I think it’s cool that you’re engaging with criticism and acknowledging the harm that happened as a result of your struggles.
And, to cut to the painful part, that’s about the only positive thing that I (random person on the internet) have to say about what you just wrote.
In particular, you sound (and sorry if I’m making any wrong assumption here) extremely unwilling to entertain the idea that you were wrong, or that any potential improvement might need to come from you.
You say:
For whatever it’s worth: I don’t recall wanting you to quit (as opposed to improve).
But you don’t seem to consider the idea that maybe you were more in a position to improve than he was.
I don’t want to be overly harsh or judgmental. You (eventually) apologize and acknowledge your responsibility in employees having a shitty time, and it’s easy for an internet stranger to over-analyze everything you said.
But. I do feel confident that you’re expressing a lack of curiosity here. You’re assuming that there’s nothing you possibly have done to make Kurt’s experience better, and while you’re open to hearing if anyone presents you with a third option, you don’t seem to think seeking out a third option is a problem you should actively solve.
My recollection of the thought that ran through my mind when you were like “Well I couldn’t figure out how to use a bike pump” was that this was some sideways attempt at begging pardon, without actually saying “oops” first, nor trying the obvious-to-me steps like “watch a youtube video” or “ask your manager if he knows how to inflate a bike tire”, nor noticing that the entire hypothesized time-save of somebody else inflating bike tires is wiped out by me having to give tutorials on it.
Like, here… You get that you’re not really engaging with what Kurt is/was saying, right?
Kurt’s point is that your pump seemed harder to use than other bike pumps. If the issue is on the object level, valid answers could be asking what types of bike pumps he’s used to and where the discrepancy could come from, suggesting he buy a new pump, or if you’re feeling especially curious asking that he bring his own pump to work so you can compare the two; or maybe the issue could come not from the pump but from the tires, in which case you could consider changing them, etc.
If the issue is on the meta level and that you don’t want to spend time on these problems, a valid answer could be saying “Okay, what do you need to solve this problem without my input?”. Then it could be a discussion about discretionary budget, about the amount of initiative you expect him to have with his job, about asking why he didn’t feel comfortable making these buying decisions right away, etc.
Your only takeaway from this issue was “he was wrong and he could have obviously solved it watching a 5 minutes youtube tutorial, what would have been the most efficient way to communicate to him that he was wrong?”. At no point in this reply are you considering (out loud, at least) that hypothesis “maybe I was wrong and I missed something”.
Like, I get having a hot temper and saying things you regret because you don’t see any other answers in the moment. But part of the process is to communicate despite a hot temper is to be willing to admit you were wrong.
Perhaps I’m missing some obvious third alternative here, that can be practically run while experiencing a bunch of frustration or exasperation. (If you know of one, I’d love to hear it.)
The best life-hack I have is “Don’t be afraid to come back and restart the discussion once you feel less frustration or exasperation”.
Long-term, I’d recommend looking into Non-Violent Communication, if you haven’t already. There’s a lot of cruft in there, but in my experience the core insights work: express vulnerability, focus on communicating you needs and how you feel about things, avoid assigning blame, make negotiable requests, and go from there.
So for the bike tire thing the NVC version would be something like “I need to spend my time efficiently and not have to worry about logistics; when you tell me you’re having problems with the pump I feel stressed because I feel like I’m spending time I should spend on more important things. I need you to find a system where you can solve these problems without my input. What do you need to make that happen?”
I’ve been dating Nate for two years (tho wanna clarify we are not doing marriage-kids and we’re both actively looking for more serious other partners).
Nate is profoundly wonderful in many ways, like often surprises me in new ways of wonderfulness, and has raised my standards in partners. He’s deeply caring, attentive, competent, hilarious, and of course brilliant.
Also, many of the complaints about him in the comments resonate with my experience, particularly your description above. I often find that in disputes I feel dismissed, I perceive him as having a significant lack of curiosity about my worldview (and believe he’s explicitly said he’s not curious about perspectives he anticipates to have no value to him).
Iirc he’s explicitly said he doesn’t respect my thinking (edit: he clarifies he respects it in some areas but not others), and from my perspective this radiates off him whenever we fight. I often feel like I have trouble trusting my own mind, I doubt myself, and despite my best attempts I somehow come out of disputes thinking I must be the one who’s wrong. It’s weird to have a partner who’s so shockingly good in so many ways, yet we have maybe the worst fights I’ve ever experienced in romantic relationships. (Though he says other girls he’s dated don’t have this problem and I am unusual)
On one plus side, I’ve found him to be very good at installing concrete changes if you can articulate them to him. A few times I managed to have a specific request about how I’d like him to say things differently, and if he agrees to do so he updates fast, thoroughly, and permanently.
