111. Connection Before Correction
When you fuck something up, what’s your initial reaction?
Is it to emotionally connect with and care for yourself?
Probably not.
Instead, you probably lay into yourself with accusations, insults, and the assertion that you should’ve known better damnit.
I get it.
I fuck things up, too, and it’s not always easy to treat myself with kindness and compassion when I do.
It’s much easier to blame and shame myself (or others) when things go wrong.
(Easier because I (and probably you) have so much more practice at it).
But all that blame and shame does not help you get what you want.
It doesn’t fix the fuck ups (those are done at this point, no going back).
And it degrades your relationship with yourself (and maybe others, too).
If you want to learn how to bounce back from fuck ups faster and more effectively, you need a new skill.
You need to learn the fine art of connecting with yourself before you correct yourself (and your fuck up).
And bonus, this skill is also super helpful in your relationships with others.
This will probably feel really alien and weird after a lifetime of responding to mistakes with shame and blame, so come listen to the podcast and get the full download on how to learn and incorporate this new skill.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
Satisfied AF is officially open for enrollment! Click here to get on a consult call and talk about what it would be like for you to be Satisfied AF in your life and career.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What it means to connect before you correct.
Why this idea of connection before correction is an amazing tool to use in communicating with yourself as well as others.
Why so many people find it incredibly difficult to stop judging and shaming themselves.
What it looks like to connect before you correct yourself versus falling into the pit of despair.
Why connecting before you correct yourself makes it easier to tell yourself the things that are difficult to hear and acknowledge them.
Where it might be powerful to connect before you correct with yourself or the people in your life.
How to connect with yourself when you’re feeling disappointed with the person you’re being, and correct your future actions from that place.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jonice Webb Ph.D.
Positive Discipline by Jane Nelson
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about connection before correction.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey, hey, hey, happy Wednesday y'all. I'm so excited to talk to you and I hope you're having a magical day. So this week I want to talk to you about this idea that I kind of came up with when I was reading this book. And then it was such a clever like snappy little phrase that I was like, “Somebody probably already came up with this.” And I Googled it, and in fact they had.
So the book I'm reading is called Running On Empty by Jonice Webb PhD. And the subtitle is Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. Because, of course, this is exactly the kind of book I like to read for fun, just to like get ideas and see what's out there.
And it's interesting, because this is yet another time when I requested this book from the library, and I didn't remember who referred it to me or where I'd heard about it from. And so when it came up in my library app I didn't see the subtitle, I just saw Running On Empty. And I was like, “Oh, this is probably a book about burnout or a book about overwhelm.” You know, like something, I was like, “Oh yeah, okay, I'll just listen to this casually.”
And I didn't read the subtitle at all. It's just like when I read that book about fear that I told you all about recently, where I was like, “Oh, book about fear, this will be interesting.” And then it was about how to avoid violent behavior and I was like, “Oh shit, this is not.” It was still a really interesting book, I read the whole thing. But it was kind of not the vibe I thought I was getting into.
And so that happened with this book as well. And then I realized I think I heard about this book on TikTok or something, I don't know. Still not 100% sure. But it's been a fascinating book. I'm not actually even done with it yet, but I was taking a walk with Alex yesterday and I was telling her about some of the concepts I was learning.
And I was telling her like, so the author of the book talks about like when you are parenting children, one of the things that's important to do is to like emotionally attune to your child and understand their lived experience before you guide them, or correct them, or teach them whatever it is the valuable skill that you want them to have moving forward.
And the example in the book is like this kid comes home with a note from the teacher about some behavior that they've been engaging in. And then throughout the book there's all these different examples of how different types of parents would react to that note.
And the example that she gives of like, I don't know what the opposite of neglect, but like connected emotional parenting is, and it's fiction, right? It's a fictional example. But the mom like kind of tuned in to what was maybe going on for the kid and what emotions were maybe at play, and why what the teacher said maybe hit a nerve and all this stuff.
And honestly, it was really powerful to even read the example of it. And it also made me realize, I think that kind of emotional attunement is actually quite rare. And I think a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily consider themselves emotionally neglected, didn't actually get that kind of connective response for a lot of stuff in their childhood because, of course, and she says this a lot in the book, parents are doing the best they came with the tools they have.
