Good post! I saw Kaj’s response to having what he feels is “a bit of an ‘aura of trustworthiness’,” and that seems to be a phenotypical Real Life example of the Big Seeming Small, which, in my mind, demands a very separate discussion from the intentions of the seemer.
This post may be about intentions in seeming, but there also exist important lacks-of-intentions-in-seeming which came to the fore of my mind when reading this.
I am a large man, with a neanderthal-ish face, a strong chin, and a voice that sounds very much as if one or both of my parents were tenured professors. My body language, like my chest, is very broad. I’m not very smart. I’m a blabbermouth in real life, and I interrupt slow speakers without realizing it. My voice is consistently very loud, because my father was, in fact, a tenured professor with a hearing disability.
I project an aura of untrustworthiness when I try to act small. Because generally, no one believes I am small in any way, until they grow to know me. I think of myself as shy and self-conscious, but none of my physicality seems to express that.
One of my innate smallnesses is a lack of self-control, but this often expresses itself as a perceived lack-of-need-for-self-control, which people instinctively interpret as dominant.
When I interrupt people, I get away with it. Even, and especially, when I shouldn’t. Then I beat myself up about it for three days, rehearsing my conversations in my head after-the-fact.
I am so self-conscious about this fact about myself that the first thing I could think of, seeing that charming picture of Anna Salamon, was to simulate a conversation with her where I was needlessly interruptive and obnoxious. I immediately felt shame, seeing that picture, because I am terrible at self-control and I can JUST IMAGINE how a conversation between us would go. And I’m still feeling pangs of shame, five minutes later, for that imagined conversation, in which I failed to know my place, with this smart person I’ve never met...
So, clearly I have a low opinion of myself that my body doesn’t properly communicate, but attempting to act small goes poorly for me. People don’t trust self-deprecations from me. I shout them everywhere I go, including right here and now. Despite everything I’ve said having been utterly true, my bigness even comes out in my writing, and I can feel doubt from you before I even click SUBMIT. “Is his face really neanderthal-ish? That sounds like body dysphoria, not a real problem.” I promise you, when you imagine a neanderthal, you imagine my face.
I’m therefore limited to pretending to be small in Softening ways, not in Smallening ways. I do a lot of flamboyant shrugging and enthusiastic nodding and avoiding eye-contact. Does anyone have any advice for expressing “HI, I’M A LOUD IDIOT, PLEASE TELL ME WHEN YOU WANT ME TO SHUT UP.”? Because I have literally used that as an opener before, and it kind of railroads me into a certain kind of conversation that I don’t particularly enjoy having. I need to find something better.
A lot of your comment actually sounds pretty familiar to me.
The main suggestion I have based on what you wrote is to pick a small number of specific things you’d like to do differently, then gradually practice those in some conversations, treating it explicitly as practice that you will need to do for a while, not as a magic fix that you’d be able to implement perfectly if only you were a good enough person.
To unpack that:
Specific things to do differently: from your comment, it already sounds like you’ve already identified some things you do that make you “bigger” than you want to be—interrupting people and speaking in a loud voice. Take those, as a starter.
Practice in some conversations: explicitly pick some interactions where it feels OK to experiment with this—maybe it’s first conversations with people you’re not likely to meet again, or maybe it’s group conversations with 4+ people where it’s fine if you don’t say much, or maybe it’s some other type of context. However you choose, start trying to keep an eye out for “practice conversations”.
Treating it as practice: in most conversations, you probably have multiple goals you’re pursuing at once—maybe to learn something, maybe to tell someone else something, maybe to get them to like you, etc. The idea of explicitly picking some subset of conversations to be practice conversations is that in those ones, you bump up practicing your selected skills to be above your other goals.
Practice you’ll need to do for a while: At first, your main goal is just to notice chances to practice the things you’ve picked. The first few times you try it, you might not notice until it’s too late—maybe you’ll notice once you’re a sentence and a half into interrupting someone, or you’ll talk quietly the first time you speak, but not the second. That’s totally OK! See AgentyDuck on why noticing is so important (and hard). If you notice at all, that counts as you getting practice, and therefore as a win. If you stick with it, you’ll gradually get better at noticing, and the better you are at noticing, the more chances you have to practice doing the thing.
This is basically what I did many years ago when training myself out of some pretty similar habits. Maybe the most similar was that when I felt insecure in a conversation, I would (subconsciously) default to trying to speak as much as possible—I think motivated by trying to show people I was smart? But this just resulted in (a) people being annoyed that they couldn’t get a word in, and (b) my average contribution being not that interesting, because I was saying so many things. One thing I practiced very explicitly was noticing when I was feeling this kind of insecurity, and raising my bar for how interesting/funny/etc I expected my contribution to be. I knew theoretically that it’s much more likeable to say a few things people enjoy than lots of things they don’t, but it still took a lot of attentive practice to change my in-the-moment habits.
I’ll note that trying to express “HI, I’M A LOUD IDIOT, PLEASE TELL ME WHEN YOU WANT ME TO SHUT UP.” sounds to me like basically the epitome of low-big as described in the post—and I therefore wouldn’t recommend it. I can understand it seems appealing since you’re perceived as being much bigger than you want to be, and you’re trying to compensate for that, but this is such a “big” way to try to compensate that I think it’s bound to backfire. Instead, I think it’s totally feasible to learn to work with features of yourself that you seem to be treating as fixed (voice volume, interrupting-ness, body language), to actually directly affect how “big” people perceive you to be, rather than asking them to forgive you for it.