I feel conflicted about posting this here because ??? should this be personal/private ?? but I’m having some sort of massive relief and feeling like actually I’m not insane. And also I am invested in (though not hopeful about) something changing here cause it would be good for our relationship and I assume also MIRI, which I like and believe in.
(I talked to Nate before posting this comment and he was encouraging)
(To be clear: I think that at least one other of my past long-term/serious romantic partners would say “of all romantic conflicts, I felt shittiest during ours”. The thing that I don’t recall other long-term/serious romantic partners reporting is the sense of inability to trust their own mind or self during disputes. (It’s plausible to me that some have felt it and not told me.))
Chiming in to provide additional datapoints. (Apologies for this being quite late to the conversation; I frequent The Other Forum regularly, and LW much less so, and only recently read this post/comments.) My experience has been quite different to a lot of the experiences described here, and I was very surprised when reading.
I read all of the people who have had (very) negative experiences as being sincere and reporting events and emotions as they experienced them. I could feel what I perceived to be real distress and pain in a lot of the comments, and this was pretty saddening.
Note: I really don’t like posting personal information on the public internet, for both personal preference and professional reasons. (I felt sure I wanted to post this, though.)
Background: I dated Nate on-and-off for ~6 years (from 2016-2022). We’re now friends on good terms.
How I experienced Nate’s communication over the years:
During disputes, I felt Nate respected my views and my feelings. I felt Nate tried to communicate well with me (though of course this is often hard for both parties in the midst of a dispute and we both failed a bunch).
During disputes, and generally, I felt like Nate engaged with me as an equal. I don’t recall ever feeling dismissed in the ‘you’re not as smart as me’ vein (or any other vein).
It feels important to note that we never really had discussions about his work in the way a lot of people in the comments seemed to have had (where they had very bad experiences). We talked about our respective work a bunch, but the subject matter wasn’t technical (I don’t have a technical background).
I don’t recall Nate losing his cool/saying something mean, except for uncommon instances where I was very upset and was saying unkind things first (not my proudest moments!)
I ~never felt like Nate’s confidence/manner impacted my views in a way I don’t endorse or made me feel less sure of my own beliefs. Nate is certainly intense and confident-sounding, but for whatever reason, I don’t recall this in particular causing issues.
The ways in which our communication was bad felt to me more mundane and predictable as relationship-comms go (unclear communications around expectations, not recognising and addressing underlying issues/feelings quickly enough, etc). And none of this was the reason we ultimately parted ways.
Also, in my experience, Nate’s communication / handling of disputes has improved over time.
I don’t want to paint an overly rosy picture—our worst disputes were really not great (understatement to save me saying personal things), but for reasons basically unrelated to the themes of the comments here. Nate is flawed in loads of ways (I was always pretty icked-out at the reverence? people treated him with, like he was perfect or something); and though I haven’t had the experiences others here have had, I find him to be someone who wants to be better and knows he’s far from perfect.
In particular, you sound [...] extremely unwilling to entertain the idea that you were wrong, or that any potential improvement might need to come from you.
you don’t seem to consider the idea that maybe you were more in a position to improve than he was.
Perhaps you’re trying to point at something that I’m missing, but from my point of view, sentences like “I’d love to say “and I’ve identified the source of the problem and successfully addressed it”, but I don’t think I have” and “would I have been living up to my conversational ideals (significantly) better, if I’d said [...]” are intended indicators that I believe there’s significant room for me to improve, and that I have desire to improve.
At to be clear: I think that there is significant room for improvement for me here, and I desire to improve.
(And for the record: I have put a decent amount of effort towards improving, with some success.)
(And for the record: I don’t recall any instances of getting frustrated-in-the-way-that-turntrout-and-KurtB-are-recounting with Thomas Kwa, or any of Vivek’s team, as I think is a decent amount of evidence about those improvements, given how much time I spent working with them. (Which isn’t to say they didn’t have other discomforts!))
If the issue is on the meta level and that you don’t want to spend time on these problems, a valid answer could be saying “Okay, what do you need to solve this problem without my input?”. Then it could be a discussion about discretionary budget, about the amount of initiative you expect him to have with his job, about asking why he didn’t feel comfortable making these buying decisions right away, etc.