And a lot of parents parent the way that their parents parented. Or they parent like 180 degrees away from the way their parents parented, like in a reactionary thing. And a lot of people are not as emotionally attuned as the example she provided in the book because they simply have never had that modeled or they didn't even know it was something that they could do.
Anyways, I was telling Alex about it, and I said, basically, I think what she's trying to teach us is that to really parent your child effectively in this emotionally connected way, you need to connect before you correct. And it's interesting, because I think there's some crossover in that idea with something else that I teach, which is like the compliment sandwich when we're going to give difficult feedback, where we surround the feedback with compliments that we actually mean.
And what I like about connect before you correct is it doesn't actually even require a compliment. And so it's kind of, I think, a more advanced in some ways, but also more basic in some ways, more nuanced way to talk to people when there's something that they're doing that you're not appreciating. And it allows for a different positive part of a conversation that doesn't have to be a compliment, right?
So in connect before you correct, it's more about establishing an emotional connection. And specifically in the book, I think it's about showing that you understand the other person's point of view or what might be going on with them. And the thing is, sometimes we actually don't understand other people's points of view. But we can take guesses, we can ask questions, there's lots of ways to emotionally connect.
Anyways, I love this phrase so much, connect before you correct, that I was immediately like, “Oh, I'm going to do a podcast on this.” And it was interesting too because Alex, like I could tell the way I was explaining what I was learning in the book to her, I was like, “Oh, this is going to also impact how she and I talk to each other.”
Because I've been long asking for compliment sandwiches from her for like her feedback for me. But putting it in the framework of connect before you correct, I think just hit her brain in this different way where she was like, “Oh, I see why this makes total complete sense.” And I think it feels more obvious and intuitive to her than the idea of a compliment sandwich.
So maybe it feels more obvious and intuitive to you. Maybe it's something you can incorporate even if you have struggled to incorporate the compliment sandwich or maybe the compliment sandwich didn't always feel authentic to you. Now you have this other tool in your toolkit.
Okay, so I became so enamored with this phrase that I did look it up. And what I found when I looked it up is yes, absolutely it's a phrase that people already use and talk about. Interestingly, when I looked it up, it didn't tie back to the book I'm reading because she has never said that phrase, that I remember at least, in the book. But there is a kind of parenting like framework called positive discipline that teaches this idea of connection before correction.
So I am not really familiar with what the positive discipline teaching is, I haven't really read any of that person's materials. But because that person's already teaching about it, I wanted to mention like I came up with this framing on my own, but it apparently is a whole thing. So I don't want to like take ownership of the phrase as it already exists, and someone already means something by it.
But it does sound like what they already mean by it is pretty much the same as what I'm learning from this book and matches up pretty closely to the concept as I think of it and the way I want to teach it. But in this book and in that thing, positive discipline, that's all about parenting. And parenting is great, and I know that many of y'all are parents, so feel free to take this and use it in your parenting with your kiddos.
But the reason I wanted to talk to you all about it is actually about how you talk to yourself. Okay, so that's probably not where you thought I was going. You probably thought I was going to like how you talk to your colleagues, or how you connect with your significant other. And I think it can be really useful for all of that too.
But the place that I immediately was like, “Holy fucking shit, this could have such a huge impact in my own life,” is it's just another way to think about like how do I talk to myself when myself has done, I guess when I, but like when myself, who is I, has done something that doesn't make sense to me or doesn't line up with who I want to be as a person.
And I think so many of us come in at ourselves, not with the compliment sandwich, not with connection before correction, but with guilting, shaming, judging and all this negative emotion, all of this beating ourselves up thing. And if you've been listening to the podcast for pretty much any length of time, you know that that's something I teach and talk a lot about, like I don't think that's helpful to do.
And if you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you probably already know that one of the things I teach and talk about a lot is that I don't think guilting, shaming, judging, and beating ourselves up is useful. I think it mostly makes us feel like shit, it makes us get into like the fuck it effect, the pit of despair, overwhelm, giving up and not going after the life and career we want.
And I also know that it's so hard for so many people, myself, my clients, my friends. Like it's so hard for so many people to stop doing that shit. And I think having this new framework of what you can do instead could be so incredibly useful for you stepping away from the behavior of self-criticism, self-blame, self-judgment, et cetera, and stepping into something that's more useful.
