“You pick things up so quickly I sometimes see you getting frustrated with people who don’t. I think to improve you need to learn to slow down and be more patient with people who aren’t as quick.”
This is something our department director said to me in my first review when I was promoted to supervisor. It’s advice I’ve tried to keep in mind all the years I’ve been doing it. Slow down. Take my time. When someone isn’t picking it up, explain again. Try various ways to highlight a task’s importance. Place it in the bigger picture. But one thing I’ve noticed in reviewing employees myself: there are task-oriented skills you can teach people to improve on and then there are inherent personal traits that can be controlled through effort but will never be entirely overcome. To a large extent, this is mine. Every time I’m training someone, I have to keep make a renewed effort to overcome my frustration with trainees who can’t pick things up quickly. I try to remember what it’s like being new, imagine how what I’m saying might be confusing since they don’t know everything I know. After all, I want them to succeed. That’s part of my personality too. I want to see others do well. I’ve had a number of employees I’ve trained get promotions. Two have even been bumped up to the same position as me. Every time that happens, I’m proud of their achievements. But these two things, wanting people to succeed and getting frustrated when they’re not understanding concepts I’m trying to teach, are at odds because if they see me getting frustrated, they’ll feel discouraged, and I’ve found people learn better when the person teaching them believes they can get it.
This critique that my director offered doesn’t just apply to work. It applies to parenting, and I’d do well to remember that and work on it there. One situation that I’m struggling with right now is teaching my daughter the alphabet. She has blocks with all the letters on them and flash cards, and for a few weeks, we had a book out of the library that detailed a race from A to Z that I was using to try and teach her letters, but she’s not taking to it, and I’m worried that by being unable to hide my frustrations at her lack of focus, I’m going to make it so she doesn’t like learning. It may be she’s too young, not ready yet. That’s possible. It took us a long time to potty train her as well. But I don’t believe it’s from any lack of intelligence so much as stubbornness (last night after a string of sass and disobedience I told her I wasn’t going to read her stories at bedtime, after which she proceeded to pull out a book of poems and point out that they weren’t stories so I could read them, rather lawyerly for a three-year-old). My mother says she’s a lot like I was at her age (the curse works, my friends; chalk one up for genetics!). She lives in her own little world. She likes to focus on things that attract her attention and she filters out any interruption to this. This can be maddening in situations where she’s doing something that could hurt herself or her brother, in which case my wife or I have to physically intervene and remove her from certain situations. In circumstances where I’m trying to teach her something like the alphabet, it results mainly in me leaning back and rubbing my eyes or my temples and trying to filter the impatience out of my voice.
A fairly typical exchange goes something like this:
I show her a card, “What’s that?”
“A bumblebee.”
“That’s right.” I turn the card over. “And this is the letter B.”
She nods. I turn the card back over. “And what’s that again?”
“A bumblebee!”
“That’s right. It’s a BEE!” And what letter does BEE start with?”
She shrugs, “I don’t know…”
I rub my eyes, run a hand through my hair. “B, Bee starts with the letter B.”
And I’m right back there thinking about that review. Thinking how her brain might not be developed enough yet to retain this. Or maybe she doesn’t care to know it yet. Should I just put the cards away and try at a later time when she’s older and more willing? But she asked me to take them down. She wanted me to show them to her. Should I let her take the lead, try to make it fun, not care so much when she refuses to answer? Probably. That’s probably the tack I should take. What difference does it make at this point?
She knows the alphabet, she can sing it. She can count. The only reason she’d need to learn to read as a new three is to read books to herself, and for the time being, she has someone to do that for her. Two someones. I need to admit to myself the only reason I’m getting frustrated is because I want to see her as special, smart, accelerated. And I want to see her that way, not for anyone else’s benefit, not even for her own, but for my personal satisfaction. So it may be time to take a step back and admit that my expectations are a slight bit ridiculous. She’ll get it in time. Just like using the bathroom. It felt like she’d be in diapers forever. Her flat out refusal to use the toilet was a source of absolute frustration, but once she got it, she ran with it, without any problems. It’s a regular thing now and it seems the frustrations are in the distant past when really the transition only happened two months ago. I really don’t want to make my child dislike learning or reading. Just last night she sat in bed with two books and leafed through them, and she was entirely happy, content to sit there looking at the pictures. And I love that she did this. She’ll get the reading thing too, eventually. I just have to remember that advice. Slow down and be more patient with people. It’s not a natural mode for me, and it takes effort. But I did it at work. I’ve been successfully training good employees for almost eight years. And if I can do there, I can certainly do it at home.
There are no comments yet