A Somewhat Systematic Cataloguing of Systematic Approaches to Everything
Don’t eat at Friendly’s unless:
You want a tuna melt with french fries and really good pickles and you are in a good enough mood that you don’t mind spending a ton of money on what would cost way less anywhere else with that kind of quality and you want to feel warm and cozy like all those years when everything was ok in life and your mom took you to Friendly’s.
Or ice cream, from the outside counter, on a date, in July.
When finishing a book, or reading a particularly interesting blog post, or dining at some great restaurant people often feel impelled to make a recommendation to a friend or relative. Many times this simply irritates the person on the receiving end, or they forget, or they are well meaning but never get around to it anyway. Why is recommending things such a precarious act? Is there a good system out there for deciding when to dole out recommendations or when to heed those that have been doled to you?
Let me analyze one such possible recommendation. If I have a read a book, let’s say Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope,” and found it particularly well-written and intelligent, I may want my friends and family to share in the experience that I had being thoroughly enthralled by it. The problem with this is that everyone knows full well that Barack Obama is about to become the president, and that there are probably some kind of books available either by him or about him that are fascinating reads. If they really thought that following-up with their President meant reading his book, they would have read it, already, just like I did. A recommendation in this case could only serve to put someone over the edge who had pretty much been planning to do it anyway but was a little distracted by other concerns. Maybe my recommendation may even serve as a competitive force for some friends who want to be contemporary with my book shelf, lest they be considered not as well-informed.
For people not planning to read the book, the recommendation is simply unnecessary and worse, probably seen as some sort of self-aggrandizement. A recommendation turns from “You should read this,” to “Look at me, I read this.”
Telling someone about something that they may not know of, like some hidden away restaurant is not a recommendation…it’s a bit of information sharing. When you take that extra step and say “I think you’d like this,” you run the risk of doing some sort of reverse psychology (“Ugh, he thinks I would like this, I hate it already!”) or being annoying “I think you’d like this, because I like this and you should be exactly like me.”
Just occasionally, depending on the person, a recommendation is on the money. Someone reads something, or eats something, that they just know–in their gut–that the other person will appreciate. In these cases, it is important to have a skillful way of communicating this. If you’re too forceful or preachy you will turn them off, and yet if you’re not persuasive enough, this great opportunity may pass.
I’m much more inclined to recommend information sharing over recommendations. I recommend this, because I feel–in my gut–that recommendations are mostly tainted with all of these selfish motives that I have been describing. When it feels appropriate, there are many advantages to recommending things as well, and you should feel free to recommend when you need to.
The system: Share information with your friends, and let them make their own decisions. When you intuit that someone will benefit from something and may not decide that way necessarily, offer a recommendation. Avoid the phrase “You should watch that,” or “read” or “eat,” and replace it with “I think that you would enjoy this. I recommend it.”
My system for following up is pretty straightforward. Do it! But what happens when you’re a little anxious or afraid of following-up? Let’s break this down.
Fear is a difficult thing to work with, and perhaps in another post, I’ll speak more directly to that, but in this case I think some clear things can be identified to help one follow-up even though afraid.
First, what are you following-up on? If it’s a job or a relationship situation, then there’s always the fear of rejection, or having to speak a truth that may be particularly hard for the other person to hear. This is a normal fear, and I think part of our responsibility to ourselves is to work (over the course of many years possibly) to be comfortable speaking our truth, even when it means rejection for us, or possible hurt for another. My system is simple, but not easy: Work over time to be more communicative with your truths, your needs, and your own power. This is not a Tony Robbins pep talk blog, this is a system blog, and I think that is the best system for overcoming fear in these situations: Train yourself to honor your needs and communicate your truth. How you work on that individually is laid out in many types of self-help books, and working with a therapist or learning meditation is probably a good place to start this kind of growth work.
If you’re having a hard time following-up in other situations (responding to a casual email, meeting someone for dinner) it seems to me like this would be more an issue of overcoming flakiness than overcoming fear. Maybe being flakey is one way of exercising fear (of becoming your best self?, of having people begin to expect too much of you?, of connection, intimacy?), in which case, I would also say that training over time to work out these kinks in your system is the best system. But if being flaky, is just flakiness, then I enthusiastically recommend embracing the simplicity of System Sally’s injunction: Just follow-up…it’s a great system for having people trust you, and for creating a strong foundation for other systems to work efficiently.
Please let me know in the comments if this was helpful, or if there’s some other angle I’m missing.
It is important to follow up on many things. Applying for jobs requires following up. Responding to blog comments requires follow up. Having plans with a person requires a certain amount of follow up.
I owe someone a huge follow up. I let her know in a short direct email, and in person. These types of temporary follow-ups serve to let the person know how deeply you care about whatever is needing follow up, but the current circumstances aren’t allowing the follow up to meet up.
Also, follow up is very similar to responsibility. All my dedicated readers have probably been wanting more insight and systems from System Sally, but I haven’t been able to respond to that need in the way I would have liked. So, the need to maintain and update a blog, for example, is more a responsibility, which is really a constant follow up. A follow up is a short term responsibility.
This is less a system than an explanation of things. But the system is “Be responsible, and follow up where necessary. Do temporary follow-ups where necessary.” The advantages of this are many and include having people trust you, and creating a reliable system-wide system for other systems to work better.
Whenever you use something that someone else came up with you have to show respect for that person. Of course, in an academic paper, we use footnotes and bibliographies and there is a number of systems for doing that, but even in regular discourse it is always a sign of your integrity and understanding when you reference someone’s original idea. At some point, someone else came up with this idea, and I am simply restating it as a good system.
Once you’ve established a certain amount of trust with someone, you should look for the opportunities that arise to stick it to them. Be loud, straightforward, intelligent, piercing, and sarcastic. Show them that your sticking it to them is actually a demonstration of your respect and caring for them, and shows them that you are comfortable enough with their intelligence that you know they will be able to handle it.
Recent Comments