Navigating a Whackadoodle World: Episode 64, The Power of Process and Growth, or Don't Ask People to Feel What They Don't Feel, or Think What They Don't Think
A Whackadoodle lesson featuring the delegation process, the health benefits of gratitude, a grumpy student, and three really long scientific words.
As soon as she entered, my student went to her chair, dropped her backpack ceremoniously on the table in front of her, and stood at attention, only to inform me, “I have achieved my objective of eating healthier this week by keeping my MASTERed goal of eating 30 different plants.” She then gave me a mock salute, put herself at ease, and sat down, adding, “I was actually getting kind of mad at myself because when I finally got around to making a list, I had only eaten like 27 plants; then I remembered we had V8 in the cupboard. I downed one of those, and added carrots, beets, parsley, watercress, and spinach all at once, which actually brought me to 32 plants; so really, I exceeded my goal.”
“Proud of you,” I grinned, sipping my less healthy beverage of eggnog spiked coffee. (One of the best things about the holiday season—eggnog hits the grocery shelves.) “And can you finally see why I believe so strongly in MASTERing your goals?”
“Yup,” she admitted. “Keeping them realistic makes them easier to keep. Less like sending a wish out into the world and hoping it happens.”
“Exactly,” I nodded, and reached for my own notepad. “And now, given the holiday season, I thought we might talk about the healing power of gratitude.”
“Hang on,” she interrupted. “Last week, you said that we were going to review the delegation process.”
“I know, but over Thanksgiving, everyone was writing about gratitude, and a few of the articles inspired me.” I could see her hand come up, and rushed on before she could stop me. “They were explaining how the feeling of gratitude actually improves your overall health by activating new pathways in your brain, and releasing endorphins like releasing dopamine and serotonin—chemicals that create feelings of pleasure and contentment. Thom Hartman wrote a really nice article about it called ‘The Radical Power of Gratitude to Rewire Your Brain and Life.’ Then there was another article by Julie Fratantoni. She’s a neurobiologist who writes a substack newsletter debunking all the stuff on the Internet that people claim will improve your brain’s health, and then gives scientific advice about stuff that actually does improve your brain’s health. Anyway, her article in particular struck me because she said that just keeping a gratitude list or a journal doesn’t do much unless you are visualizing or reliving the gratitude while you journal. It’s the actual feeling of gratitude that activates the brain, particularly in the areas that are…” I opened my notebook. “Hold on, I have it here.” I flipped through the pages. “Right, gratitude activates the brain ‘particularly in areas that are involved in reward, perspective taking, and moral and social behavior, (as well as setting) the context and define(ing) the meaning of your experiences.’”
She was staring at me, looking bored. I tried one more time, “You see, she advocates a kind of meditation everyday, where you remember a time when you were truly grateful, and that you spend a few minutes actually feeling the emotion you felt then and re-experience it in your body.” She faked a yawn, but I persisted. “Then there’s the article by Thom Hartman. He advocates what I think is an even better approach to feeling gratitude. He takes a daily walk with his wife, and they express their gratitude for the world and beauty around them. I mean, when you think about it, you could feel gratitude in almost any activity. Shoot, I mean like with my Dad,” I looked towards her, checking in. “You do know that I look after my Dad right?”
“Yeah, I know,” she admitted grudgingly. “He’s one of the reasons you tutor out of your house instead of out of a center, so you don’t have to leave him alone all day.”
“Right, so anyway. Last month, we had a terrible scare. He ended up in the hospital for a week because of a blood infection. He was so weak and disoriented. Now, there are a lot of negative things I could get mad about. I could be mad about the neuropathy in his feet, which lets him hurt himself without feeling it. I could be mad at myself for not discovering the wound before infection set in. I could be mad at a lot of things, but that would be pointless and unhealthy. Instead, I choose to feel gratitude for the antibiotics that literally saved his life. Gratitude for the doctors and nurses that gave him such good care. Gratitude that I was able to bring him home. And it turns out that all that gratitude—that feeling of gratitude—is actually improving the circuitry in my brain, and enhancing my emotional and psychological resilience. I think that’s kind of cool. Don’t you?”
“Yeah, cool, you shared it,” she said drily. “Gratitude good. Gratitude healthy. Now can we review something that I’m not so clear about?”