So I want you to think about it, like maybe you fuck something up at work. Maybe you fuck it up a real bad. What would it look like to connect before you correct yourself? Versus to go into like, “Oh my fucking God, I can't believe I did this. What's wrong with me?” Et cetera, et cetera and the self-judgment, self-shame, self-beating route that so many of us take even when we “know better.”
So with a framework like connect before you correct, like with kids, like I said before when I was talking about the example from the book, the mom is kind of like, oh, I know you've been struggling with this thing lately. And like maybe when your teacher said this, it hit a nerve for these reasons. Is that maybe why you did that? And she connects with the child and pulls in all this other information about what she knows about him because she's emotionally attuned and because she pays attention to her child.
And then only after they connect about that does she say like, “Okay, and it's really important that when your teacher gives you a direction, you follow it.” Like, that's the teaching. That's the correction she wants to offer her child, but she doesn't offer it until she's already connected with the child and the child feels seen and heard and understood.
So what would that look like for you? You've maybe fucked something royally up at work, and you come in with yourself and you're like, “Oh, honey, I know you really wanted this to go so well. I know that you've really been thinking about how exciting it's going to be to get the big promotion. And I know you really, really wanted to prove yourself to your boss and show that you could handle XYZ project.
And I know that you've been feeling sensitive because your colleague, this person has been like taking on a lot of this kind of project and you were so ready to show everyone you could do it. And it just did not go the way you thought it would. And that has got to be so painful.”
And then whatever the correction is you want to come through with. Like, “I can see that was really hard for you, and it seems like maybe in the future what we need to learn is that it's actually really okay to ask for help and it's better to ask for help early on.
Or maybe the thing we need to learn in the future is like it's really essential we plan the work out from the deadline, and then work backwards to make sure we can actually get all the work done without having to rush and do crunch time at the end, because when we do crunch time, our best work is not the thing that's happening.
Or maybe the correction is like, I know you really wanted to be able to do that kind of work, because XYZ colleague is doing it, and everyone has so much appreciation for them. And that's actually not like your zone of expertise and we need to find a different area for you to be able to show your zone of expertise to everyone else. Because trying to be as good as this person in their area of expertise is not really working for you. And it's okay that you're not great at that because you don't have to be great at everything.
These are just some examples. Like I can't know for you without knowing whatever example or whatever situation in your life hasn't gone the way you wanted it to. But I trust that you will know, hearing me talk about this, there will be something that will come up right away and you'll be like, “Oh, it never occurred to me that I could connect with myself about that, be emotionally attuned to myself, be tender with myself.
And then also still tell myself the things that need to be corrected that may be hard to hear. But when I've connected to myself emotionally it's so much easier to say those things that will be hard to hear and it's so much easier to hear those things that will be hard to hear.”
And maybe you had a parent in your life who was able to show up for you like this, who did connect with you before they corrected you. And so maybe this is intuitive and something you already do. And if so, that's really amazing and you can revel in that and enjoy that. And maybe even become more skilled at it because whoever your parent was, they were a human being. And human beings are like not always good at everything, even if they're really good at some things.
And if your parents weren't able or didn't do this for you, I just want you to know, that doesn't mean you're fucked. That doesn't mean you can't ever have this capacity. You can learn, you can teach it to yourself. And it can be something that you can get really good at and have like in your pocket as a skill.
I also want to take a moment to say I do think it would be wonderful if all of our parents had been like this. And I do think we're all deserving of that kind of care and emotional attunement from our parents. And the world being what it is, it's not what we all got, and we can still have really magical, satisfying, fantastic as fuck lives. And we may also need to spend some time grieving, and being sad, or being deeply angry that people didn't attune to us in this way.
I know that for me, I've done a lot of what could be called self-parenting, like self-reparenting where I have learned to give myself the things that I wanted from adults that I didn't get. And that's been really valuable, and really rewarding, and really painful, and really hard. And it's a really specific thing to be able to do that in a way that it's not about blaming our parents or blaming the adults around us.
I think one of the things about being in the human incarnation is just realizing that people will for sure let you down. And it sucks, and it's fucking terrible, and it's also part of it for pretty much every single human, I think. I think even humans who have lives that look really magical and fantastic from the outside, they all still have something, they all still have a place in their lives, in their hearts, in their minds where they're suffering. They all have things they're struggling with.
None of us are getting that perfect experience. And I think it's also okay if you want to believe that it's not cool that you didn't get the things you needed. Because it's not cool. It's just, in my opinion, part of this incarnation, part of this life. And so, for me, what I want for myself is to decide that I'm not fucked just because I didn't get something when I was like six years old, and you're not fucked either.
