What’s your point of view?

Welcome to The Inbox Coach nudge, a small nudge to help you stay on track with your career development. This week I’m thinking about the assumptions we make about other people. ?

“You see a lady sitting there…and you tend to forget that of course she wasn't always a little old lady.” Judith Kerr

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The topic for The Inbox Coach in January is challenging assumptions, so this week I want to look at the assumptions we hold about other people.

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What do you think of me?

As I said last week assumptions aren’t inherently bad, they allow us to make decisions and move forward when the information we have is limited. Where we can come unstuck is when we base our decisions on assumptions, and those assumptions are wrong. By doing this we are limiting the success that we can have, and when it comes to other people possibly even find ourselves discriminating against them and we really don’t want to be doing that!

Challenging your assumptions of other people isn’t always about looking for an unconscious bias that you might be holding or avoiding discriminating against someone. It can be about making your relationships better. A challenge that lots of my clients bring to me is having a difficult relationship with their boss or other colleague, they find their interactions challenging, and often the outcome of any meetings is not what they wanted. At the heart of these interactions is a lack of understanding of the point of view of the other person. We tend to present things from our own point of view, and we don’t necessarily share all of the framework and basis we have for our thinking. We tend to prioritise those things which we hold important, and if those don’t align with the other person or communications can be mismatched.

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What’s your point of view?

A strong value for me at work is collaboration. I believe that my work will be better when I’m collaborating with other people who bring different skills to a project. Having a great collaborative relationship with someone at work really helps me to thrive and reach my goals. Where I struggle is if the other person doesn’t value collaboration. In the past, I have spent a lot of trying time trying to build relationships with these people, when in fact what I should’ve been doing is putting myself in their shoes and understanding what they value. If a person values brevity or isn’t concerned about collaboration, then my communication style needs to be more transactional. I need to be to the point, ask for what I need, and not worry about whether we collaborated on the results.

This is true for any interaction you have if the person communicating with holds different values, beliefs, and assumptions. You need to take these into account when presenting your point of view if you are communicating with someone that values, facts, figures and data telling them how your team feels is not likely to land well. If you are working with someone who values well-being they will respond less effectively if you only talk about the bottom line.

It can be easy to assume that the other person is coming at the situation from the same point of view as you when it is likely that they won’t be and being able to put yourselves in their position, to see things from their point of view, will really help you to develop in your career.

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“You see a lady sitting there and she's not doing anything, and you tend to forget that of course she wasn't always a little old lady. There's all this coloured stuff inside her, it's all inside, bubbling.” Judith Kerr

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Judith Kerr was a children’s author and illustrator and one of my favourite people. Her life was disrupted when she was 10 years old as her family had to flee Germany to avoid persecution by the Nazis. She built a life in England as a refugee and whilst she didn’t start writing her books until she was in her 40s, she became one of the best loved children’s writers.

This quote is a reminder to be careful about the judgements you make about people. Appearances can be deceptive, and people usually have a lot more going on in their life than the attributes that are visible to us. It is very easy to make judgements about anyone, but especially older people and to lump them together into one group. You forget that an ageing, greying body masks the person underneath, who they really are.

A central part of my coaching practice is to be non-judgemental about the situations my clients bring to me. As a coach, this is to help me to ask questions which will help them to gain awareness of their situation, and stops me from imposing my thoughts, and opinions on them. I have found that it has also helped me to be less judgemental in life. I tend to ask people open questions, which are non-judgemental and leave room for people to answer in a way that suits them, rather than asking closed questions which can force my views on other people. By being open to the idea that people are so much more than I might judge them to be I am often pleasantly surprised at the things people open up and share with me.

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?It can be hard not to make assumptions about other people but taking the time to notice when you might not be seeing things from the same point of view as someone else will help you to find some common ground and hopefully you can both achieve your goals.

I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on how to challenge your assumptions to create a career you love

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See you then

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Laura

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