This reply wouldn’t have quite suited me, because Kurt didn’t report to me, and (if memory serves) we’d already been having some issues of the form “can you solve this by using your own initiative, or by spending modest amounts of money”. And (if memory serves) I had already tried to communicate that these weren’t the sorts of conversations I wanted to be having.
(I totally agree that his manager should have had a discussion about discretionary budget and initiative, and to probe why he didn’t feel comfortable making those buying decisions right away. He was not my direct report.)
Like, the context (if I recall correctly, which I might not at 6ish years remove) wasn’t that I called Kurt to ask him what had happened, nor that we were having some sort of general meeting in which he brought up this point. (Again: he didn’t report to me.) The context is that I was already late from walking my commute, sweaty from changing a bike tire, and Kurt came up and was like “Hey, sorry to hear your tire popped. I couldn’t figure out how to use your pump”, in a tone that parsed to me as someone begging pardon and indicating that he was about to ask me how to use one, a conversation that I did not want to be in at that moment and that seemed to me like a new instance of a repeating issue.
Your only takeaway from this issue was “he was wrong and he could have obviously solved it watching a 5 minutes youtube tutorial,
Nope!
I did (and still do) believe that this was an indication that Kurt wasn’t up to the challenge that the ops team was (at that time) undertaking, of seeing if they could make people’s lives easier by doing annoying little tasks for them.
It’s not obvious to me that he could have solved it with a 5 minute youtube tutorial; for all I know it would have taken him hours.
(Where the argument here is not “hours of his time are worth minutes of mine”; I don’t really think in those terms despite how everyone else seems to want to; I’d think more in terms of “training initiative” and “testing the hypothesis that the ops team can cheaply make people’s lives better by handling a bunch of annoying tasks (and, if so, getting a sense for how expensive it is so that we can decide whether it’s within budget)”.)
(Note that I would have considered it totally reasonable and fine for him to go to his manager and say “so, we’re not doing this, it’s too much effort and too low priority”, such that the ops team could tell me “X won’t be done” instead of falsely telling me “X will be done by time Y”, as I was eventually begging them to do.)
My takeaway wasn’t so much “he was wrong” as “something clearly wasn’t working about the requests that he use his own initative / money / his manager, as a resource while trying to help make people’s lives easier by doing a bunch of little tasks for them”. Which conclusion I still think I was licensed to draw, from that particular interaction.
what would have been the most efficient way to communicate to him that he was wrong?”
oh absolutely not, “well then learn!” is not a calculated “efficient” communication, it’s an exasperated outburst, of the sort that is unvirtuous by my conversational standards.
As stated, “Sorry, I don’t have capacity for this conversation, please have it with your manager instead” in a gentle tone would have lived up to my own conversational virtues significantly better.
At no point in this reply are you considering (out loud, at least) that hypothesis “maybe I was wrong and I missed something”.
I’m still not really considering this hypothesis (even internally).
This “X was wrong” concept isn’t even a recognizable concept in my native cognitive format. I readily believe things like “the exasperated outburst wasn’t kind” and “I would have lived up to my conversational virtues more if I had instead been kind” and “it’s worth changing my behavior to live up to those virtues better”. And I readily believe things like “if Kurt had taken initiative there, that would have been favorable evidence about his ability to fill the role he was hired for” and “the fact that Kurt came to me in that situation rather than taking initiative or going to his manager, despite previous attempts to cause him to take initiative and/or go through his manager, was evidence against his ability to fill the role he was hired for”.
Which you perhaps would parse as “Nate believed that both parties Were Wrong”, but that’s not the way that I dice things up, internally.
Perhaps I’m being dense, and some additional kernel of doubt is being asked of me here. If so, I’d appreciate attempts to spell it out like I’m a total idiot.
The best life-hack I have is “Don’t be afraid to come back and restart the discussion once you feel less frustration or exasperation”.
Thanks! “Circle back around after I’ve cooled down” is indeed one of the various techniques
that I have adopted (and that I file under partially-successful changes).
express vulnerability, focus on communicating you needs and how you feel about things, avoid assigning blame, make negotiable requests, and go from there.
Thanks again! (I have read that book, and made changes on account of it that I also file under partial-successes.)