Now, is it a lot more work to learn how to do this for yourself as an adult? Yeah, probably it is. I think anything where you are not having the experience you want in your life, literally any area where that's happening, whether it's being able to connect before you correct with yourself, or whether it's wanting to make multiple six figures a year in your business, or whether it's wanting a significant other and not having one yet. Any area where you don't have the thing you want is going to require growth.
I think that's okay. I actually would even go so far as to say I think it's a beautiful thing. I think humans are built for it. I think we're built to continue to learn into adulthood. And we're always, always also allowed to rage and grieve about the shit that we didn't get at times when it might have been developmentally really, really powerful for us to have it. So that's sort of a both and thing.
Okay, so I want you to think about a place in your life where maybe it might be really powerful for you to connect before you correct with yourself. And then to go through sort of that conversation of doing that. And it may be helpful to say it out loud to yourself, like talk back and forth with yourself. It may be helpful to write it down. I think there are a lot of different ways you could do it, so try it in whatever way feels fun and interesting to you.
And then yeah, let's also take a minute to say I do think this will be really useful for any relationship you have in your life, whether it's a relationship where you're literally parenting a child, whether it's a relationship where you are the child of a parent.
Yes, according to this book the direction it's supposed to go, “supposed to go” is that parents do it to their kids. But if you want to, you could try this tool on your own parents. If there's something where you want to ask them to do things differently, you could try connecting before you correct just to see if maybe you like that experience of it.
I want to be really clear, I don't think you like owe it to anyone to connect before you correct. I just think it is a powerful tool to have in your toolkit. And I do think it probably makes it easier for people to hear feedback.
You don't have to make it easier for people to hear feedback. But from what I understand from a lot of my clients, they want to give feedback and they want to do it in a way that feels yummy and connected. And so I think this is a way that could feel yummy and connected, and that's why I want it to be available in your toolkit.
So you could do it to your own child, you could do it to your own parent. I do also think, if done well, this could be done in a professional setting. You could connect to your boss about something that's going on with them before you make a request, or an ask, or say something that does or doesn't feel good to you.
It could be a way you handle a conversation with a colleague you've been really struggling to have a good relationship with. It could be a way to handle a conversation with one of your direct reports. And, of course, life isn't all about family and work, so I think this would be something that could be really useful in friendships as well. And also in your relationship with your significant other if you have one.
So I think there are all kinds of relationships where this could be really useful. It can be useful, like I said, parent/child relationships from both directions, work colleagues, work hierarchies both directions, friendships, your relationship with your significant other. I think anywhere where you want to have a connected relationship and you also want to make a correction or ask for something to be different, this could be an incredibly useful tool.
And it's also something you can just have conversations with people about. Like I just had a conversation with Alex about it and without my really even asking her to incorporate it for our relationship with each other, she could see the value of that. So it's something you can talk to people about. It's something you can just quietly implement yourself and see what happens. But it's also something you can talk to your team about like, “Hey, do we want to do this?” Or talk to your family about like, “Hey, is this useful?”
And then, of course, the circle back to the main point of the podcast, I think it's an incredibly powerful tool for you to use for how you talk to yourself. And I think for people who want to have a wildly satisfying life and career, that often involves doing really big, interesting things. And when we do really big, interesting things, we fail a lot. We make a lot of fuck ups. Things don't go as planned.
And in order to be able to tolerate the discomfort of that, being able to have this connected way of correcting yourself may give you so much more softness and so much more levity to be able to go do that scary, difficult work.
And listen, if you want to do this work in community, I want to do this work in community with you too. And right now I am enrolling clients for the next round of Satisfied As Fuck, it's going to start in February 2023. It's going to be amazing. This round that I'm doing now has been truly incredible and awe inspiring. And I think doing this work in community makes the work exponentially faster and just so powerful. And people build these connections that can last way longer than the group program.
So if that sounds like exactly where you want to do this work, come sign up for a consult at my website and I will talk to you all about how you can have a satisfying as fuck life and career.
All right, that's what I have for y’all this week. Have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey, hey, hey, happy Wednesday y'all. I'm so excited to talk to you and I hope you're having a magical day. So this week I want to talk to you about this idea that I kind of came up with when I was reading this book. And then it was such a clever like snappy little phrase that I was like, “Somebody probably already came up with this.” And I Googled it, and in fact they had.
