If you clicked over to my blog about 4 hours ago you’d have seen a post with no real introduction and if you happened to read it you might have thought, “Well, that sounds all well and good but just what is Adrian trying to share with us today?”
The answer – Oopsie.
I was busy working on my posts before I had to head out and somehow I must have clicked PUBLISH instead of update.
Have you ever been there?
You know, when you swear you didn’t do something only to find out later you did.
It’s called carelessness.
And it happens more often than we realize.
Each of us has our own set of standards and judge others based on them.
When I was young I used to say things like, “Well, why would I bother wearing a belt? I don’t need one.”
Then there was the “Why the heck does he wear stuff like that?”
And the “Geez, I just can’t trust that woman.”
All’s well and good from my side, but when I started looking at the world from their side of the table I started to realize how naive I was.
Take the belt example. Nowadays I always wear a belt, not because I need one, but because it completes an outfit. Without it people look bare. It’s almost like wearing a suit and not wearing any socks. Something’s just not right.
As such I try and imagine what the populace will say when I go outside. I’m not interested in the fringes, but what the common accepted view of something is.
I don’t need to keep my hair nice and neat, but when I see people who don’t have their hair all messy I think, “Why didn’t they take the time?” But before I judge another I should first take a look in the mirror.
A colleague many years ago mentioned to me that he thought women should wear revealing clothes and look sexy.
But you should have seen him. I suppose some people might have used the word “slob” when they saw him in some of his getup.
Many of us in fact have a double-standard. We expect others to be perfect while we are given some sort of pass.
Sometimes it takes a good friend to bring this to our attention.
Personally speaking, it was hard for me to take when someone started reeling off my faults, but after hearing them out I realized I had to do something about them. Many of us go through life unsuspecting.
We don’t think our foul mouth is a big deal, how our habits don’t bother others or how we dress doesn’t affect anyone.
We forget that other people have feelings too. And ours are by no means better than theirs, just different.
My pet peeve is people being late, but for some people I’ve been friends with showing up 30 mins to an hour late wasn’t a big deal.
They did say sorry, but next time round the same thing happened.
They assumed incorrectly that you don’t mind people being late because they don’t.
That’s why it’s so important we ask people if our actions, language or habits are by any means offensive to others.
If we don’t bother to find out we could very well be shooting ourselves in our own foots in both business and socially without even knowing it.
But getting such honest feedback is rare.
When I asked 10 of my closest friends to write everything down that I did that come across negatively to them or other people. Only one, my wife, was kind enough to tell me.
Thanks to her brutal honesty, I saw myself in a different light and started making some changes.
If I were going to make a list of the 5 most common areas we overlook and that could be costing us dearly I would have to say
- Attitude
- Language
- Punctuality
- Clothes
- Bad habits