So for the bike tire thing the NVC version would be something like “I need to spend my time efficiently and not have to worry about logistics; when you tell me you’re having problems with the pump I feel stressed because I feel like I’m spending time I should spend on more important things. I need you to find a system where you can solve these problems without my input. What do you need to make that happen?”
If memory serves, the NVC book contains a case where the author is like “You can use NVC even when you’re in a lot of emotional distress! For instance, one time when I was overwhelmed to the point of emotional outburst, I outburst “I am feeling pain!” and left the room, as was an instance of adhering to the NVC issues even in a context where emotions were running high”.
This feels more like the sort of thing that is emotionally-plausible to me in realtime when I am frustrated in that way. I agree that outbursts “I’m feeling frustrated” or “I’m feeling exasperated” would have been better outbursts than “Well then learn”, before exiting. That’s the sort of thing I manage to hit sometimes with partial success.
And, to be clear, I also aspire to higher-grade responses like a chill “hey man, sorry to interrupt (but I’m already late to a bunch of things today), is this a case where you should be using your own initiative and/or talking to your manager instead of me?”. And perhaps we’ll get there! And maybe further discussions like this one will help me gain new techniques towards that end, which I’d greatly appreciate.
So I’ve been thinking about this particular branch for a while and I think I have a slightly different diagnosis from PoignardAzur, which I think nearly lines up with yours but has an important difference. I think this is the important part:
I’m still not really considering this hypothesis (even internally).
This “X was wrong” concept isn’t even a recognizable concept in my native cognitive format.
...
Which you perhaps would parse as “Nate believed that both parties Were Wrong”, but that’s not the way that I dice things up, internally.
Even if you are not tracking who is Wrong is any particular interaction, if other people are tracking who is Wrong, that seems like an important thing for you to handle because it will be a large part of how they interpret communication from you. (For the bike pump example, the thing where you saw Kurt as “begging pardon” seems like evidence this was plausibly up for Kurt / you could have guessed this was up for Kurt in the moment.) One way to interpret the situation is:
Kurt: I am Wrong but would like to displace that to the bike pump
Nate: Rejected! >:[
Kurt: :(
I am imagining that you were not asking for this sort of situation (and would have been less interested in a “save your time” deal if “do emotional labor for people helping you” had explicitly been part of the deal), but my guess is attention to this sort of thing is the next place to look for attacking the source of the problem.
[Also, I’m not trying to confidently assert this is what was actually up for Kurt in the moment—instead I’m asking “if this story made me side with Kurt, why did that happen?”]
Perhaps I’m being dense, and some additional kernel of doubt is being asked of me here. If so, I’d appreciate attempts to spell it out like I’m a total idiot.
I don’t know if “dense” is the word I use, but yeah, I think you missed my point.
My ELI5 would be “You’re still assuming the problem was ‘Kurt didn’t know how to use a pump’ and not ‘there was something wrong with your pump’”.
I don’t want to speculate too much beyond that eg about the discretionary budget stuff.
Thanks again! (I have read that book, and made changes on account of it that I also file under partial-successes.)
The best life-hack I have is “Don’t be afraid to come back and restart the discussion once you feel less frustration or exasperation”.
I talked to Kurt in some detail. Nate never apologized or acknowledged the bike pump incident (until now). After that incident, Nate never came back and said e.g. “wow, I was really frustrated earlier, sorry for taking that out on you!” The next time Kurt was alone with him was in the elevator later that week, and there was a cold silence that neither of them broke.
I think it’s cool that you’re engaging with criticism and acknowledging the harm that happened as a result of your struggles.
And, to cut to the painful part, that’s about the only positive thing that I (random person on the internet) have to say about what you just wrote.
In particular, you sound (and sorry if I’m making any wrong assumption here) extremely unwilling to entertain the idea that you were wrong, or that any potential improvement might need to come from you.
You say:
But you don’t seem to consider the idea that maybe you were more in a position to improve than he was.
I don’t want to be overly harsh or judgmental. You (eventually) apologize and acknowledge your responsibility in employees having a shitty time, and it’s easy for an internet stranger to over-analyze everything you said.
But. I do feel confident that you’re expressing a lack of curiosity here. You’re assuming that there’s nothing you possibly have done to make Kurt’s experience better, and while you’re open to hearing if anyone presents you with a third option, you don’t seem to think seeking out a third option is a problem you should actively solve.
Like, here… You get that you’re not really engaging with what Kurt is/was saying, right?