“Your gratitude is underwhelming,” It was my turn to be snide.
“And yet,” she grinned mischievously, “I seem to remember someone telling me a story about one Thanksgiving when one side of her whole family unexpectedly descended to ‘help out,’ and basically took over her entire holiday and turned her house upside down. I also remember that when she did try to voice an opinion, she got screamed at by one of the helpers who thought she should just, ‘BE MORE GRATEFUL.’ I also recall that there were certain areas of her home that she no longer wanted to even look at because the changes they had made just made her feel angry, helpless, exhausted, and depressed.”
“And your point?”
“Don’t expect people to feel what they don’t feel, or think what they don’t think.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “We can review the delegation process. But I don’t see what I can add to what I’ve already explained in my book.”
“I know what you explained in your book.” She pulled an old dog eared copy out of her backpack and flipped to through the pages. “I reviewed the passage last night to prepare for today. Here’s your explanation, here,” she said, and pointed:
You must not mistake delegating jobs with telling people what to do. If you simply tell your kids to clean their rooms, then you’d better get ready for a fight.
True delegation only happens when people agree to assume a responsibility. If you want to learn to delegate, you need to be clear on the delegation process.
A successful delegation has seven steps.
First, identify a desired outcome and get your “delegatee” to agree that they want the desired outcome as well. Second, determine the standards and guidelines of a successful job. Third, help them to identify their resources. Fourth, make sure the responsibility has clear rewards and consequences. Fifth, give them time to practice. Sixth, once they’re ready, get out of the way and let them have total responsibility for the project. In other words, don’t keep throwing in your two cents about how they should proceed after you’ve asked them to assume the responsibility. Seventh, budget a specific time to monitor their progress, so that you can reward the delegatee for a job well done, or enforce the consequences of a job poorly done.
Please notice that a delegation must begin with an agreement between the two parties. If you have no agreement regarding the desired outcome, you will be constantly pulling teeth.
For example, my mother used to decide when it was my turn to take out the trash. Moreover, she would always decide when it was my turn to take out the trash without warning me, or asking me. After dinner, while the whole family was watching television, she would simply announce that during the next commercial, I was to take out the trash. Obviously, I hated it. So every night, I complained, whined and argued.
Why? First, I was afraid of the dark and didn’t like taking the trash out at night. Second, I naturally resented be told what to do, even though I was being told by someone that I adored. After all, doesn’t everyone resent being told what to do?
My mom did a much better job with delegation when she taught me how to cook. First of all, when I was still quite young, she noticed that I liked to watch her while she cooked, so she figured that I was the right person for the job. Next, she began to ask my opinion about what I’d like for dinner. Pretty soon, she started to teach me how to cook my favorite things. Slowly, without my even being aware of the process, she began to delegate the task of cooking to me.
The desired outcome was obvious. Dinner had to be ready each evening, or the family couldn’t eat.
The standards and guidelines were clear. We needed a protein, a salad, a starch and a vegetable. If I forgot one part, my mom would simply ask, “What kind of vegetable do you think will go with that?”
My resources were clear. When my mom picked me up from school, she would ask, “What do you feel like having for dinner?” I could fix whatever I wanted, so long as it was within our food budget. If we didn’t have the raw stuff at home, we’d drop by the store together.
Whenever she suggested a new recipe, she helped me to practice the recipe.
The responsibility was mine. Never once did my mom order me to start the dinner. I knew what we were having. I knew that dinner needed to be ready by six. My mother would simply ask, “Do you want to start the rice, or should I?” until one day, I volunteered to start dinner on my own.
My progress was monitored at each meal—and rewarded lavishly.
In fact, the rewards and consequences were the best of all. First, whenever I cooked, I was loaded down with compliments about how tasty everything was. Second, I got to cook whatever I wanted to eat. Third, my mother would invariably utter the same magic words each night as she excused our family from the table, “Lynn did the cooking, so the rest of you kids can do the dishes.”
Now that’s a reward worth cooking for.
By the time I was ten, I was cooking for a family of six on a regular basis. At twelve, I even fixed an entire Thanksgiving dinner on my own because my mother threw her back out. I was proud of my ability to help and happy to assume the responsibility.
