Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Well, for starters, to any of your listeners, one of my very favorite authors is Carol Dweck who wrote a book called Mindset and you put a word yet at the end of any of those, I don't know how yet, I'm not like that yet, changes the meaning of the whole thing. And by the way, talk about updating a mental model, instant update of a mental model. And the other thing that I'll say is we are all capable of changing our behavior. We cannot change our personality. We are born wired with personalities. I am very outgoing and extroverted as might come as a shock to all of you. And you know what? When I overdo it, I suck all the oxygen out of the room and one of the behaviors I had to learn, and it takes discipline to engage in was zipping it a little more so that others could speak up more. And my incentive was that I actually really wanted to learn more about what was going on for them and I wasn't going to learn anything unless I shut up long enough for them to tell me. So behavior is something we all have control over. Now when I give somebody feedback and they tell me, well, I can't do that. If I've asked them to change a behavior, then I'll say, I'm sorry, I don't think I can accept I can't. I will accept I don't want to or I don't have it, but I don't have to accept I can't. So I'd just like you to own the fact that it's a choice that you're making. Kind of along those lines, something, I don't know if this is from your book, but I saw somewhere you said that it's possible to say almost anything to almost anyone if you have the necessary skills. How do people build these skills? I know we talked about a lot of this through the structure focusing on your side of the net, but just how do you avoid people getting defensive? First of all, let's make sure that we point out that what we're doing here is we're shifting probabilities of success, we're not guaranteeing anything. And let's say that you do your best and you stay on your side of the net and you give somebody feedback and they go bonkers and they call you all kinds of names and they write... Now there's an opportunity to learn something else that everybody learns in these programs, which is called repair. How do you repair when something goes sideways? Because no matter how good you are, no matter how skilled you get, no matter what your intent was, sometimes it won't work. And then you've got to know how to repair. And that's why, remember I told you that our facilitators have a unique set of skills? And that's because they have to allow messes to happen otherwise nobody's going to learn how to repair. And repair often goes back to some of what we've already talked about. Let's start with I come in the kitchen, my husband's struggling. I say to him, "Can I help you with that?" He says, "Don't tell me what to do." I'm sure none of your listeners can relate to this story. And I say, instead of, "I wasn't trying to tell you what to do, I was just trying to be helpful. What a kind of way to respond to my offering help is that?" I say, "What did you hear me say?" One of the most powerful things you can do when somebody responds in a way that feels very unexpected and out of whack with what you just said is go back to, "What did you hear me say?" Because nine times out of 10 what they heard is not what you said. He said, "I heard you say I didn't know what I was doing." Now, by the way, it didn't matter. That's not what I said. And I didn't say, that's not what I said. I said, "Wow, really glad I asked, because now that I understand that that's what you heard, I understand why you reacted the way you did." And I said, "Let me try it again." One of the ways that I show somebody that I love them is I offer to help and what would you like me to do if in a situation like this when I see you struggling? He says, "Wait for me to ask." And that was 25 years ago, and that has served us very well because we've been married 37 years, 39 years. And if we go back to feedback, you give somebody feedback, they get super defensive. By the way, net jumping invites net jumping, so they're likely to net jump too. And by the way, the minute you label somebody or you're over the net. In fact you sent me something that was really interesting that I wanted to find here because you said "Nobody is born with genes for being rude or self-involved." Well, guess what? Rude and self-involved are labels that is not behaviorally specific. So calling somebody rude or self-involved is just going to make them defensive.…

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