Kurt’s point is that your pump seemed harder to use than other bike pumps. If the issue is on the object level, valid answers could be asking what types of bike pumps he’s used to and where the discrepancy could come from, suggesting he buy a new pump, or if you’re feeling especially curious asking that he bring his own pump to work so you can compare the two; or maybe the issue could come not from the pump but from the tires, in which case you could consider changing them, etc.
If the issue is on the meta level and that you don’t want to spend time on these problems, a valid answer could be saying “Okay, what do you need to solve this problem without my input?”. Then it could be a discussion about discretionary budget, about the amount of initiative you expect him to have with his job, about asking why he didn’t feel comfortable making these buying decisions right away, etc.
Your only takeaway from this issue was “he was wrong and he could have obviously solved it watching a 5 minutes youtube tutorial, what would have been the most efficient way to communicate to him that he was wrong?”. At no point in this reply are you considering (out loud, at least) that hypothesis “maybe I was wrong and I missed something”.
Like, I get having a hot temper and saying things you regret because you don’t see any other answers in the moment. But part of the process is to communicate despite a hot temper is to be willing to admit you were wrong.
The best life-hack I have is “Don’t be afraid to come back and restart the discussion once you feel less frustration or exasperation”.
Long-term, I’d recommend looking into Non-Violent Communication, if you haven’t already. There’s a lot of cruft in there, but in my experience the core insights work: express vulnerability, focus on communicating you needs and how you feel about things, avoid assigning blame, make negotiable requests, and go from there.
So for the bike tire thing the NVC version would be something like “I need to spend my time efficiently and not have to worry about logistics; when you tell me you’re having problems with the pump I feel stressed because I feel like I’m spending time I should spend on more important things. I need you to find a system where you can solve these problems without my input. What do you need to make that happen?”
I’ve been dating Nate for two years (tho wanna clarify we are not doing marriage-kids and we’re both actively looking for more serious other partners).
Nate is profoundly wonderful in many ways, like often surprises me in new ways of wonderfulness, and has raised my standards in partners. He’s deeply caring, attentive, competent, hilarious, and of course brilliant.
Also, many of the complaints about him in the comments resonate with my experience, particularly your description above. I often find that in disputes I feel dismissed, I perceive him as having a significant lack of curiosity about my worldview (and believe he’s explicitly said he’s not curious about perspectives he anticipates to have no value to him).
Iirc he’s explicitly said he doesn’t respect my thinking (edit: he clarifies he respects it in some areas but not others), and from my perspective this radiates off him whenever we fight. I often feel like I have trouble trusting my own mind, I doubt myself, and despite my best attempts I somehow come out of disputes thinking I must be the one who’s wrong. It’s weird to have a partner who’s so shockingly good in so many ways, yet we have maybe the worst fights I’ve ever experienced in romantic relationships. (Though he says other girls he’s dated don’t have this problem and I am unusual)
On one plus side, I’ve found him to be very good at installing concrete changes if you can articulate them to him. A few times I managed to have a specific request about how I’d like him to say things differently, and if he agrees to do so he updates fast, thoroughly, and permanently.
I feel conflicted about posting this here because ??? should this be personal/private ?? but I’m having some sort of massive relief and feeling like actually I’m not insane. And also I am invested in (though not hopeful about) something changing here cause it would be good for our relationship and I assume also MIRI, which I like and believe in.
(I talked to Nate before posting this comment and he was encouraging)
Thanks <3
(To be clear: I think that at least one other of my past long-term/serious romantic partners would say “of all romantic conflicts, I felt shittiest during ours”. The thing that I don’t recall other long-term/serious romantic partners reporting is the sense of inability to trust their own mind or self during disputes. (It’s plausible to me that some have felt it and not told me.))
Chiming in to provide additional datapoints. (Apologies for this being quite late to the conversation; I frequent The Other Forum regularly, and LW much less so, and only recently read this post/comments.) My experience has been quite different to a lot of the experiences described here, and I was very surprised when reading.
I read all of the people who have had (very) negative experiences as being sincere and reporting events and emotions as they experienced them. I could feel what I perceived to be real distress and pain in a lot of the comments, and this was pretty saddening.
Note: I really don’t like posting personal information on the public internet, for both personal preference and professional reasons. (I felt sure I wanted to post this, though.)
Background: I dated Nate on-and-off for ~6 years (from 2016-2022). We’re now friends on good terms.