So the book I'm reading is called Running On Empty by Jonice Webb PhD. And the subtitle is Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. Because, of course, this is exactly the kind of book I like to read for fun, just to like get ideas and see what's out there.
And it's interesting, because this is yet another time when I requested this book from the library, and I didn't remember who referred it to me or where I'd heard about it from. And so when it came up in my library app I didn't see the subtitle, I just saw Running On Empty. And I was like, “Oh, this is probably a book about burnout or a book about overwhelm.” You know, like something, I was like, “Oh yeah, okay, I'll just listen to this casually.”
And I didn't read the subtitle at all. It's just like when I read that book about fear that I told you all about recently, where I was like, “Oh, book about fear, this will be interesting.” And then it was about how to avoid violent behavior and I was like, “Oh shit, this is not.” It was still a really interesting book, I read the whole thing. But it was kind of not the vibe I thought I was getting into.
And so that happened with this book as well. And then I realized I think I heard about this book on TikTok or something, I don't know. Still not 100% sure. But it's been a fascinating book. I'm not actually even done with it yet, but I was taking a walk with Alex yesterday and I was telling her about some of the concepts I was learning.
And I was telling her like, so the author of the book talks about like when you are parenting children, one of the things that's important to do is to like emotionally attune to your child and understand their lived experience before you guide them, or correct them, or teach them whatever it is the valuable skill that you want them to have moving forward.
And the example in the book is like this kid comes home with a note from the teacher about some behavior that they've been engaging in. And then throughout the book there's all these different examples of how different types of parents would react to that note.
And the example that she gives of like, I don't know what the opposite of neglect, but like connected emotional parenting is, and it's fiction, right? It's a fictional example. But the mom like kind of tuned in to what was maybe going on for the kid and what emotions were maybe at play, and why what the teacher said maybe hit a nerve and all this stuff.
And honestly, it was really powerful to even read the example of it. And it also made me realize, I think that kind of emotional attunement is actually quite rare. And I think a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily consider themselves emotionally neglected, didn't actually get that kind of connective response for a lot of stuff in their childhood because, of course, and she says this a lot in the book, parents are doing the best they came with the tools they have.
And a lot of parents parent the way that their parents parented. Or they parent like 180 degrees away from the way their parents parented, like in a reactionary thing. And a lot of people are not as emotionally attuned as the example she provided in the book because they simply have never had that modeled or they didn't even know it was something that they could do.
Anyways, I was telling Alex about it, and I said, basically, I think what she's trying to teach us is that to really parent your child effectively in this emotionally connected way, you need to connect before you correct. And it's interesting, because I think there's some crossover in that idea with something else that I teach, which is like the compliment sandwich when we're going to give difficult feedback, where we surround the feedback with compliments that we actually mean.
And what I like about connect before you correct is it doesn't actually even require a compliment. And so it's kind of, I think, a more advanced in some ways, but also more basic in some ways, more nuanced way to talk to people when there's something that they're doing that you're not appreciating. And it allows for a different positive part of a conversation that doesn't have to be a compliment, right?
So in connect before you correct, it's more about establishing an emotional connection. And specifically in the book, I think it's about showing that you understand the other person's point of view or what might be going on with them. And the thing is, sometimes we actually don't understand other people's points of view. But we can take guesses, we can ask questions, there's lots of ways to emotionally connect.
Anyways, I love this phrase so much, connect before you correct, that I was immediately like, “Oh, I'm going to do a podcast on this.” And it was interesting too because Alex, like I could tell the way I was explaining what I was learning in the book to her, I was like, “Oh, this is going to also impact how she and I talk to each other.”
Because I've been long asking for compliment sandwiches from her for like her feedback for me. But putting it in the framework of connect before you correct, I think just hit her brain in this different way where she was like, “Oh, I see why this makes total complete sense.” And I think it feels more obvious and intuitive to her than the idea of a compliment sandwich.
So maybe it feels more obvious and intuitive to you. Maybe it's something you can incorporate even if you have struggled to incorporate the compliment sandwich or maybe the compliment sandwich didn't always feel authentic to you. Now you have this other tool in your toolkit.
