Jerk

how do I find the right feedback? Getting good feedback is hard, and it’s even harder to know whether to take it. Part of me knows that if I’m not pissing off at least a couple people, I’m doing something wrong. If you tell someone something that they don’t know, and it conflicts with what they believe in, that will cause them to be pissed at you. That’s ok. If I pissed off people by being a jerk, that’s not the right way to do it. I go back and look at my final evaluation from 375, and Dr. K says,

“One suggestion I have for you is that you develop better communication skills. You blame caffeine and lack of sleep (and I’m sure these didn’t help), but sometimes attitudes are contagious and you need to reduce stress on your teammates, not add to it. “

In other words, she’s telling me that my partners think I’m a jerk, and that I don’t do so well in a group. I guess at my age, the whole pretentious jerk thing comes with being smart, and conscious effort must be taken to change that. In the way she’s describing, it seems like being a jerk goes with lacking communication skills. Those ever so important soft skills… communication, leadership, that stuff that’s not taught in class, how does one go about developing it?

Just today, my mom thanked me for putting leaving the toilet seat down after I took a shit. I know that's one kind of feedback, and she's basically telling me that I should do that in the future. But how do I know if that’s legitimate criticism that I need should change, or if she’s trying to make me into a vehicle that eases her own life?

More generally, people will often criticize me because I don’t act in a way that eases their life. Back when I worked in Reading ER, I heard a patient complain/criticize that one of her doctors never answered his phone. But that’s a way that the doctor makes sure he gets his own work done, and doesn’t get interrupted by trifle matters. But easing other people’s life should be secondary goal to getting things, done, and getting things done requires working with other people, which means listening to the criticism about how I don’t do that well.

The other problem is that none of these complaint/criticisms come back to me. I know people trash talk me behind my back, and that almost always, it doesn’t come back to me, and as a result, I don’t know what I’m doing that pisses people off.

When people criticize you, either they are telling you something that you should change to your own benefit, or they want to change you because that change will make their life easier. But the difficult part is that the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and you can’t always tell based on the person.

So the way to go about this is to gather information, if you can, and then judge the information that you have to see if it has merits.

What did Trevor, Scott, and Sage say about me? What do Allison, Julie, and Emily think of me? What does Sam complain to her friends that I do? Meh. I’m not going to worry about that.