Senseless Acts

Challenge two: TRANSLATE COMPLAINTS AND CRITICISMS INTO TRANSFORMATIVE REQUESTS

Why many people have a hard time making requests. It often feels easier to say, “You’re wrong.” than it is to say “I need your help.”  Making requests leaves us much more vulnerable in relation to our conversation partners than making criticisms or complaints. So people have a tendency to complain rather than to request. If we make a request, the other person could turn us down or make fun of us, and the risk of disappointment and loss of face is hard to bear. If we complain, on the other hand, we stand on the emotional high ground and our listener is usually on the defensive. However, to improve our chances of getting cooperation from another person, we need to ask for what we want and risk being turned down. With practice we can each learn to bear those risks more skillfully and gracefully.

Why criticisms usually don’t get the positive result we want:Whenever we place people on the defensive, their capacity to listen goes down. Their attention and energy will often go into some combination of defending their position, saving face and counter-attacking. Only when they feel safe are they likely to listen and consider how they might meet our needs. The truth of the complaint is not the issue. Because mutual imitation or emotional “echoing” is so much a part of ordinary conversation, a criticism from one partner, no matter how justified, tends to evoke a criticism from the other, bogging the pair down in a spiral of accusations. To avoid this trap, you can to approach the other person not as a problem maker and adversary in a debate but as a problem-solving partner.   By translating your complaint into a request, you “transform” the role you are asking the other person to play.

Specific action requests help to focus your listener’s attention on the present situation. Focus on the actions you want to take and the actions you want others to take in the present and future. (For example, use verbs and adverbs, such as “meet our deadlines regularly.”) Avoid proposing changes in a person’s supposed character traits (nouns and adjectives, such as “slow worker” or “bad team player”). “How can we solve this problem quickly?” will generally produce much better results than, “Why are you such an awful slow-poke?” In the latter kind of statement, I am actually suggesting to my conversation partner that the behavior I want changed is a fixed and perhaps unchangeable part of their personality, thus undermining my own goals and needs.

     Talking about specifics will help to keep the current conversation from becoming one more episode in whatever unresolved conflicts might be in the background of your conversations. Your listener, like all of us, may sometimes be in the grip of feelings of embarrassment, resentment or self-doubt unrelated to the present situation. The more vague and open-ended a criticism is, the easier it is for your listener to hear it as part of those other conflicts. Instead of saying something like “Why does it always take you so long to get things done?”, try saying things like “I would like you to fix the faucet in Apartment #4 by five o’clock, so the tenants can use the kitchen sink when they get home tonight?” Of course, your tone of voice is important here. It’s important that you yourself are not carrying forward old complaints. Life is lived best one day at a time.

by Dennis Rivers, MA

“We criticize people for not giving us what we ourselves are afraid to ask for.”

Marshall Rosenberg