Recently, a friend was describing a misunderstanding he had had at work due to simply not paying enough attention to what a coworker had said. His lack of attention had led to a bit of wasted time and then confusion at the end of the day when the wrong project had been completed. It was nothing major, just a small annoyance, but nonetheless, it could have been avoided had he paid attention when first asked.

When he was done describing it, I responded with an understandable, “Well, next time, you’ll know.” Just as I said it, I realized that, while this is habit for many people, it’s not helpful because it can come across as condescending, like you know you wouldn’t have made that mistake, but you’re saying there’s some reason it was okay for someone else to.

Due to that, I followed up by explaining that I really meant to say that the situation was unfortunate, but at least, it was just a simple misunderstanding and did not lead to any significant setbacks. The important realization for me was that there are plenty of times when it’s important to simply listen and not provide any feedback or to just sympathize. There’s no need to turn something of such little relevance into a lesson. Not putting forward a statement like that that can be perceived as judgmental can actually make a person feel closer to you, which, going along with this blog’s theme, can be quite helpful.

Tags: friends, life lesson, misunderstanding

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Lessons, life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.