Seek First to Understand....

The 5th habit is called Seek First to Understand, then be Understood.  It's strange how my events in my life seems to develop around the latest habit I'm reading. Either that or I'm darned good at drawing inferences.  Anyway, I'll let you be the judge of that.

This habit talks about how we tend to project our own biographies (our experiences, motivations, preferences, ethics) onto other people, thinking they are like us, when actually many come from very different backgrounds and perspectives, and what they are saying could be something very different.  When we fail to fully understand the other, our response will be somewhat limited or off-the-mark. 

It encourages us to really listen to the other person to understand where they are coming from, their emotional state, instead of thinking of your own reply, or interpreting what they are saying in light of your own biography.  This is really hard, cos, well I guess that's what I've been doing all along.

But it goes on to say that when we succeed in doing that, we give the other person the gift of understanding, which is a great emotional deposit.  And when they are assured that we understand them, they actually become a lot more receptive to what we have to say.  Hmm... not bad for a persuasion technique.  Ok, I'm not supposed to think that, or I would go right back into being a manipulative listener... It kind of requires us to suspend our agendas for a time to really listen and understand.  Wa, I think it will be quite a mental workout since that is just not what we are used to!

Anyway, these past few weeks, I've had the opportunity to visit two friends with young children - one was my hubby's friend, who recently added a third child (a boy) to his two girls, and we decided to visit them just for the fun of it (the boy was already about 5 months old).  The second one was my friend who recently gave birth to her first boy, and we went to the boy's 1-month party.  Both experiences opened my eyes to the wide range of parenting styles there are on this planet (ok, that's an exaggeration, but it's wide enough that I marvel that such parents exist).

First, we went to visit my hubby's friend at about 7pm on Sat night, they had just arrived back home from being out the whole day and the mom was in the kitchen with the maid while the father was standing in the living room loosening his tie.  When I entered their home, I immediately noticed their son lying prone on a Winnie-the-Pooh mat doing swimming motions to himself.  His two sisters were playing with toys by the side, but as he was not yet mobile, he couldn't quite join in.  So I went to speak to him and play with him.  When he saw me, he got real excited and smiled, his movements becoming more energetic.  He was such an adorable child.  As the night progressed, we made a disturbing observation - neither parent paid any attention to the 3 kids while we were there.  The mom was busy cooking in the kitchen with her maid, she hardly appeared except to ask the two older girls to have dinner, and the father was talking to my hubby the whole time.  When the youngest son flipped over on his back and started yelping cos his legs were stuck under a low table, I was the only one who noticed and turned him upright.  When he started putting a red crayon into his mouth, it was my hubby (who is normally quite inattentive to kids) who shouted "Stop him!" repeatedly until someone took it out of his mouth.  And the funniest thing of the night was, when the maid and mom carried the youngest son into their bedroom for his night feed, we suddenly heard a loud crying that went on for quite a while, and suddenly it went very quiet.  And before we knew it, my maid was entered the living room carrying the little boy!  This was quickly intercepted by the other mom, who quickly whisked him away back into the room, and said her maid was just preparing the milk, she would take care of the baby.  My hubby and I laughed, as it was so ingrained in our maid to always respond promptly to distressed crying (in fact, the adults get more worked up than the baby sometimes), that she instinctively did what she felt was best - to carry and comfort the poor boy.  Later, I snuck into the bedroom with my maid, to sneak a peek at the boy drinking milk, and he was so cute!  He was lying on his back, holding a big bottle with both his hands, sucking insistently while staring at a spot on the ceiling.  And the maid said this was his happiest moment of the day.  And he would sleep soon after.  I couldn't help pitying the boy, as no one was holding him as he drank, and we also learnt during dinner, that both parents had gone through a period of sleep training (cry-it-out method - thanks Gina Ford), where they had trained him to go to sleep on his own without adult carrying or rocking.  Now tis just flies against my own knowledge of what constitutes good parenting (especially in the first year when what they need is predictable responsive parenting to assure them the world is a safe place and they are too old to manipulate with cries yet).  Ok ok I admit I am a product of attachment parenting (I belong to the Dr William Sears club), but the science and research that shows it is good for the child is so abundant!  I wondered if the boy would turn out ok, and if he would always hold a part of him back, cos he was trained as a kid not to expect affection and to "suck it up" and move on.  Perhaps that is the genesis of many emotionally restrained, unexpressive men.  Or perhaps not.  I am just drawing my own conclusions here, and I have not factored in other influencing factors like his genetic make-up, his teachers, his friends, his school and ultimately, God.

