Okay, you and I can make a lot of mistakes. We can let people down and act in such a way that people have a right to be angry with us. But we also are, quite often, a convenient target for people to take out the frustration they are experiencing in other areas of their life.

LifeHack.org has a good post up on practicing what they call “Tedious Reflection,” a strategy that helps one get to what is really going on. Read this example and see how it might be applied to that person who knocks on your door and asks, “do you have a minute?” prior to unloading in a bizarre way.

Try this example. You sit down at your colleague’s work station to quickly check something while the service guy works on your computer. You close a window and temporarily lose a file for your colleague and she is furious. Of course you can offer to search around and retrieve it but she won’t listen. Her blood is boiling, her pulse is rising and it looks like any minute you might see Mt. Vesuvius erupting through her eyes. Practical solutions are not going to help because you simply don’t understand how she feels. It is not about the lost file anymore.

There is something going on in her personal world that is making the bomb tick.

The only solution is to deal with the understanding issue before it gets out of hand. The best way to do this, and walk away with a productive relationship, takes time. If you don’t have the time, then try some other way to make peace but you are going to lose in the long run. Until we try to understand the other person, an issue will never be fully solved, and may well come back to bite us later.

Here is one way to make sure you understand the other person. I call it Tedious Reflection, simply because it is tedious and it involves reflecting what you hear from the other person. This is not the same as the manipulative reflection that is supposed to build rapport with others. All we are doing here is asking if we understand the other person. If we don’t then we ask again and again and again slowly getting closer and closer to full understanding.

So you lose your colleague’s file and you carefully ask her:

You: “Can I solve this by finding your file for you? Will that make everything OK ?”

Sue: “Of course it won’t, you lazy………”

You: “So is the problem that I am a lazy….”

Sue: “No, that just makes you lose files. The problem is that this is the fourth time that…”

You: “So is the problem that people keep abusing your generosity?”

Sue: “No I haven’t been generous, it is just that they assume that I will be.”

You: “So people have just been walking in here and using your desktop like I did.”

Sue: “Yes, and they wouldn’t have done that if I was a jerk like Steven”

And so it goes on, and after a tedious process of dragging the understanding out of your colleague, her tempo gradually reduces, her colour changes back to normal and she visibly relaxes a little. At the end, you understand that the actual incident was just the flash-point. Really she cared very little about the file and so finding it again was not a big issue. It all came down to a bunch of other things happening in her world that now you have a better understanding of. (Source)

I wish I had known this trick earlier. It takes thick skin as you will need to not jump into defending yourself right way for an outrageous attack, but I think it will be much better if we can help people to see what they are doing for themselves.

I tip my virtual hat to YouthHacks for the link.