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And yet... blindspot feedback is hard. It usually creates tangles for one or both parties involved, and little net benefit. A thread of some of my realizations about this over the last year. https://t.co/jLXKbf11QZ
Afaict, this is basically true: > "Nobody knows what's wrong with themselves. Everyone else can see it right away." Two addenda: 1. This applies to groups too. Every group has a blindspot. 2. By default, nothing A says about how B's wrong will be comprehensible to B.
Let's start with this—the core of the blindspot feedback puzzle: > By default, nothing A says about how B is wrong will be comprehensible to B. Importantly, this is mostly true for communication patterns and other unconscious stuff. Can usefully give eg golf swing advice ofc.
Okay, so suppose you do something that systematically causes issues in your relationships. Unless you're a sociopath, you probably don't want to be aware you're causing these issues, and you probably *aren't* aware. Things just seem to happen to you. But someone else has a sense.
When they try to speak their sense, though, what they're saying will inevitably be attempting to point at something your worldview is set up to avoid looking at. This is not a comfortable situation for *either* person, generally.
It's uncomfortable to have someone point at your blindspot, because to the extent they're succeeding, they're generating errors for your subsystems whose job it is to keep you from looking there. Key: this is NOT something to be ashamed of. Doesn't mean you're bad or don't care.
It's also uncomfortable to be sincerely trying to point at someone's blindspot, because the more you try to adopt their frame (necessary in order to communicate),the less sense the thing you're trying to say makes—because it's that frame's blindspot. So you end up dumbstruck.
One assumption that keeps people stuck is the idea that if what you're doing is causing problems, you should stop it immediately. Not only is that not wise, it's usually not even possible. Practice this sort of response to feedback instead: https://t.co/n3svIPiaKo
Someone recently told me, "When you talk about X, you sound like you think you have all the answers." I replied, "I can sorta see what you're pointing at and why that undermines X. I don't know what in me is generating that… until I understand why, I'll probably keep doing it."
Develop the ability to entertain someone's feedback without feeling a need to change. Without that, here's 2 ways people usually respond to blindspot feedback: 1. "omg sorry uhh I'll xyz" (which may half-work but not longterm) 2. "uh what are you talking about? you're confused"
Both responses result in "layering" (from @meditationstuff's https://t.co/NgkakOwK5T) In the first case, the feedback recipient adds a compensatory layer trying to subvert their own behavior. In the second, the other person adds a occlusive layer to avoid seeing the problem.
IN NEITHER CASE does anything get resolved. Can we do better? I think so. It involves the sort of thing I said above, of being able to acknowledge that you really don't know why what you're doing, and that you'll probably keep doing it until you understand why.
This blog post of mine is a short case study of one personal work-in-progress. You can witness a pattern evolving over a period of trying to bring it into awareness without trying to change it. https://t.co/hiHpx5DyoI
As a feedback-*giver*, my main suggestion would be to explicitly differentiate between your own experience and your own frame and someone else's, and to be clear (internally and overtly) that you're looking for some sort of correspondence, not a direct fit.
I ended up with a bunch of layers due to people seeing some of my behavior patterns as selfish/greedy or assholish, and then me trying to find my selfish parts or my asshole parts. Well, turns out I don't have any parts that identify as "asshole", so this was a wild goose chase.
Instead of saying "you're doing/being xyz", say "you're doing 🤷♀️something🤷♀️ that in my internal language I'm inclined to call 'xyz'." It's impossible to refute, which in this case is not a psy-op but actually helpful for both people, because it *needs* no refutation!
Needs no refutation because I'm obviously doing *something*, and you're gonna call it as best you can. This sort of spacious frame encourages dialogue participants to feel like they're on the same team, mapping some hard-to-explicate 🤷♀️something🤷♀️ from the inside & the outside.
Importantly, only go in as far as feels safe. If someone comes up to you and says "you're doing something I'm inclined to call narcissism" but you sense they're trying to manipulate you, you don't have to try to have that conversation and try to sort it out! (No have-tos ever)
Trusting your own sense of what conversations feel safe to have is paramount. It's your layering detector. https://t.co/W0NyiXclqn
if someone can't trust me in some way, even if I or others *do* trust me in this way then I cannot ask them to trust me more than they can trust me each person has been betrayed in different ways, and their trust must thus be earned in different ways
@actualhog hmmm. so you just talk about all the blindspots, and then people have clarity, and then they no longer have blindspots? or what? describe the sorts of experiences/scenes of yours that feel relevant to this (if you want)
oh lol I actually quoted it (or half of it) in the 2nd tweet in my thread. oh well, worth having for the paraphrase https://t.co/ANYsfy71y8
Afaict, this is basically true: > "Nobody knows what's wrong with themselves. Everyone else can see it right away." Two addenda: 1. This applies to groups too. Every group has a blindspot. 2. By default, nothing A says about how B's wrong will be comprehensible to B.