How I experienced Nate’s communication over the years:
During disputes, I felt Nate respected my views and my feelings. I felt Nate tried to communicate well with me (though of course this is often hard for both parties in the midst of a dispute and we both failed a bunch).
During disputes, and generally, I felt like Nate engaged with me as an equal. I don’t recall ever feeling dismissed in the ‘you’re not as smart as me’ vein (or any other vein).
It feels important to note that we never really had discussions about his work in the way a lot of people in the comments seemed to have had (where they had very bad experiences). We talked about our respective work a bunch, but the subject matter wasn’t technical (I don’t have a technical background).
I don’t recall Nate losing his cool/saying something mean, except for uncommon instances where I was very upset and was saying unkind things first (not my proudest moments!)
I ~never felt like Nate’s confidence/manner impacted my views in a way I don’t endorse or made me feel less sure of my own beliefs. Nate is certainly intense and confident-sounding, but for whatever reason, I don’t recall this in particular causing issues.
The ways in which our communication was bad felt to me more mundane and predictable as relationship-comms go (unclear communications around expectations, not recognising and addressing underlying issues/feelings quickly enough, etc). And none of this was the reason we ultimately parted ways.
Also, in my experience, Nate’s communication / handling of disputes has improved over time.
I don’t want to paint an overly rosy picture—our worst disputes were really not great (understatement to save me saying personal things), but for reasons basically unrelated to the themes of the comments here. Nate is flawed in loads of ways (I was always pretty icked-out at the reverence? people treated him with, like he was perfect or something); and though I haven’t had the experiences others here have had, I find him to be someone who wants to be better and knows he’s far from perfect.
Perhaps you’re trying to point at something that I’m missing, but from my point of view, sentences like “I’d love to say “and I’ve identified the source of the problem and successfully addressed it”, but I don’t think I have” and “would I have been living up to my conversational ideals (significantly) better, if I’d said [...]” are intended indicators that I believe there’s significant room for me to improve, and that I have desire to improve.
At to be clear: I think that there is significant room for improvement for me here, and I desire to improve.
(And for the record: I have put a decent amount of effort towards improving, with some success.)
(And for the record: I don’t recall any instances of getting frustrated-in-the-way-that-turntrout-and-KurtB-are-recounting with Thomas Kwa, or any of Vivek’s team, as I think is a decent amount of evidence about those improvements, given how much time I spent working with them. (Which isn’t to say they didn’t have other discomforts!))
This reply wouldn’t have quite suited me, because Kurt didn’t report to me, and (if memory serves) we’d already been having some issues of the form “can you solve this by using your own initiative, or by spending modest amounts of money”. And (if memory serves) I had already tried to communicate that these weren’t the sorts of conversations I wanted to be having.
(I totally agree that his manager should have had a discussion about discretionary budget and initiative, and to probe why he didn’t feel comfortable making those buying decisions right away. He was not my direct report.)
Like, the context (if I recall correctly, which I might not at 6ish years remove) wasn’t that I called Kurt to ask him what had happened, nor that we were having some sort of general meeting in which he brought up this point. (Again: he didn’t report to me.) The context is that I was already late from walking my commute, sweaty from changing a bike tire, and Kurt came up and was like “Hey, sorry to hear your tire popped. I couldn’t figure out how to use your pump”, in a tone that parsed to me as someone begging pardon and indicating that he was about to ask me how to use one, a conversation that I did not want to be in at that moment and that seemed to me like a new instance of a repeating issue.
Nope!
I did (and still do) believe that this was an indication that Kurt wasn’t up to the challenge that the ops team was (at that time) undertaking, of seeing if they could make people’s lives easier by doing annoying little tasks for them.
It’s not obvious to me that he could have solved it with a 5 minute youtube tutorial; for all I know it would have taken him hours.
(Where the argument here is not “hours of his time are worth minutes of mine”; I don’t really think in those terms despite how everyone else seems to want to; I’d think more in terms of “training initiative” and “testing the hypothesis that the ops team can cheaply make people’s lives better by handling a bunch of annoying tasks (and, if so, getting a sense for how expensive it is so that we can decide whether it’s within budget)”.)
(Note that I would have considered it totally reasonable and fine for him to go to his manager and say “so, we’re not doing this, it’s too much effort and too low priority”, such that the ops team could tell me “X won’t be done” instead of falsely telling me “X will be done by time Y”, as I was eventually begging them to do.)