My second visit was to my friend, who married late and just had her first.  At the 1-month party, she looked slim and radiant, as a new mother, and though she was busy entertaining many guests, I could not help feeling excited and happy for her, thinking back to the time when I had my first kid (projecting my own experiences!).  But when I asked her (during a moment's respite when she was sitting near me) if she was feeling very maternal now, she shook her head and said no.  I was shocked.  She said her hubby seems to take to fatherhood a lot more than her, often going straight to the kid when he got home, to carry and talk to him for an hour straight (even when he was sleeping)!  Whereas for her, when she gets home she might head over to take a look at the baby, and if he was awake she would say "Kuai dian shui jiao!  Yao bu ran ba ni diu diao!" (sleep quick, or I'll throw you away!). And she shrugged indifferently when I asked her how breastfeeding was - it was ok, but she pumps out all her milk cos her boy likes to suck a little too much, sometimes sucking for 45 min.

All these experiences made me realise there are many kinds of mothers (a non-maternal mother just makes me shudder, a little), and different kinds of fathers, that despite it all, kids still grow up, and they live and walk and work around us.  So, no wonder that we all come from different backgrounds, upbringing, have different "scripts" written in our minds!

Just that little difference in the kind of parents we had (whether they are Gina Ford or William Sears followers) could spell the big difference deep down inside their emotional make-up (which I understand from research, shapes the parts of the brain that develop later, which are reasoning, cognition and creativity).

I thought I should try to apply this listening technique (of seeking to really understand the person) to someone these few days, but I still haven't found the opportunity.  Perhaps the one person I did try it on was my elder son, Jack, who is now very adept at throwing spectacular tantrums.  After punishing him harshly through the naughty corner (which I think he remembers with pain till today), I thought a better way could be to understand what he wants (to do whatever seems fun to him) and to try to go along with it.  Yes, the word "no" triggers a meltdown like a match to fire, so now I try to avoid saying it.  It's an exercise in creativity!   "Later" is a favourite, or just "ok" (and not do it), or explain why he cannot have it (I realised if I say long sentences, he tends to get lost trying to follow and forget to throw a tantrum).  I still set limits, and he still flouts them (like throwing lego pieces in all directions when he is frustrated) but I am learning that a sharp look and disapproving words plus removing people from harm's way is as good a teaching tip as beating him at this stage.  I think he gets it that he shouldn't do it, he just can't control himself yet.  I just learnt from a website the best way to deal with a tantrum is just to hold him and be with him until it subsides (in a private place where he cannot disturb others), and then when he has calmed down, to explain to him why he could not have it/do it/should not have done it.  Sigh, so much to learn! 

I also remember what a Pastor's wife once told me.  "The most important thing I did right with both my kids was - I always prayed for them". 

The next person I would want to try this tip on, would probably be my husband, who is as different from me as chalk and cheese in certain matters.  But more on that in another post.

The Importance of Emotional Banks

I recently moved to assume a new role in my Division, a policy role.  It was initially one I was very reluctant to take up, as policy roles traditionally have been unpopular in my organisation because of a few reasons:

(a) You do not own any domain area in terms of expertise or knowledge, but are expected to contribute your views to "improve" the policy of a line Department, whose people have been in that field for ages,

(b) People in that domain area tend to see you as a source of either (1) someone who talks nonsense, not knowing the ground or having enough technical expertise/experience in that field or (2) a work generator, someone who will give them extra (often unimportant) work and send them on wild goose chases, because you don't know the field well enough, and/or because you are not the implementor and so have no aligned incentive to minimise work for them.  In fact adding to their work load scores you points!

(3) Competing with them for limelight, because you often report to a different boss, and so both sides are trying to profile themselves. You can't "value add" without the line department (who has been in this field for so long) looking bad.

