As I was eating breakfast this morning, I watched my son, Jake, drag the kitchen chair across our wooden floor from our dining table to the counter.
“Stop dragging the chair Jake!!”
He's been doing this on a regular basis for over a year and it’s begun to feel like a battle of wills. Each time we see it happen, my wife and I respond the same way. – we yell at him to stop and feel frustrated that he is not learning this lesson.
As I reflect on this recurring scene, I realized that I’ve been looking at this situation in the wrong way. I interpret my son's repeat offense as insubordination when, in fact, his behavior continues, most likely, because he is so focused on achieving his goals.
The reason he drags the chair to the counter is because the charger for the iPad is on the counter. He wants to sit next to the counter so he can continue to play while the iPad is charging. That is his sole focus.
My goal is to prevent the floor from scuffing while the chair gets dragged across it. When I yell for my son to stop, I am singularly focused on achieving my goal and inadvertently become an obstacle to his achieving his goal. Similarly, when he drags the chair across the room, he is just focused on his achieving his goal and inadvertently becomes an obstacle to what I want. We each get into each other’s way without even knowing it.
For me, the deeper insight comes from recognizing just how quickly and repeatedly I keep exerting my power over him to get what I want at the expense of what he wants. I justify this behavior by reminding myself that I am the adult and he is the 6-year old child. I go even further by telling myself that I’m teaching my son discipline and keeping him in line. Instead, if I took a few minutes to think about what he wanted, I could have made a structural change that allowed us each to achieve our goals. If I move the charger to the living room next to our couch, my son can sit there and play whenever he needs to charge his iPad.
Inadvertently, getting in each other's way happens all the time - at work, in school, during social gatherings. The next time you feel slighted or feel someone is repeatedly doing something you don’t want them to do, figure out why they are doing it that way. If you pay attention to the other person’s goal, you might find a way to both get what you want.
Remember, more often than not, it’s nothing personal. You just happen to be in their way.
Photo by Ali Yahya
Something that’s helped me a lot with this type of thinking is pausing for a moment and trying to “zoom out” on the situation and see it in the third person. What I almost always see is a situation like what you described with the kitchen chair and the charger where two people have parallel goals that can both be met with a strategic decision.
Generally, this strategic decision is to change whatever it is about the environment or scenario that causes the conflict in the first place. That’s usually what causes two people with parallel goals to come into any type of conflict to begin with since their goals wouldn’t otherwise conflict with each other.
And as I’m sure you know, kids are great at bringing this out when they have goals that conflict with what the adults want.
Great point Robert on zooming out and seeing it from a more detached point of view!