Reading Time: 2 minWe all know that listening is an important skill, and most of us know that we need to do better with it, myself included. The more you can truly listen to what someone else is saying, the better off you’ll both be. This is a subject that came up a lot while I was reading […]
Empathy
Feedback is a gift
Reading Time: < 1 minIf given in the right spirit, feedback from others is an amazing thing. The book “Thanks for the Feedback” offers great ways to share productively with others, and I touched on a few other ideas in a post from last year. If you can stay open to feedback (and hopefully it’s delivered in the right […]
We all have accessibility needs
Reading Time: < 1 minWebsite accessibility is something I’ve shared a lot about. We’ve written about it on the GreenMellen blog, devoted a podcast episode to it, and there are a handful of posts on here as well. Polishing up the accessibility of your website is a great thing, and makes it so all users can consume the content […]
Love is greater than hurt feelings
Reading Time: 2 minDespite the title, I’m not advocating for being a jerk, but I also think there are times when some hard truths that lead to hurt feelings can be a good thing. In Annie Duke’s excellent book “Quit“, she shares some insight on this from Daniel Kahneman: When I asked Daniel Kahneman what he thinks the […]
Make the charitable assumption
Reading Time: < 1 minIt’s easy to make assumptions about other people. If someone is short with you, they might be a jerk. Or maybe they just lost their job, or lost a friend. It’s hard to know for sure, but if your initial thought is always that they must just be a jerk, that’s generally a bad outlook […]
The output of courage is curiosity
Reading Time: < 1 minIt’s something I’ve never really thought about before, but in many cases it’s difficult to express curiosity without some degree of courage. On a recent episode of “The Long and The Short Of It” podcast, they unpacked this quite a bit. While it can be seen in a handful of different ways, Jen summed it […]
Don’t make a bigger mistake
Reading Time: 2 minSometimes you will execute something perfectly, yet another person might think you’ve made a mistake. Depending on who that is, it might be worth owning up to your “mistake” rather than making a bigger one by trying to correct them. In his pursuit of excellence, Danny Meyer shares these thoughts in the book “Unreasonable Hospitality“, […]
Interpersonal versus social empathy
Reading Time: < 1 minI talk about empathy on here quite a bit (there’s a whole category for it), as it’s a skill I’m working to improve in my own life. The more I read and learn about it, the more my skill of empathy slowly improves. Until now, though, I’ve largely thought of empathy as a personal thing […]
Empathy is more than just caring
Reading Time: < 1 minI talk about empathy quite a lot on here, as I believe that those with more empathy are generally able to make better decisions about many aspects of life. However, it’s easy to think of empathy as just “caring about others”, when that’s really not the point. There’s also the idea of attunement, which can […]
Be curious, not judgmental
Reading Time: < 1 minIn the fantastic Apple TV show “Ted Lasso”, Ted drops a quote that he attributes to Walt Whitman: “Be curious, not judgmental“. It likely was never said by Whitman, but the effect of the quote still stands. In the case of Ted Lasso, Ted wraps this around it: Guys have underestimated my entire life. And […]