My family has a guess-culture (“you must not love me enough if you don’t notice that I’m too busy to for what you request!”)
I’m guessy about things by instinct.. but don’t like being guessy about receiving requests—it feels manipulative to place the burden of my feeling offended on the person asking.
From the perspective of receiving requests, I’ve started trying hard to play by Crocker’s Rules (to the usual mixed success).
In making requests—I prefer to be telly and have tried to incorporate that into my life.
But what I notice is that other people sometimes don’t realise you’re making a request—or get caught up in the long explanation and miss the “call to action”—so an actual ask is often useful even with the telling.
So I’d have phrased it as:
“I’ll be in town this weekend for a business trip. I would like to stay at your place, since it would save me the cost of a hotel, plus I would enjoy seeing you and expect we’d have some fun. I’m looking for other options, though, and would rather stay elsewhere than inconvenience you. So, is staying with you ok?”
Remember—sometimes the “telling” is even longer than this short phrase...repeating the question at the end helps people with weaker short-term memory.
Also I have started to lead groups of mixed ask/guess-culture people… and asking for things from people of multiple cultures (without offending any of them accidentally) is a skill I’m just starting to have to figure out.
I am well aware of the negative feelings of burdening somebody (presumably of guess-culture) with a request that they really don’t have the time/inclination to fulfil—but they feel obliged to say yes to when i ask. So I’m working on ways of minimising that situation.
I have tried pure-telling—but given it doesn’t have an explicit question in it, my experience so far is that too many people will not realise there is actually a call-to-action there or that it means YOU. This is especially in the case where it takes a page of explanation to get across what’s going on and why they need to care about it. The request easily gets lost in that.
So I’ve instead been trying my hand at new skills of asking-without-offending.
My favourite request-structure so far being:
“These are all the reasons and background about why I’m making this request…
Will you X?
It’s absolutely ok to say no.”
It incorporates aspects of all three cultures:
You tell exactly why, so that guessers aren’t inferring incorrect assumptions based on your implied motivations.
You are explicitly asking.
You are giving them an explicit get-out-of-request-free card by giving explicit permission to say no.
My family has a guess-culture (“you must not love me enough if you don’t notice that I’m too busy to for what you request!”) I’m guessy about things by instinct.. but don’t like being guessy about receiving requests—it feels manipulative to place the burden of my feeling offended on the person asking. From the perspective of receiving requests, I’ve started trying hard to play by Crocker’s Rules (to the usual mixed success).
In making requests—I prefer to be telly and have tried to incorporate that into my life. But what I notice is that other people sometimes don’t realise you’re making a request—or get caught up in the long explanation and miss the “call to action”—so an actual ask is often useful even with the telling.
So I’d have phrased it as: “I’ll be in town this weekend for a business trip. I would like to stay at your place, since it would save me the cost of a hotel, plus I would enjoy seeing you and expect we’d have some fun. I’m looking for other options, though, and would rather stay elsewhere than inconvenience you. So, is staying with you ok?”
Remember—sometimes the “telling” is even longer than this short phrase...repeating the question at the end helps people with weaker short-term memory.
Also I have started to lead groups of mixed ask/guess-culture people… and asking for things from people of multiple cultures (without offending any of them accidentally) is a skill I’m just starting to have to figure out.
I am well aware of the negative feelings of burdening somebody (presumably of guess-culture) with a request that they really don’t have the time/inclination to fulfil—but they feel obliged to say yes to when i ask. So I’m working on ways of minimising that situation.
I have tried pure-telling—but given it doesn’t have an explicit question in it, my experience so far is that too many people will not realise there is actually a call-to-action there or that it means YOU. This is especially in the case where it takes a page of explanation to get across what’s going on and why they need to care about it. The request easily gets lost in that.
So I’ve instead been trying my hand at new skills of asking-without-offending. My favourite request-structure so far being:
“These are all the reasons and background about why I’m making this request… Will you X? It’s absolutely ok to say no.”
It incorporates aspects of all three cultures: You tell exactly why, so that guessers aren’t inferring incorrect assumptions based on your implied motivations. You are explicitly asking. You are giving them an explicit get-out-of-request-free card by giving explicit permission to say no.