So, with the odds stacked against me, I somehow found myself assuming this role as of 1 Jul 2013.  But a saving grace (or not, in terms of workload), was that I was still holding on to my previous position in my Department, which I was growing very comfortable with and which I liked very much.  It was good in that I consoled myself - if I hate my new policy role, I can always have my Department work to fall back on, and at least I'm not stuck doing policy full-time.  Some people felt I was getting the raw end of the deal in terms of workload (and I also acted like the poor overworked officer when people asked me about my new role), but I was actually not too unhappy about it.

What was surprising to me, was how enjoyable and challenging my new role was to me, both in terms of defining the job scope of this new policy unit, what me and my new team (albeit a small one) are each supposed to do, how we would work together, establishing relations with new Departments, and just getting up to speed on the myriad of issues in my work.  Some parts are more enjoyable than others, and not every one is as challenging, but I shall talk more on the enjoyable ones (being someone who likes to dwell on the positive, remember the good and forget the bad, haha).

They are the last 2 areas of my work, and the first one on establishing contacts has been a lesson in emotional banks.  I realised that in getting in touch for the first time with Departmental staff, that some treated me with surprise (why are you approaching me to ask me all sorts of questions about my work?), puzzlement (so you want me to send you my draft paper?  Then what are you going to do with it? How does it affect workflow?) and skeptics (ha!  This new policy unit is just a waste of time.  It overlaps with what we and other departments are doing and will just add to the bottleneck, further slowing down an already long and cumbersome clearance process.  You are just going to add to our workload, like all the other initiatives that have gone before.  And how can you possibly value add to our work?).  Many of the Directors, in fact, probably all Directors, fell into the last category to some extent.  I could see their distrust and wariness in their eyes and from their comments about the policy unit.  I was also hearing some of these sentiments from the grapevine.

However, what I have found is that it is very important to gain their trust and establish your credibility by giving good, constructive comments, from the get-go.  Let's see, even my own Director, was quite surprised to see me sitting in a meeting where they were discussing another section's work.  Having argued with the staff quite a bit before this meeting, where most of my comments were shot down by them (sigh, it's actually a matter of timing, many of my comments were on areas have already been approved, which is a big pity in my opinion), I kept quiet in this meeting until the very end, where I raised one concern with their recommendation.  It pertained to how the policy would look to the customers, which would be nothing short of confusing.  To my Director's credit, he took it in his stride, and immediately suggested a way to manage this risk.  It got incorporated into the slides as a sub-bullet on the last slide, and eventually it all got approved.  At the management meeting, they even talked about that sub-bullet, and how that would be an issue on the ground, and my Director spoke up at the meeting to commit the Department (actually my colleagues) to even more mitigation measures, to minimise the confusion.  I must say even though I got none of the credit for that, and my policy boss doesn't know this, I felt a private victory inside myself, at having influenced public policy in Singapore in a small way.

Another similar incident happened at another meeting with another Director.  Once he realised my comments were on-the-ball, he started asking his staff to amend the slides to reflect my comments, and was decidedly warmer in his interactions with me afterwards.  With a third Department, a Deputy Director who was initially quite snarky with his comments on the policy unit, started sharing some problems he had with his work.  It was a philosophical one - where they had to promote something which people all agreed was a good thing to do, but simply was not cost-effective.  Why should government do it then?  He mused.  I overcame all my hesitation and uncertainty about what I was about to say (a lot of it when it comes to Singaporeans!) and asked him what was in his cost-benefit analysis.  Apparently, he did not take some future long-term cost into account, which the government would have to fork out if they did not promote what they were promoting.  So if they took that future cost into account, would the cost-benefit analysis actually become positive?  He looked like a light bulb had gone on in his head, and immediately turned to his staff and started giving instructions on how to tweak their numbers.  After the meeting, the gruff Deputy Director was still telling me about some other issue he was facing and how he may need policy's help in the future.  I felt like I scored another private victory and won another person's trust.

All these are emotional bank accounts, and as they are all new, I am wary of putting too many negative deposits into it at the beginning. According to Stephen Covey's book, when a relationship has been built up over the years, with many positive deposits, you can make a few withdrawals in a row, and the trust level is still very high.  But not so for fledgling relationships.  You have to kind of make sure the deposits outweight the withdrawals, or you run up negative feelings all the time when you encounter the person.  I had also made up my mind, shortly after I assumed this new role, that I wanted to be known for a few things, namely simplicity, clarity, insight and innovation.  As a unit, I wanted us to be known for humility, going back to basics and fundamentals, and an ability to get the policies approved by presenting the facts in a convincing, persuasive, easy-to-understand manner.  I suppose I arrived at these because of my dislike of their opposites.  I dislike unnecessarily complicated, messy writings, which display no insight, no clarity of thought, no creativity.  I am aware that things like insight and creativity in new fields of knowledge take time, but they are goals I aspire towards.

