Evaluate the message and not the messenger

Otherwise, you run the risk of losing a friendship or a job.

I am working on a project with a friend. We had known each other for about 25 years. Ideally, the collaboration should have been smooth. But I am having a tough time with our communications. Whenever I gave her any suggestion or shared a different perspective on any task on the project, I had to face her resistance.

Instead of understanding my message, she is getting defensive against me and putting her guard to protect her. Our primary mode of communication is via chat on WhatsApp. Hence, I do not think my tone plays a crucial role in activating her sensors. It has happened thrice in the last two days.

In the first instance, I suggested a different way of doing a task. In the second instance, I shared some more information from the internet. This information was contradictory to our earlier understanding of a topic. In both cases, she got defensive immediately. To prove her point, she gave some invalid reasons. After a few hours, which I deliberately took to cool off the situation, I showed her some information to prove her points wrong. But this did not improve this situation any further as our next confrontation happened on the same day.

I am not sharing these things to prove her wrong and myself right. I think many among us behave the same way as my friend. And I am no exception there. As I’m thinking about this behavior, I am also doing a retrospection on my life. There have been so many past instances where I focused on the messenger rather than the message.

Earlier, I was working as a product manager in a small company. I was reporting to the CEO, who was a micromanager. He never respected the boundaries of his subordinate’s work. He used to come out with weird new features for the product and expected me to start working on them without further discussing the ROI of those new features. One day, he asked me to add new features. I rejected it outrightly. I regret this instant reaction from my side, as the CEO was taken aback by my immediate rejection. He did not like it and brought up this instance many times in our later conversations. Anyways, long story short, I reacted to the messenger in this case. I did not try to understand the message first and then respond to it.

I feel it is our preconditioned mind that fails to separate the message and the messenger. Like in this earlier case, I had some reservations about my CEO. So whenever he communicated with me, I evaluated him on the first impression that I had formed about him from my previous interactions. The new message from him was never completely understood in isolation. So I interpreted it with a preconditioned lens. This is not one single instance. There would be many more instances in my professional and personal life, where I had ruined the meaning of the present message by shadowing it with a past situation.

The situation with my friend showed me a mirror, where I could see a reflection of myself in her behavior. No doubt It is a challenging situation between two old friends. But this also taught me a profound lesson. I will never judge the messenger and always try to interpret the message by keeping it separate from the messenger. Only time will tell how much I succeed in this, or maybe another blog in the future on my success score.

Wish you all a great week and hope you get success in segregating the message from its messenger.