My takeaway wasn’t so much “he was wrong” as “something clearly wasn’t working about the requests that he use his own initative / money / his manager, as a resource while trying to help make people’s lives easier by doing a bunch of little tasks for them”. Which conclusion I still think I was licensed to draw, from that particular interaction.
oh absolutely not, “well then learn!” is not a calculated “efficient” communication, it’s an exasperated outburst, of the sort that is unvirtuous by my conversational standards.
As stated, “Sorry, I don’t have capacity for this conversation, please have it with your manager instead” in a gentle tone would have lived up to my own conversational virtues significantly better.
I’m still not really considering this hypothesis (even internally).
This “X was wrong” concept isn’t even a recognizable concept in my native cognitive format. I readily believe things like “the exasperated outburst wasn’t kind” and “I would have lived up to my conversational virtues more if I had instead been kind” and “it’s worth changing my behavior to live up to those virtues better”. And I readily believe things like “if Kurt had taken initiative there, that would have been favorable evidence about his ability to fill the role he was hired for” and “the fact that Kurt came to me in that situation rather than taking initiative or going to his manager, despite previous attempts to cause him to take initiative and/or go through his manager, was evidence against his ability to fill the role he was hired for”.
Which you perhaps would parse as “Nate believed that both parties Were Wrong”, but that’s not the way that I dice things up, internally.
Perhaps I’m being dense, and some additional kernel of doubt is being asked of me here. If so, I’d appreciate attempts to spell it out like I’m a total idiot.
Thanks! “Circle back around after I’ve cooled down” is indeed one of the various techniques that I have adopted (and that I file under partially-successful changes).
Thanks again! (I have read that book, and made changes on account of it that I also file under partial-successes.)
If memory serves, the NVC book contains a case where the author is like “You can use NVC even when you’re in a lot of emotional distress! For instance, one time when I was overwhelmed to the point of emotional outburst, I outburst “I am feeling pain!” and left the room, as was an instance of adhering to the NVC issues even in a context where emotions were running high”.
This feels more like the sort of thing that is emotionally-plausible to me in realtime when I am frustrated in that way. I agree that outbursts “I’m feeling frustrated” or “I’m feeling exasperated” would have been better outbursts than “Well then learn”, before exiting. That’s the sort of thing I manage to hit sometimes with partial success.
And, to be clear, I also aspire to higher-grade responses like a chill “hey man, sorry to interrupt (but I’m already late to a bunch of things today), is this a case where you should be using your own initiative and/or talking to your manager instead of me?”. And perhaps we’ll get there! And maybe further discussions like this one will help me gain new techniques towards that end, which I’d greatly appreciate.
So I’ve been thinking about this particular branch for a while and I think I have a slightly different diagnosis from PoignardAzur, which I think nearly lines up with yours but has an important difference. I think this is the important part:
Even if you are not tracking who is Wrong is any particular interaction, if other people are tracking who is Wrong, that seems like an important thing for you to handle because it will be a large part of how they interpret communication from you. (For the bike pump example, the thing where you saw Kurt as “begging pardon” seems like evidence this was plausibly up for Kurt / you could have guessed this was up for Kurt in the moment.) One way to interpret the situation is:
Kurt: I am Wrong but would like to displace that to the bike pump
Nate: Rejected! >:[
Kurt: :(
I am imagining that you were not asking for this sort of situation (and would have been less interested in a “save your time” deal if “do emotional labor for people helping you” had explicitly been part of the deal), but my guess is attention to this sort of thing is the next place to look for attacking the source of the problem.
[Also, I’m not trying to confidently assert this is what was actually up for Kurt in the moment—instead I’m asking “if this story made me side with Kurt, why did that happen?”]
I don’t know if “dense” is the word I use, but yeah, I think you missed my point.
My ELI5 would be “You’re still assuming the problem was ‘Kurt didn’t know how to use a pump’ and not ‘there was something wrong with your pump’”.
I don’t want to speculate too much beyond that eg about the discretionary budget stuff.
Happy to hear that!
(I had used that pump that very day, shortly before, to pump up the replacement tire.)
I talked to Kurt in some detail. Nate never apologized or acknowledged the bike pump incident (until now). After that incident, Nate never came back and said e.g. “wow, I was really frustrated earlier, sorry for taking that out on you!” The next time Kurt was alone with him was in the elevator later that week, and there was a cold silence that neither of them broke.