Dealing with Disappointment 4 of 4 (Dr. Brent Lindquist)

Those of you that have been listening will know that I started with an email that I got from a guy I call George where he talked about the disappointment and sense of failure that he was feeling.  At least that’s what I interpreted it as.  We’ve been looking at expectations.  We’ve been looking at honesty and feelings.  This time we’re going to talk about working through differences.

I talked about, last time, an important concept for me and perhaps it might be important for you.  That is, I like to start from the end or begin at the ending.  What I mean by that is I really want to say in what I do or what I say – What do I want people to think about that?  Do I want them to be challenged by something?  Do I want them to be intrigued?  I will develop how I want to talk to somebody by how I want them to respond after I’m done.  A seminar that I do starts by saying, ‘What do I want the people to leave their time with me knowing?’ I start with the 3 points or whatever.  I always say when I speak if I can give you one thing you can use this afternoon, then I’ve been successful.  I say that to you listening to this program.  If one of these things makes sense and you can do it tomorrow or think about it tomorrow, then I’ve been very successful.

What do you want in the end, George?  Do you want statues or memories?  That’s kind of an interesting metaphor.  Do we want a statue that people will walk by and ignore or do we want memories of us that people interact with?  I want to go for the memories.  What are we supposed to do when we work through these differences?  I think first of all, we revel in mistakes.  Oh, that’s maybe too much of a positive look at mistakes, but I spent 20 years teaching people how to figure out how to live in a different culture, how to learn the language and how to manage their feelings and so much of this happens by making mistakes.  Indeed, language learning is but a series of mistakes; making mistakes and doing something positive with them.  So revel in the mistakes.  George, speaking to you, don’t worry about it.  You feel bad.  You’ll feel better if you do some of these things.  Maybe doing some of these things will have no influence on how you feel, but after a while you realize that you’re feeling better.  None of this can produce instant answers, instant responses or instant change.

Another important point to think through is to find local resources to tell you when to be quiet and when to speak.  I say that because one of the things that George said was,  ‘When I’m quiet people say I should have spoken and when I speak people say I should be quiet’.  So if you’re like George you don’t know what to do.  The best thing is to find local resource people who can help you know what to do, say or be in certain situations.  A friend of mine was working in another country and he had to do something that he had never had to do before in this country and that was that he had to go to a funeral.  My friend was a language teacher and he had to go to the funeral of the husband of one of his language teachers in the school.  He didn’t know what to do.  He had this circle of friends around him that he could go to and ask.  He asked what he should do at a funeral.  They worked through that idea and he thought, ‘Well okay, I have a better idea about what to do’.  But he still was surprised.  He and the family dressed up in their nice clothes and everything and they went to the place in the city where the funerals were.  This doesn’t occur back here in the United States in that there was a big building and in this building there were 20, 30, 50 or 100 funerals going on.  People were gathering around chatting and they hadn’t had the service yet.  Some of the coffins were opened and some of them weren’t, and there were big pictures and flowers.  They walked over to where this lady was and as my friend said, he said, ‘We put on our sad faces and started to wish our condolences to this lady and she comes over and with a big smile says, ‘Did you bring your camera?’’ Well, in this particular context, I guess, it’s a big deal to have your picture taken around the coffin with the dead person.  Now, that sounds kind of unusual to you and me maybe, and maybe to some people it sounds perfectly normal and natural but you wouldn’t understand that unless you’d been out there in the local context or unless you talked to your people and gathered information.

The next point is to find out what their definition of excellence is.  One of the things that George wrote was, ‘I want to do my best and I push people to do their best but their attitude is that I’m just being plain pushy’.   Part of the problem with that is a lack of understanding what someone else’s expectation is of doing well.  Now, some people that I’ve talked to when I presented this before – they say to me, ‘Yeah, Brent, but you know what?  Their expectation is really low.  Noone challenges them to excellence’.  I say, ‘Okay, but bear with me.  What would it look like to challenge someone to excellence?  These people that you’re working with, they all like to do a good job but what does doing a good job mean?  Doing a good job may mean to me having something turn out very beautiful or perfect or whatever.  Yet, to someone else it may mean doing a job such that other people notice the job that you did and that they will give credit for that, if you will’.  That’s a very different explanation of what excellence is.  We need to know.  The best way is to ask them what their definition is.  That may clear up a lot of things.

Another point is to live, laugh, cry and everything in season.  Now I’ve talked about that before and I don’t know that I have a whole lot to say about it right here.  What I want to say again, though, is that nobody said it was always going to be positive.  Nobody said you are always going to feel effective.  If they did, they were not being honest with you.  These negatives times, as you see them, are there for a reason.  You can learn from them.  I had somebody once say to me that they wished that I could be out where they were because they didn’t know anybody like me who could answer their problems about emotional, psychological and cross-cultural issues and I said, ‘Wait a  minute.  First of all, I’m honoured that you would think I’m such a good help and resource to you, so thank you for that, but let’s really push this a little bit, if you will.  Are you telling me that nobody there struggles with feelings of sadness or anxiety?’ They said ‘well, no’.  I said, ‘Well if they’re just like you and me then the issue is, how do we find out what they do?’  In this case it was a young mom with young children and she said ‘I don’t know how I’m going to make it’.  I said ‘Well you’re living in a neighbourhood that has many other young moms and young children’.  ‘Yeah’.  Well one of the ways is to get to know some of them in a way that you can talk about child-rearing issues but they’ll be different.  ‘Yeah’.  But you know that you might both grow from that and one of the unintended outcomes of that is that you will make new friends.  So rather than looking for the negatives in our lives as things to keep us from people let’s look at it as things that can draw us closer to people, particularly those people that we went a long way around the world to work with and to be  productive with.  Everyone can be a resource and everyone can be an influence.  So as you process through this stuff, think about that.

George – I hope I was more of a help than a hindrance and if I have inadvertently stepped on your toes I am really sorry because I’m not thing to do that.  Since you wrote to me, I want to try to give you the straight shot, if you will.  I want to help you think through these things and look at the solutions that may be present there, not present here.

Talk to you next time!