Another thing I am enjoying in my new role is learning the work.  As my new boss promised me, the work in my policy role certainly is interesting.  What he didn't tell me was how technical and scientific it was.  I found that out when I organised a workplan seminar recently for my Division.  From the workplan presentations of the 5 departments, I found out that I was going to have to brush up on my science again, if I was to comment on the work of certain Departments.  For another Department, it was heavily engineering-based.  Disliking fluff and having a preference for going back to fundamentals, I think I better brush up on my engineering too.  Thankfully I liked science in school!

Every day is bringing with it new challenges, new issues to understand and new people to meet.  I am having a fun time.  I thank God, as my hubby once said, the ability to enjoy your work is a blessing from God.

What I’ve Been Up To... And First Things First

Hi all!  I suppose after so long, some of you may be wondering – what happened to her?  I am waiting for the Third Habit!  Alas, this will not be the post.  In fact, I have given up on implementing the Third Habit – First Things First – because doing it simply isn’t easy.  First off, I need to write my mission statement, long-term, medium-term and weekly goals in all roles/areas of my life (that makes about 7 of them, a lot of goal-setting!) onto my calendar, and plan activities for that week that will move me a step closer to my goals.  This way we organise our week around our priorities, and we can say no to other things.  Sounds good in theory.  It's kind of the practicing and actually saying no to other things that gets tricky. 

I actually tried it before, years ago after I just completed the 7 Habits course, and it’s exhausting.  There are so many goals to keep track of, and I know I spent a good chunk of my time on Sunday nights planning it, meticulously penciling in things in specific times of the week, and then checking if I kept to it the previous week.  I guess there are many areas in our lives where we don’t like to set goals, and keep trying to work towards them.  Not explicitly.  My mind can only focus on a few areas.  Like for me, health is pretty low priority (thanks to a God-blessed, inherited good constitution), so my goals there will be rather half-hearted.  Top would probably be my role as a cell leader, personal/spiritual goals, and as a mother (sorry hubby!  Sorry work!).  I guess things in those 2 departments are going relatively smoothly, or I almost just coast along, and don’t feel they need much work. 

I also don’t feel like trying it again because apart from the exhaustion of doing all the planning (which is supposed to make life more purposeful and guided but feels kinda anal after a while), I also find it a bit disappointing when I don’t manage to carry out all the planned activities for that week, and worse, if I miss a particular activity week after week (e.g. Quiet Time, journaling time).   It’s like, I guess I need some force greater than me to make me do those things I had planned out at the start of the week.  Yes, though my brain clearly thinks are worth doing and I can see how they are linked to my goals, the shout of the urgent (e.g. work), the visible (e.g. kids) and hedonistic urges (e.g. a bit more sleep, a thrilling fiction book) are still louder than that still, small voice.  I guess not even the most fantastic planner in the world can overcome the slothful nature of man.   I am reminded of a great Christian who said, about waking up early to do QT “Kick yourself!  Prod yourself!  It’s the only way.”  Not so complex, but I am starting to think it might be effective.  Aside from fervently praying that God somehow overtakes my body and bestows me with absolute self-control.

So, I eventually stopped that detailed planning and lived life more loosely and by the flow of the moment.  I think some middle ground is probably best.  I used to want to display my goals prominently in my room, or my wardrobe, basically some place where I would see daily.  So I think reminding ourselves of our goals regularly is a good thing.  I think once I see my goal daily, I will subconsciously plan my day with that in mind.  And I can’t keep track of too many goals.  Perhaps a few really important ones would be good.  And to have a few really important actions or plans to reach my goals would be good too.  But no need to have that week-by-week planning.  As I said, unless one happens to be a planner by nature, it’s exhausting. 

Anyway, this post isn’t about First Things First!  Ah, but too late.  I’m already exhausted.  So I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to another day!