Understanding That The Hard Task Needs Doing Anyway

On Monday I had the good fortune to be able to watch Venus Williams play at Wimbledon.

She’s been a player I have always followed and admired. She’s very close in age to me and I had seen her in person some years ago at the Championships. That time it wasn’t on court, but I passed her walking between courts in the grounds.

I had been struck by her immense size and power. The muscles in them made each of?her thighs the size of my little torso. I reckon she could easily have held my small frame above her head.

So I was enormously excited to have tickets for Centre Court, when I found out that Venus would be playing. Not least because, knowing from bitter experience that fitness doesn’t come as easily at 43 as it does at 25, I had wondered whether she would be in the draw at all. When she walked onto court I couldn't help questioning whether something was not just older, but wrong.

She was still powerful but she didn't have the enormity of strength that I had seen the time up close before.

Her knee was strapped up and I thought perhaps it was that which made me imagine a slight limp.

She played like a champion. She is a champion.

But there was a moment when she twisted, fell and screamed out in pain. The knee that was strapped up had given out underneath her during a tricky shot at the net. The umpire and her opponent rushed to her aid.

Sympathy from the whole crowd was tangible. But so was the disappointment. The trainer was called.

I honestly thought I might be about to watch her walk off the court within minutes of starting the match.

She played on. She played like the former champion that she is. Her serve suffered: the serve that used to be invincible. Nevertheless, she had come to do her job: to play a match.

It got me to thinking about how we tend to assume that people who do something for a living, or routinely, can do it easily and always with the same resources at their disposal as they ever had.

When we interact with somebody we imagine we know them, through our own experience or by reputation.

We have expectations of them. We forget that, just like in our own lives, things go up and down for them without them quitting. The ease with which anyone does the thing that has been their habit or career, and which we might expect to be straightforward, can differ.

We forget to regularly reassess the cost to somebody of what we are asking of them.

Having seen her fall and heard the scream, I don't think anybody would have begrudged Venus Williams the decision to walk off court and concede. Given the choice, however, she might not have wanted us to see her weakness. We had come to see her play, and Svitolina had come to play her, not to win by default. Venus upheld her side of the bargain. I don't think anybody expected her to win the match with that vulnerability, but she had shown up in SW19 to do her job: which was to play, win or lose. She played on.

Svitolina also upheld her side of the bargain. She played well. She played beautifully. She played like she was playing opposite a champion. I don't know if she was being more gentle out of compassion. Probably.

In mediation or dispute, there is often a tendency to make assumptions about what the other person's strengths and capabilities are.

The motives behind what is said or done can be misconstrued because we forget that there are other factors playing on the behaviour: influences which might be changing with time and making things harder.

We talk a lot in mediation about empathy. I often meet resistance because everybody knows that when you start to understand another person’s position your perspective alters. For a disputant determined to get their own way, empathising can seem like a threat to winning at all costs. There is always a place for sympathy in every interaction even if the outcome of the negotiation will not alter for it.

In a neighbour dispute where families had lived side by side happily and as friends for 50 years, one party said to me of the other “I don't know what happened: they've gone mad!”

Even though I had just been told they didn’t know, I asked “What happened in the months before this became a problem?”

It transpired that these families were multi-generational and the individuals who had “gone mad” had recently lost both their parents.

They were the new legal owners of the?family home and they were dealing with probate and property deeds while also handling their grief.

Their reaction to their neighbours’ parking arrangements seemed blown out of all proportion.

What was needed was not a Land Registry tribunal but a bunch of flowers and a sympathy card. Possibly, after decades of friendship, even a hug and some gentle words to acknowledge that these times were really hard for the siblings.

Sometimes it’s obvious from the circumstances, but often in professional circles we have no indication of what is going on in someone's life at the time that they are interacting with us.

We like to think that we are dealing with a company not a human, yet companies can only function by the humans who act on their behalf.

There is no reason for us to be aware of personal or irrelevant details as part of our interaction with them. We can be sensitive that they might be there though.

Venus Williams could not hide her vulnerability, though perhaps when she walked onto court she had hoped to tough it out in private.

With the warring neighbours, the death of the parents was part of the narrative and so it was easy to identify the factor that was being overlooked.

Sometimes we simply don't know. If it is not relevant to the situation or transaction it is sometimes important to an individual to do their job or play their part regardless.

Towards the end of 2013 the American actor John Schneider was booked for a publicity photoshoot for a new season of a TV show in which he starred. He showed up and got the job done, giving no indication that there was any issue.

Afterwards he took the photographer, Jeremy Cowart, aside and asked for some record shots of his true face that day. During the shoot he had heard that his father had died. Those portraits are pure grief.

Yet it was Schneider's job to show up and smile. The TV studio had paid for everybody to be present and for everybody to bring joy and carefree fun to the promotional shots, Schneider included. He must have been on a knife-edge of emotion, but in the pictures of him in character you wouldn’t know. He had a job to do and his personal loss was not relevant to it.

When you interact with someone who seems brittle, irrational, selfish or cold, ask yourself: what pain or vulnerability do they feel which I need not know about to help them overcome?