Good post! I saw Kaj’s response to having what he feels is “a bit of an ‘aura of trustworthiness’,” and that seems to be a phenotypical Real Life example of the Big Seeming Small, which, in my mind, demands a very separate discussion from the intentions of the seemer.
This post may be about intentions in seeming, but there also exist important lacks-of-intentions-in-seeming which came to the fore of my mind when reading this.
I am a large man, with a neanderthal-ish face, a strong chin, and a voice that sounds very much as if one or both of my parents were tenured professors. My body language, like my chest, is very broad. I’m not very smart. I’m a blabbermouth in real life, and I interrupt slow speakers without realizing it. My voice is consistently very loud, because my father was, in fact, a tenured professor with a hearing disability.
I project an aura of untrustworthiness when I try to act small. Because generally, no one believes I am small in any way, until they grow to know me. I think of myself as shy and self-conscious, but none of my physicality seems to express that.
One of my innate smallnesses is a lack of self-control, but this often expresses itself as a perceived lack-of-need-for-self-control, which people instinctively interpret as dominant.
When I interrupt people, I get away with it. Even, and especially, when I shouldn’t. Then I beat myself up about it for three days, rehearsing my conversations in my head after-the-fact.
I am so self-conscious about this fact about myself that the first thing I could think of, seeing that charming picture of Anna Salamon, was to simulate a conversation with her where I was needlessly interruptive and obnoxious. I immediately felt shame, seeing that picture, because I am terrible at self-control and I can JUST IMAGINE how a conversation between us would go. And I’m still feeling pangs of shame, five minutes later, for that imagined conversation, in which I failed to know my place, with this smart person I’ve never met...
So, clearly I have a low opinion of myself that my body doesn’t properly communicate, but attempting to act small goes poorly for me. People don’t trust self-deprecations from me. I shout them everywhere I go, including right here and now. Despite everything I’ve said having been utterly true, my bigness even comes out in my writing, and I can feel doubt from you before I even click SUBMIT. “Is his face really neanderthal-ish? That sounds like body dysphoria, not a real problem.” I promise you, when you imagine a neanderthal, you imagine my face.
I’m therefore limited to pretending to be small in Softening ways, not in Smallening ways. I do a lot of flamboyant shrugging and enthusiastic nodding and avoiding eye-contact. Does anyone have any advice for expressing “HI, I’M A LOUD IDIOT, PLEASE TELL ME WHEN YOU WANT ME TO SHUT UP.”? Because I have literally used that as an opener before, and it kind of railroads me into a certain kind of conversation that I don’t particularly enjoy having. I need to find something better.
Hey Martin,
A lot of your comment actually sounds pretty familiar to me.
The main suggestion I have based on what you wrote is to pick a small number of specific things you’d like to do differently, then gradually practice those in some conversations, treating it explicitly as practice that you will need to do for a while, not as a magic fix that you’d be able to implement perfectly if only you were a good enough person.
To unpack that:
Specific things to do differently: from your comment, it already sounds like you’ve already identified some things you do that make you “bigger” than you want to be—interrupting people and speaking in a loud voice. Take those, as a starter.
Practice in some conversations: explicitly pick some interactions where it feels OK to experiment with this—maybe it’s first conversations with people you’re not likely to meet again, or maybe it’s group conversations with 4+ people where it’s fine if you don’t say much, or maybe it’s some other type of context. However you choose, start trying to keep an eye out for “practice conversations”.
Treating it as practice: in most conversations, you probably have multiple goals you’re pursuing at once—maybe to learn something, maybe to tell someone else something, maybe to get them to like you, etc. The idea of explicitly picking some subset of conversations to be practice conversations is that in those ones, you bump up practicing your selected skills to be above your other goals.
Practice you’ll need to do for a while: At first, your main goal is just to notice chances to practice the things you’ve picked. The first few times you try it, you might not notice until it’s too late—maybe you’ll notice once you’re a sentence and a half into interrupting someone, or you’ll talk quietly the first time you speak, but not the second. That’s totally OK! See AgentyDuck on why noticing is so important (and hard). If you notice at all, that counts as you getting practice, and therefore as a win. If you stick with it, you’ll gradually get better at noticing, and the better you are at noticing, the more chances you have to practice doing the thing.
This is basically what I did many years ago when training myself out of some pretty similar habits. Maybe the most similar was that when I felt insecure in a conversation, I would (subconsciously) default to trying to speak as much as possible—I think motivated by trying to show people I was smart? But this just resulted in (a) people being annoyed that they couldn’t get a word in, and (b) my average contribution being not that interesting, because I was saying so many things. One thing I practiced very explicitly was noticing when I was feeling this kind of insecurity, and raising my bar for how interesting/funny/etc I expected my contribution to be. I knew theoretically that it’s much more likeable to say a few things people enjoy than lots of things they don’t, but it still took a lot of attentive practice to change my in-the-moment habits.
I’ll note that trying to express “HI, I’M A LOUD IDIOT, PLEASE TELL ME WHEN YOU WANT ME TO SHUT UP.” sounds to me like basically the epitome of low-big as described in the post—and I therefore wouldn’t recommend it. I can understand it seems appealing since you’re perceived as being much bigger than you want to be, and you’re trying to compensate for that, but this is such a “big” way to try to compensate that I think it’s bound to backfire. Instead, I think it’s totally feasible to learn to work with features of yourself that you seem to be treating as fixed (voice volume, interrupting-ness, body language), to actually directly affect how “big” people perceive you to be, rather than asking them to forgive you for it.