I’m pausing mid-series on the 5 Ways to Wellbeing, because I want to talk about this while it’s fresh.

I offended some people recently. When you put out as many words as I do, two or three thousand a week, you’ll probably say something that offends somebody somewhere eventually, so I’ve been expecting that it would happen sooner or later. I didn’t expect that it would be in a guest post about procrastination on Steven Aitchison’s Change Your Thoughts, though. 

In that post, I took a talk that I’d heard at a recent conference and used the topic, which was stuttering, as a metaphor for procrastination. My point of comparison was that, in both cases, you can have difficulty starting or difficulty stopping.

I talked about how the speaker’s approaches to overcoming his own stutter (which he’s also used to help many other people) might work as approaches to overcome procrastination, as well.

People take offence

As I said, I didn’t expect the post to be offensive, but it was.

It turns out that there is an online community of stutterers (of course there is – there’s an online community for everyone else, so why not?), and some members of this community took exception to my use of their speech difficulty as a metaphor for procrastination. While I was asleep in New Zealand, Steven’s site in the UK was being inundated with comments about how I didn’t know what I was talking about and how my post was hurtful and insensitive. One of the stutterers who blogs also picked it up and posted about it, and the pingback from that post was the first thing I saw when I checked my email that morning.

The problems that people had with the post seemed to be threefold.

1. In using stuttering as a metaphor for procrastination, I had implied that stutterers procrastinated (and were bad and defective people in various other ways).
2. What I actually said about stuttering showed that I didn’t understand it – I talked about a “cure” when there is no cure, and the techniques I mentioned were just ways of “masking” the stutter, while the real, underlying voice was always that of the stutterer.
3. The way I distinguished between “stuttering” and “stammering” was not the way they used the terminology, and in fact was wrong and another way in which I revealed my ignorance. This actually seemed to be one of the things that got people most worked up.

What I did

Of course, I replied. I would have done so anyway, but I could hardly not reply when the blogger said, “He has not replied to any of the comments about stuttering specifically, like he did to several of the earlier comments that praised his post.”

In my replies, which of course you can read on the post, I first apologised. But notice what I said.

I apologised for choosing an inappropriate metaphor.

I apologised for giving offence.

I apologised for reproducing the ideas of (apparently) someone with a non-mainstream viewpoint on stuttering, without checking more into the issue.

I apologised for using the word “cure”.

But I didn’t apologise for denigrating stutterers, because I hadn’t. One of the commenters (the blogger I mentioned) said “We are not intellectually or emotionally impaired, nor are we nervous, anxious, shy or withdrawn” – none of which I had said or implied. These were words she’d heard from other people, perhaps, but not from me, and I pointed that out in my response.

Let’s everybody own their stuff

It’s always right to take responsibility for the words you have said.

But I’m not going to take responsibility for words I haven’t said, that someone else has heard inside their head.

Nor am I taking responsibility for their feelings, exactly. It’s one of my key beliefs that everyone is responsible for their own emotional reactions (it’s one of the few useful things I learned when training to be a youth worker, at least one of the few that was actually on the curriculum).

At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge other people’s feelings and validate them – that is, convey that in the circumstances and given their presuppositions, it’s understandable that they have these feelings.

Please, please, don’t ever tell anyone that they don’t feel what they, in fact, do feel. And equally, don’t tell them that they shouldn’t feel it, as if their feelings were morally wrong or transgressed some law about how things ought to be. They feel what they feel. They feel it for reasons that, to them, are valid. Acknowledging that is the start of restoring relationship and communication, and after that point you can have the conversation about what you intended and what you did or didn’t actually say.

Connection is more important than correction

I don’t know that I did an A+ job of conveying what I’ve just talked about to the commenters on my post, though judging from the way they calmed down after I apologised, I must have at least done something right. But it reminded me (as such things tend to) of other times when I’ve offended people and apologised.

 
photo credit: kayugee

My first car was a lemon. It was an elderly Corolla, sold to me for more than it was worth by the stereotypical sleazy used-car salesman. You had to work the clutch in a particular way when you slowed down and changed gear, or it used to stall.

When I was selling it, my friend Andrew was looking for a car. I told him about the stalling issue, and we had the Automobile Association come and do an inspection and a report on it. We agreed that he would buy it at a certain price.

Well, he couldn’t get the hang of preventing the stall, and ended up selling it to someone else for less money – I forget exactly how much, about $150 or $200, I think. This was years ago.

Andrew was angry about the whole thing, and I knew it. So I said to him, “Let me pay you the difference.”

Contractually, I had no obligation. We’d agreed on a price, we’d had the car inspected, all due diligence, etc., etc. But what it came down to for me was, Andrew was my friend, and I valued that friendship at more than $200 (or however much it was). The relationship was more important to me than the money – and more important than being right.

And that’s the thing. In my view, relationship and connection is always more important than being right. That’s why I apologised to people who I believed had misunderstood and misinterpreted my blog post.

At the same time, connection is not more important than being true to myself, so I wasn’t going to have other people’s words about stuttering put on me. I took responsibility for what I said, but not for what I didn’t say and wouldn’t say.

How to defuse a ticking situation

We all have things that set us off, that are the equivalent of “light blue touch-paper and stand well clear” for our emotions. I have them, you (I would bet) have them. Sometimes we set each other’s off by accident.

I remember when I was working in an office where almost all of the other people, including my boss, were women. Siezed by an ill-considered, but innocent whim, I printed out a sign and put it by the door. It said, “You don’t need to be female to work here – but it helps!”

My boss went ballistic. Looking back, she was an ambitious, competent woman in an organisation where there was a glass ceiling a foot thick. Of course she reacted. She sent out an email that started “I am on the warpath” and implied dire consequences if she discovered who had made the sign.

She was known as someone you absolutely didn’t mess with, and I was a contractor – she wouldn’t even have to go through many formalities to fire me. But I went to her and confessed and apologised.

Nothing more was said. If anything, we had a better relationship afterwards than before.

I’ve consistently found that if I come clean and apologise when I’ve done something wrong, it defuses anger, where defensiveness and excuses would only add fuel to it.

It was bloody scary learning that, I can tell you. But it’s true.

What to do when you offend someone

To tie it all up, then, here’s what I’ve learned from many mistakes and the occasional right decision.

1. Sooner or later, you will offend someone for some reason.
2. When you do, apologise.
3. Own your stuff. Don’t own their stuff.
4. Acknowledge, allow and validate their emotions. They have their reasons.
5. Other people’s hot buttons are generally not about you, however much it may seem that way.
6. Stay aware of your own emotions and your tendency to defend yourself. Work consciously against that tendency.
7. Value connection over correction. Being right isn’t really that important, especially if it leaves you alone against the universe.

Next week, all going well, I’m back to 5 Ways to Wellbeing, and we’ll be talking about one of my favourite subjects: paying attention. Until then – be excellent to each other.

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