Listen Up

Written By: Dr. Rich Houston, Director of the Culverhouse School of Accountancy

First, the speed round:

• I wrote a sentence this morning that included the words “your” and “you’re.” Hope I wrote it correctly.
• Blocking out the noise is so important and so difficult.
• Literally and figuratively sit in the front. Listen to people who have been there and have your best interest at heart. You have no idea how much time we spend trying to save you from yourselves.
• Our kitten’s mother must have taught her to bite when swaddled.
• Someone said this the other day: “Remember…get another cookie on the way out.” It sounded really deep to me at the time, although I don’t know exactly why, which reminded me of the opening to Joe Walsh’s song Meadows:

Can't think of any reason

Don't know exactly why

Must be it’s out of season

Give it another try        

Listen up. Bet you thought this was going to be about a gym teacher. It’s not, and there’s no whistle involved. This week, I realized that I had had very similar conversations with people who did not know each other (about four or five different times about different things). I think that shows the universality of our experiences…so many of our experiences are similar even though they’re not exactly the same…so perhaps we should try to understand each other better.

A lot of people talk about active listening, and they should. Really, really think about what people are really, really saying. It might strike a nerve with you, provide you with a perspective you never had, put you in a better position to help them, or simply be doing them a service by letting them be heard.

Pervasive ruffling. I love the word pervades, and the cartoon below illustrates how anxiety pervades our lives. It seems to be something new every day. I do my best to avoid things that upset me that are outside of my sphere of influence although it’s difficult, if not near impossible. I have what I call my “radius theory.” About 95% of my life takes place within a three mile radius, and I try to focus on what happens there.

I do my best to limit my intake of news, and I am far more successful limiting my intake of social media. People say things about social media that I used to hear about cigarettes. I want to quit, but I can’t. One of my favorite jokes that’s not really a joke is: quitting is easy, I do it all the time. My friend Greg quit smoking cold turkey after smoking for about 20 years. One day he smoked, next day he didn’t. He likely went through a tough period, but I didn’t know him well enough at the time to know one way or the other. All I know is that he weathered the initial storm and never did it again.

Rationalizations. Quiet quitting could be a real thing in some meaningful way or it could be just another rationalization, or as “we” said many years ago, a cop-out. If you’re blaming the boss or some other aspect of your working conditions for slacking at work, ask yourself why. Is it something about them? You? Little of each? Or is it that the weather outside is too nice, producing greener grass than is growing under your work station.

See if this sounds familiar. Often, we don’t know if we really want it, but we work for it anyway, and therefore get consumed by it (as if we want it), and perhaps we really do. When we get it, we don’t know if we wanted it, as often it feels like a hollow or exhausting victory. Just a thought.

A MAcc student wrote: I’d like to ask the other people in class this question: “What is stopping you from saying the things you want to say?” I would ask this because I know we all have a lot to say, but we don’t say it. I assume that many people have comments to say in response to what others say, but hold back. I am guilty of this. Overall, I am afraid to speak in class. It is something that I have tried to work through and now having the opportunity to say whatever I want to say makes me more nervous. The fear is no longer “this is a dumb question.” It is thinking that people will judge me for being vulnerable and they will make fun of me if I say something that is important to me, but not important to them. I know that if I shared my worries, doubts, and concerns with others, and if others did the same, we would all realize that we are more alike than we think and we would be able to get to know each other so much better on a more personal level. How great would that be?

Another MAcc student wrote: I’ve learned that we aren’t always as good as we think we are; difficulties teach bigger lessons than when things come easy; at some point we must learn to believe in ourselves and stop letting the approval we get or seek from others control us and overcome us to the point of paralysis; it is in our toughest times that we learn the most about ourselves; when we are stripped of everything we know and are in new places without anyone close to us, we begin to realize we are small fish in a big pond, and that we have to prove ourselves because we can no longer rely on the reputation we had. Come to think about it, it’s kind of exciting.

Perhaps strangely, what this student wrote reminded me of something that happened earlier this morning. I got a haircut (which caused me to say goodbye to Keith Richards for a couple of months). While I was waiting in the car, I was listening to a story on the radio about how the auto companies are trying to compensate for a lack of programmers, and that they are rethinking everything they do and how they do it. I talked about this with the person who cuts my hair. It would be difficult for what she does to become obsolete or outdated (which I must admit makes me a bit jealous), but for a lot of us, we need to be constantly keeping up with changes and learning how to do new things. Sounds daunting, but it’s really kind of invigorating. Enjoy the ride.

Proof it. We had an extremely effective speaker last night who spoke about all the great things about the accounting profession, how to get yourself ready for it, and how to succeed. One of the bullet points on one of his slides was “the lost art of self review.” He meant it in a certain way, but before he got there I made up my own definition. Proofread everything you do before you send it, submit it, or turn it in. I do, carefully, but still make mistakes. I would hate to think how my work would look if I didn’t check it. Take pride in what you do and remember that, like it or not, poor grammar, spelling, or appearance can negate a lot of what you have to say. I remember how devastated I was the first time I saw an error in New Yorker magazine. And how frustrating it is to see typos in books. By the way, sometimes proofing what you do results in never saying it at all (some call this self-editing), which can often be a great decision…especially in email and on social media.

And let’s close with an unrelated cat cartoon: