Five Ways to Stop Trying to Fix People

Everybody has been the one who did not fit. A new school, a new job, a family that has its own language and did not hand you the dictionary. You remember how it felt to be in the room and not of it.

And everybody has been on the other side of it too — the one who could not quite accept somebody else, and knew it, and carried on anyway.

Terry Schmitz, who has spent three decades building programmes that teach this stuff to students and employees, boils the skill down to five habits. None of them are complicated. Several of them are annoying, in the way that true things about your own behaviour usually are.

1. Stop trying to manage how people feel

You have done this. Somebody brought you a problem, you tried to help, and nothing landed. You tried getting them to see it your way. You tried inviting them to be more rational about it. They stayed exactly where they were, and you came away faintly irritated that your help had been refused.

The awkward possibility is that the problem was the helping. Feelings do not have a right answer to arrive at. They are not arguments, and they do not resolve because somebody competent explained them. When you tell a person they should not feel what they plainly do feel, they do not stop feeling it. They just stop telling you about it.

2. Let people be different

Consider, briefly, a world in which everybody was exactly like you. Same opinions, same taste, same jokes, same way of loading a dishwasher. You would lose interest in other people inside a week.

We know this. We still get uncomfortable around difference, and we deal with that discomfort in one of two ways: we try to convert people, or we quietly avoid them. Avoiding is the popular option because it does not feel like a decision. You simply find that you never happen to sit next to them.

The countermove is small and specific. Find the person in the room who seems most unlike you and have an actual conversation. Not a polite exchange — a conversation, with follow-up questions. You will almost always come out of it with a shorter list of differences than you went in with.

3. Give advice that fits the person in front of you

Think of the last time you took a problem to somebody and got back advice so wide of the mark that you wondered whether they had heard any of it.

They probably did hear it. What they did not do was think about you while answering. They reached for the advice they would want, or the advice that resolved their own discomfort about your situation, and handed it over.

Advice that helps has to be built for the specific person, their temperament and their circumstances. Which means most of the work happens before you say anything.

4. Do not be quick to judge

Spotting what is wrong with somebody is effortless. It requires no talent and provides a small, reliable hit of superiority. Most of us do it without registering that we have done it.

The harder move — the one that takes actual effort — is to name what is good about a person instead. And behind it sits the single most generous assumption you can make about another human being: if they could do better, they would.

You do not have to believe that about everyone forever. Try believing it about one person for one week and watch what it does to your blood pressure.

5. Try not to compare

This is the one that quietly does the most damage, and almost nobody counts it as judgement.

We compare constantly. Ourselves against other people, other people against some standard we never agreed to out loud, our children against their cousins, our job against the one our friend has. Theodore Roosevelt is supposed to have said that comparison is the thief of joy, and whether or not he did, the sentence has survived because it keeps being right. There is always somebody richer, quicker, thinner, further along. The comparison is unwinnable by design.

People are not on the same road at different speeds. They are on different roads. Measuring one against another is a category error dressed up as insight.

The reason this is on a website about a dog

Baxter never ran any of these five checks, and he was better at this than the people who wrote the checks.

He did not manage anybody’s feelings, because he had no view on how you ought to be feeling. He did not mind that you were different, because he had not formed a baseline. He never compared you to the last person through the door. Whoever you were, you got the same greeting, and the greeting contained no assessment of any kind.

That is the whole trick, and a terrier managed it. Which suggests the rest of us could manage a version of it, on purpose, with effort — and that it might be worth the effort.

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Prompted by Terry Schmitz, The Conover Company, and worth reading in the original. We keep it in the library here: read the source. Their piece is at www.conovercompany.com.