Being Grateful For Grievances

Transcript

Welcome beautiful thinkers! Let’s talk about being grateful for grievances. I was thinking about my friend’s mother, she’s French, and lives in the UK, around Leeds, a couple hours from Leeds, I think.

And she told me a story once. She said, you know, English people are so polite, so clear, so fairly polite. They won’t tell you when you’re doing something wrong. So she would go into the post office sometimes.

And she would see that there was no body at the booth, at the cashier. So she would walk right up and pay for her letter, postage stamp or whatever it was, and go on her merry way. Not giving a second thought to it.

A year of doing this, she would go there every week or every couple of weeks to go in, walk straight up to the booth. And then one day, a year later, somebody said to her, “Aye, excuse me, madam, there’s a line.” And she said, “Ouh!” A year of doing this, she hadn’t realized, because the line was a few meters from the booth, she hadn’t realized that the line was connected to the booth. She hadn’t noticed. Nobody had said anything to her.

So, it’s nice when somebody finally takes the time to voice a grievance like that. And lets us know that maybe what we’re doing isn’t exactly right.

Now, some of these times, a lot of the time, these messages weren’t always find their way in the most pleasant phrasings reading this book called difficult conversations. And it says something like, “There’s no such thing as a polite hand grenade.”

Some conversations are going to be difficult. And there’s no way around that, you can’t sugarcoat hand grenade, it’s, it’s going to be difficult no matter what you do.

That of course, you can find ways to deliver it in a way that most likely being well received, or at least with time.

I remember once, somebody said to me, it was a lover of mine.

And I was going off with some rant of mine about something I had a very strong opinion about, which was ultimately trivial. And she, she started questioning me on it.

And I said, “What, what is it? What do you want to say?”

And eventually, she sat me down and said, “Look, I don’t know why, why you act like this. But it seems like you’re trying to get into a fight.”

And she explained this to me in detail for about three or four minutes.

And I was astounded. I didn’t know what to say.

A few minutes later, I started crying and she’s like, “What is it was what’s wrong?” I said, “No, no, nothing is wrong. Something’s right.”

So, few people would take the time to give that kind of criticism. So, really, I appreciate that.

And that was probably a key moment in the renovation of my personality, finding a different way to be, not being so argumentative or antagonistic with people, not arguing over trivialities.

Sometimes, a lot of the time we say these things to people.

Maybe that won’t change, maybe one make a difference. Sometimes it will.

And more importantly, I suppose, if we’re willing to listen, then people will tell us what they think they can well offer us free feedback and criticism and we can take it on board.

And if we can be present in those moments, difficult as it might be, those blows to our egos, we may be able to even be grateful for when people show us what we are.

Thank you for being my mirror. Thank you for voicing your grievances.

Thank you for receiving my grievances.