Social Skills

I Told You So

October 26, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Something goes wrong, and your frustration is so intense that you just can’t resist blurting out, “Told ya, I saw that coming” or even “Why didn’t you listen to me?”

The phrase “I told you so” one of the least justifiable in the language. It rarely generates a positive response, and it’s unfailingly damaging to marriages, friendships, and parents’ relationships with children.

Events and premonitions thereof make perfect sense with hindsight. Your loved one already knows that you were right, and she was wrong. Going through failure is hard enough. She doesn’t need you to pour salt on her wound.

At some point, when the dust has settled, you may say carefully, “Sweetie, this stinks. That surely did not go as intended. Perhaps we shouldn’t do that again.”

It’s never okay to do the “I told you so” spiel even if you have her best interests at heart. Keep your disappointment—or delight—to yourself.

Being right about something feels so darn good, doesn’t it? But hold your tongue on gloating. Give up that attachment to the need to be correct. Let your loved one be human—let her heal, learn, grow, and evolve.

Avoiding negativity in the supportive relationship sometimes means biting your tongue and allowing the pieces to fall where they may.

Give your loved one the positive support she needs and help her cope. If you are kind, she may be more willing to listen in the future.

Idea for Impact: In relationships, a little tact and a lot of silence go a long way.

Lessons from Drucker: Manage People, Not Things

August 13, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One of Peter Drucker’s big ideas was the notion of management as a “liberal art.” In The New Realities (1950,) Drucker argued that effective managers need a wide-ranging knowledge on subjects as varied as psychology, science—even religion.

Management is a liberal art—“liberal” because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; “art” because it deals with practice and application.

Management deals with people, their values, their growth and development—and this makes it a humanity. So does its concern with, and impact on, social structure and the community. Indeed… management is deeply involved in spiritual concerns—the nature of man, good and evil.

Managers draw on all the knowledge and insights of the humanities and the social sciences—on psychology and philosophy, on economics and on history, on the physical sciences and on ethics.

Idea for Impact: Management has become more about numbers and processes than about people

Manage people, not things.

A wise manager is a well-rounded one—somebody who understands and can leverage, in Drucker’s words, “the nature of man.”

Understand your employees. Understand how they think and act. Know what makes them tick—what drives them, what motivates them, what their aspirations are. Acquaint yourself to different approaches to management based on different sets of values. Individualize your management approach.

Use this understanding to create a productive work environment—that’s your foremost responsibility as a manager.

Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

August 11, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Flattery has had a bad name since the Greeks. Over 2,000 years ago, Publilius Syrus, the Latin writer of mimes and dramatic sketches, warned, “Flattery was formerly a vice; it has now become the fashion.”

Flattery continues to be an obligatory weapon in all manner of political and personal influence. Richard Stengel’s A Brief History of Flattery (2000) lists over 200 synonyms for “to flatter” and “flattery.”

A trio of marketing professors conducted a set of experiments using a sunglasses kiosk. The sales clerks flattered customers either during the sale, after the sale, or not at all. Then, researchers asked the shoppers to evaluate the trustworthiness of the clerks.

Turns out that the customers could see through it. Flattery, whether it comes during or after the sale, reduced the customer’s perception of the clerk’s trustworthiness. Without conscious reflection, flattery made the customers distrust the salesclerks:

Our findings show that even when it was obvious the compliment didn’t serve any underlying sales motive, the participants didn’t trust what the sales agent had to say.

In a way, it’s sad that the marketplace has become so suspicious, but it seems that when someone flatters us, we get our back up even if it’s not called for. It’s the consumers’ default position to react negatively to what is perceived as an attempt to manipulate them.

Idea for Impact: Don’t try to sway anybody by unsavory flattery and ingratiation.

Flattery is an inducement that seems great initially but leaves a horrid aftertaste. People will eat up your flattery if they’re starving for affection, but undue adulation isn’t as appealing as honest, sincere appreciation.

What’s Wrong With Giving Advice

August 10, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

“It is a pleasure to give advice, humiliating to need it, normal to ignore it,” somebody once remarked.

What really happens when you offer advice is … you instinctively send a message to the other person that they don’t have the resources to solve the problem themselves.

Your advice is probably rooted in your expectations, not in the understanding of the other

The best way to give advice is to not give any advice at all but to listen attentively and emphatically.

People who relate their problems don’t really want your advice, even if they seek to sound you out about a problem.

They want you to listen to their problem, perhaps ask open-ended questions to help them think through the problem, and help them explore the options they have.

People Want You to Listen, Not to Talk

Clinical psychologist Lisa Damour notes that parents can’t help but offer direct solutions to their kids’ problems. In her insightful ‘Adolescence’column for the New York Times, Damour suggests,

Rushing in with suggestions carries the risk that it may strike our teenagers as a vote of no confidence when they are mainly seeking our reassurance that they can handle whatever life throws at them.

Instead of proposing solutions, we might bolster adolescents as they sort things out. Saying, “I’ve seen you get through things like this before” or “This is tough, but you are too” can effectively loan teenagers a bit of perspective and confidence when their own feels shaken.

