You Are Wrong
You statements suck.
You statements are not true. They are a personal view of what the other sees. Without clarification, without questioning, without objectiveness they are wrong.
It gets worse when they are large characterizations.
It gets worse when there when a disagreement to a characterization is cut off.
Example
Context
Raised emotions around assistance. Spent 2-3 hours looking through and understanding her code and her problem, helping constructing a solution. At her invitiation over the weekend. I made a suggestion about how to communicate it on the weekend. On monday morning, before getting into a bath - can you provide me with an example. The example serves a particular purpose, and can be modified depending on what is needed.
She’s run out of time to write it up. Then asks again for more question about how to prepare verbally (with 5 minutes to go). Now her understanding of the problem and the solution are all mixed up. I’m trying hard to make sure she understands it, and we both end up agitating.
Before she gets on the call - she declares we’ll talk about it later.
I write “on helping and being helped”.
Her comment was the following
Do you think that you need too much context too much of the time?
It’s like if we were painting a room and I asked for thoughts on which blue to choose. You’d ask about the
- type of paint brush,
- the type of surface,
- the type of paint,
- the type of primer,
And you’d never actually give me an answer.
You ask for too much context and you never answer.
I disagreed with that characterization, I ask for only the context that I need to answer.
My only response was
“I only ask for extra information where I feel it makes the difference between a good answer and a bad one”.
Thoughts?
Well that’s it’s clear it’s one sided and all my fault. There is exploration of responsibility. It’s just all my fault.
You statements breed defensiveness. The characterization of the other shoes every little piece of bias.
It would be occasional to just get a checkin
Validation and affirmation
An interesting thing came up in the confirmation. I re-affirmed that she may feel that way, that it’s reasonable for her to feel that way. I stated plainly that disagree with what I feel I ask for.
She outright rejected my confirmation - “I don’t need you to affirm what I’m thinking, I don’t care”.