In the season of forgiveness

[drwex]

Emma Bull (coffeeem) put this on her LJ. It's so very true of me that I asked her permission to reuse it. She agreed, so here goes, with slight modifications:

I like it when someone agrees with me, when someone laughs at my jokes, or thinks something I said was smart. When they say so, I get a nice little jolt of satisfaction.

When I think someone else has made a wise observation or a good joke, or put something particularly well, I sometimes take the moment to say, "Oh, well done." To agree or laugh or admire. But sometimes I jump right past that to add to it.

I mean it as a compliment: "That was so good I want to be a part of it." But at best, it looks as if I didn't notice how good the original statement was. At worst, it looks like attempted one-upmanship: "Oh, I can be smarter/funnier/more articulate than that."

If I've done this to you, I am sincerely sorry and I hope you'll forgive the offense I've given. I will try harder not to do this any more.

Comments

[unseelie.livejournal.com]

thank you for sharing your mental justification for this behavior; I have seen it, or variations, for some years, amoung a certain subset of humanity.
I have always made allowances for some behaviors in the past; and not allowed any annoyance to build.
That said; Now I not only feel no stress - I feel retroactively complimented.
Some of the additions/corrections I have gotten in the past were correcions when I had bad data or had mispoken; I do not mind corrections under those circumstances (within some limits - there is a differance between kind consideration and berbal abuse) but there have been other times when it seemed someone was trying to one-up me.
I can now reflect on some of these occasions and be complimented.
Thank You.

[drwex]

You're welcome. I've found this to be a fairly common behavior in male tech/engineering types. It was reading it in the journal of a non-tech, artistic, woman that really caught my attention.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

That's quite a lovely sentiment.

I know I used to do this a lot, and noticed it in myself and tried to make a conscious effort to keep noticing and stilling my tongue. But I'm sure I miss more than I notice. This is a good reminder, thanks for sharing.

[eccentrific.livejournal.com]

I agree completely. This is something that I have certainly been guilty of myself and have been working on being better at. When someone comes out with an idea that I like, I very frequently want to build on it, to add to it. I try very hard to remember to start by expressing enthusiasm so that the person knows that's my motive, not that I think the original idea was deficient.

I have also found that once I started making a point of doing this, that it was wildly effective too. It often gets the first person involved since they are happy that I like the idea and so they join in the expanding process, rather than getting discouraged.

A very related behavior I have been trying to work on as well is not allowing myself to express criticism of anything (to its author anyway) without first enumerating what I like about the idea or work. I started trying to do this after a conversation with a coworker in which he expressed an idea which I thought was cool, but had some flaws and wouldn't work in its current form. So I pointed out what was wrong with it. He got discouraged and scrapped the idea. It took me a while to convince him that I really liked the idea and thought it was worthwhile, and I was pointing out where it was deficient because I wanted to see it fully developed and made workable, not because I thought it was bad. After all, I wouldn't waste the effort criticizing an idea with no merit....