Even teenagers who have already addressed a problem may still seek our reassurance. [A teenager] said she sometimes tells her parents “about a situation and what I did to solve it” in order to get validation that she made the right choice. When this happens, she says she’s “not really looking for their solution, just checking that they think I did the right thing with my limited problem-solving experience.”

Adolescents often feel vulnerable, perhaps especially so when they open up to adults about their jams and scrapes. In these moments, well-intentioned guidance can land like criticism, and lectures or “I-told-you-so”s—however warranted—may feel like outright attacks.

More often than not, offering our teenagers an ear, empathy, and encouragement gives them what they came for. If your teenager wants help solving the problem, divide the issue into categories: what can be changed and what cannot. For the first type, focus on the needs your teenager identifies and work together to brainstorm solutions. For the second type, help them come to terms with the things they cannot control.

Often People Want You to Listen—Sharing is an Act of Self-Reflection

When people open the door of their confidence, tread delicately.

Open the ear of your heart. Don’t impose your perspective, but help them find a solution that works for them.

To empathize, say, “You are in a tough situation,” “gee, that stinks, it totally not fair to you,” “I understand why you feel this way,” “You have every right to be offended,” or “I’m so sorry you have to face this kind of difficulty right now.”
To help clarify, say, “I might be wrong, but it seems to me …,” “Are you concerned that …,” or “what if ….”
To expand perspective, say, “This may seem like a big deal at this time, but how will you feel about this in a week? A month? A year?” or “what do you think is the worst fallout of this?”

Idea for Impact: Often, the Best Advice You Can Give is Not Providing Any At All

If pressed to offer an opinion, tease out the options they’re considering. Ask, “What do you think you ought to do?” or “What would you like to happen?”

Don’t offer a solution that pleases you more than it does the other. The best solution to a problem somebody is facing is the one that works for the other person, not you.

Undertake Not What You Cannot Perform

July 16, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Each time you break a promise or commitment, even to yourself, you chip away at your claim—and your intention—to be a responsible, reliable, self-aware person.

Making promises and keeping them is how you build integrity, how you foster relationships of trust, and, more importantly, how you learn to trust yourself.

Every time you break a promise, your word has less value.

Giving your word is a serious undertaking, even on trivial matters. Never ever make a promise that you think there is even the slightest chance that you may break.

Idea for Impact: Don’t make a promise if a situation warrants a more open-ended response.

How to Project Positive Expectations

June 4, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you want to be seen as a doer, somebody who can be depended upon to get a job done, answer with “I will” whenever possible.

According to George Walther, author of Power Talking: 50 Ways to Say What You Mean & Get What You Want (1991,) expressions such as “I’ll try” make you seem hesitant—even ineffective.

Recall all the people who’ve promise to do something by saying, “I’ll try to get back to you tomorrow.” They rarely do. They have to be reminded, prodded, and nagged.

Those who announce, “I’ll have an answer for you by two this afternoon,” typically follow through.

Idea for Impact: Watch Your Language

Your choice of words matters. You are building your reputation—your brand—one interaction at a time.

Your assertions set the tone for what others can expect from you. They also motivate you to get the job done as you’ve promised.

Speak the language of success.

Everything in Life is Perception

May 18, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When J. K. Rowling wrote the novel The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) and published it under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, she sold less than 1,500 copies in print in three months. When word got out that J. K. Rowling had written the book, The Cuckoo’s Calling immediately jumped to the top of the best-seller lists. In just a few months, the book had sold 1.1 million copies.

When the internationally-acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell played his famous 300-year-old, $3.5 million Stradivarius violin at a Washington, D.C. metro station in 2007, only seven out of the 1,097 people who walked past him during his 45-minute performance stopped to listen. Dressed in street clothes, Bell made just $32.17 in tips tossed into the open violin case at his feet—plus $20 from one person who actually recognized him. People otherwise pay hundreds of dollars to hear him perform at fancy concert halls around the world.

The Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works (2010,) has described,

When we get pleasure from something, it’s not merely based on what we see or what we hear or what we feel. Rather, it’s based on what we believe that thing to be.

And so, someone listening to the music of Joshua Bell is going to hear it differently and like it more if they believe it’s from Joshua Bell. If you hear the same music and think it’s from some scruffy, anonymous street performer, it doesn’t sound so good.

And I think that’s a more general fact about pleasure. I think wine doesn’t taste as good if you don’t know it’s expensive or special wine. A painting is going to look different to you, and you’re going to value it differently, depending on who you think created it.

Bloom has explained how our minds shape the way a thing will be—because we behave in proportion to our expectations:

We don’t just respond to things as we see, feel, or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned by our beliefs of where things come from, what they’re made of, or what their hidden nature is. This is true, not just for how we think about things, but how we react to things.

Idea for Impact: Perception is Reality

Expectations color people’s perceptions, and satisfaction with any experience depends on their perceptions going into it.

What you make others think you’re offering them—your skills, your services, your products—profoundly affects their experience. The right expectations can alter anything from valueless to priceless.

However, as Dr. Johnson has warned, “we ought not to raise expectations which it is not in our power to satisfy.—It is more pleasing to see smoke brightening into flame, than flame sinking into smoke.”

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