‘Most people who come here to ride end up telling me what I should do with this farm, how I should rethink it. They don’t know anything about horses or what it means to run a farm but they tell me what to do.’ A colleague of mine told me about the owner of a horse farm where, about 15 years ago, I did a teambuilding with my Interact colleagues.
You may have experienced such situations. You invite someone home and they start telling you how you should redesign your space. Or someone new to the firm tells you how you should organise your business. I use the verb ‘should’ on purpose because they use it often. Why? Because they know and you don’t. What if you’ve had the farm or business for several years? So what if you’re comfortable at home in the space you’ve set up? They know better and they tell you even if you haven’t asked for advice.
Someone told me recently that it really bothers him when a client tells him that he can do what he does. That would show zero respect for the other person’s job.
I admit I hadn’t thought of it that way. I thought it was fine if you made something difficult look easy. But people interpret it differently, they end up devaluing your work.
We’re in a time when we’re all good at everything, especially giving advice. It doesn’t matter if someone is educated and experienced in a field, you come along and tell them they’re doing it wrong, that you’re good at it too. Sure, we’re good at criticism, at seeing the speck in someone else’s eye and imagining that we’re at least as good. But we don’t have all the facts, we judge on the surface, from the helicopter where our ego is. From there, whatever another does seems like a trifle that we would do much better. Except what we do ourselves. There the perspective changes, the standards change, everything becomes complicated, hard, no one would do as well as we do.
I’m not saying we can’t learn something new. Or that we don’t have opinions, that we don’t see a certain situation in our own way. But everyone is in their own way, what suits me may not suit you. A little humility wouldn’t hurt. Or was there none left when the qualities were divided?