Delegation reigns supreme.
Remember the process. First, identify and agree upon a desired outcome. Next, clarify standards and guidelines, and identify all available resources. Give people time to adjust, learn and practice, then completely turn over the responsibility to them. If you want to achieve a delegation that lasts, you must learn to abandon yourself to the strengths of others. Get out of their way, and allow people to reach the desired outcome in their own manner. Allow them to choose their own course. Finish by setting clear rewards and consequences, so that you can monitor their progress and reward what’s appropriate.
Again, notice that delegation must begin with an agreement between both parties. If you want your delegation to really work, then the person to whom you are delegating must want the result as much as you do. And the best way to achieve such an agreement is by demonstrating a link between achieving the desired outcome and satisfying one of their basic human needs.
A River Worth Riding: Fourteen Rules for Navigating Life, Lynn Marie Sager, Aventine Press, 2005
I glanced through the passage and heard myself mumble, “There should be an eighth step, maybe even a ninth.”
“Huh,” she chimed in. “Did I hear you add something?”
“I was just thinking that there should be different first steps. You can’t really begin with a desired outcome. That should be step three. First, you need to decide upon the tasks you can and should delegate, then you need to find the right person to whom you can delegate, and only then can you even think about agreeing upon a desired outcome with them.”
“See, I knew you’d have something to add.”
“You know smugness is a very unattractive look, don’t you?”
She stuck out her tongue before asking, “So, when did you discover you had missing steps?”
“Just now, as I was reviewing it,” I admitted. “It’s just that when I think about my most successful delegations, they always began with having a job in mind that someone else could do better than me. Like when I had an assistant teacher, I always delegated anything that had to do with any kind of drawing to her. Posters, announcement, you name it. She was so artistic, plus she enjoyed it. It was a match made in heaven. I would tell her what I had in mind, and when I needed it, and she would always come back with something more amazing than I could have done on my own. I was actually able to skip the whole step about training and practice because her talents and experience were already there for all the jobs I delegated to her.”
“So you would go,” and she ticked them off on her fingers. “One, identify task. Two, chose the right person. Three, clarify and agree upon outcomes and deadlines. Four, ensure rewards and consequences. Five, make sure they know their resources. Six, give over the responsibility and don’t micromanage. Seven, monitor success at the end of the job so you can provide feedback, rewards, or consequences.” She gave me a hard look. “That’s still an awful lot of steps.”
“You do all that stuff at the beginning of a delegation, so you won’t end up having to clean up someone else mess and doing the job yourself anyway.”
“I suppose so,” she nodded thoughtfully.
“So was that enough of a review for you?”
Her brows came together as she considered. “It went a lot faster than I thought it would, but I guess we covered it.”
“Good, then pull out some of those other books, and teach me something new.”
She replied by pulling out a particularly heavy tomb. “You’re gonna love what I have in science. We’re learning about three forms of symbiotic relationships: mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism.”
“Ooh, fun,” I rubbed my hands together. “Mutualism, a relationship wherein both sides gain in the relationship. Commensalism, a relationship wherein one side gains from the relationship without harming the other side. Parasitism, a relationship wherein one side gains something while the other side loses something.”
“Yeah, I get that much,” she nodded. “But we have this stupid assignment where we’re supposed to give examples of each of the relationship types using our favorite Thanksgiving recipe, and I so don’t get that.”
“Well, obviously, parasitism is the turkey. You gain by eating him, while he loses his life.”
“But what about mutualism? What does anything I eat gain from my eating it?”
“Do you have any fruit in your recipe?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, plants create fruit to attract animals who will spread their seeds. You gain their nutrients and flavor; they gain the ability to hitchhike in your innards.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she began taking notes. “And I suppose commensalism could be explained by other ingredients. Like it didn’t hurt my basil plant when I picked a few leaves for the salad. I got something but it didn’t hurt the plant.”
“Sounds like you’ve got your three examples right there.”
“Yeah,” she looked up slyly to add, “And I’m grateful for your ideas.”
“Good,” I sat back to watch her scribble away. “Then I will happily delegate the writing of your answer to you.” She acknowledged my ‘joke’ with a quiet grunt, and scribbled on.