must be such a nice guy that you would love me even though I’m ugly.”
And she looked at me a little bemused. “Who says you’re ugly?” she asked. “Well,” I reminded her, “you did. You said ‘I love you even though you’re ugly,’ “Oh,” she said. “That’ll be my English. It is so confusing. ‘Even though’, ‘even if’. I always muddle them up.” “Excuse me?” I said, now wondering if I had completely misunderstood her. “Yes,” she said. “I love you even IF you’re ugly.”
Of course, that single word of difference, reverses the meaning. And my years of agonizing about her point of view was completely unnecessary.
So what is the learning to take away? It’s always important that difficult conversations must run their path. And even when you think you have understood, check understanding. You can use phrases like, “Can I check I understand you?” Or “It’s really important that I hear you without error or misunderstanding.” And what you then do is to summarize and reflect back what you think you have heard. Ask with genuine curiosity and genuine openness, (not with bitterness or judgment) “Have I, have I understood that correctly?”
I often wonder if I had done that what a different journey I would have been on with Nita.