Okay, so I became so enamored with this phrase that I did look it up. And what I found when I looked it up is yes, absolutely it's a phrase that people already use and talk about. Interestingly, when I looked it up, it didn't tie back to the book I'm reading because she has never said that phrase, that I remember at least, in the book. But there is a kind of parenting like framework called positive discipline that teaches this idea of connection before correction.
So I am not really familiar with what the positive discipline teaching is, I haven't really read any of that person's materials. But because that person's already teaching about it, I wanted to mention like I came up with this framing on my own, but it apparently is a whole thing. So I don't want to like take ownership of the phrase as it already exists, and someone already means something by it.
But it does sound like what they already mean by it is pretty much the same as what I'm learning from this book and matches up pretty closely to the concept as I think of it and the way I want to teach it. But in this book and in that thing, positive discipline, that's all about parenting. And parenting is great, and I know that many of y'all are parents, so feel free to take this and use it in your parenting with your kiddos.
But the reason I wanted to talk to you all about it is actually about how you talk to yourself. Okay, so that's probably not where you thought I was going. You probably thought I was going to like how you talk to your colleagues, or how you connect with your significant other. And I think it can be really useful for all of that too.
But the place that I immediately was like, “Holy fucking shit, this could have such a huge impact in my own life,” is it's just another way to think about like how do I talk to myself when myself has done, I guess when I, but like when myself, who is I, has done something that doesn't make sense to me or doesn't line up with who I want to be as a person.
And I think so many of us come in at ourselves, not with the compliment sandwich, not with connection before correction, but with guilting, shaming, judging and all this negative emotion, all of this beating ourselves up thing. And if you've been listening to the podcast for pretty much any length of time, you know that that's something I teach and talk a lot about, like I don't think that's helpful to do.
And if you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you probably already know that one of the things I teach and talk about a lot is that I don't think guilting, shaming, judging, and beating ourselves up is useful. I think it mostly makes us feel like shit, it makes us get into like the fuck it effect, the pit of despair, overwhelm, giving up and not going after the life and career we want.
And I also know that it's so hard for so many people, myself, my clients, my friends. Like it's so hard for so many people to stop doing that shit. And I think having this new framework of what you can do instead could be so incredibly useful for you stepping away from the behavior of self-criticism, self-blame, self-judgment, et cetera, and stepping into something that's more useful.
So I want you to think about it, like maybe you fuck something up at work. Maybe you fuck it up a real bad. What would it look like to connect before you correct yourself? Versus to go into like, “Oh my fucking God, I can't believe I did this. What's wrong with me?” Et cetera, et cetera and the self-judgment, self-shame, self-beating route that so many of us take even when we “know better.”
So with a framework like connect before you correct, like with kids, like I said before when I was talking about the example from the book, the mom is kind of like, oh, I know you've been struggling with this thing lately. And like maybe when your teacher said this, it hit a nerve for these reasons. Is that maybe why you did that? And she connects with the child and pulls in all this other information about what she knows about him because she's emotionally attuned and because she pays attention to her child.
And then only after they connect about that does she say like, “Okay, and it's really important that when your teacher gives you a direction, you follow it.” Like, that's the teaching. That's the correction she wants to offer her child, but she doesn't offer it until she's already connected with the child and the child feels seen and heard and understood.
So what would that look like for you? You've maybe fucked something royally up at work, and you come in with yourself and you're like, “Oh, honey, I know you really wanted this to go so well. I know that you've really been thinking about how exciting it's going to be to get the big promotion. And I know you really, really wanted to prove yourself to your boss and show that you could handle XYZ project.
And I know that you've been feeling sensitive because your colleague, this person has been like taking on a lot of this kind of project and you were so ready to show everyone you could do it. And it just did not go the way you thought it would. And that has got to be so painful.”
And then whatever the correction is you want to come through with. Like, “I can see that was really hard for you, and it seems like maybe in the future what we need to learn is that it's actually really okay to ask for help and it's better to ask for help early on.
Or maybe the thing we need to learn in the future is like it's really essential we plan the work out from the deadline, and then work backwards to make sure we can actually get all the work done without having to rush and do crunch time at the end, because when we do crunch time, our best work is not the thing that's happening.
Or maybe the correction is like, I know you really wanted to be able to do that kind of work, because XYZ colleague is doing it, and everyone has so much appreciation for them. And that's actually not like your zone of expertise and we need to find a different area for you to be able to show your zone of expertise to everyone else. Because trying to be as good as this person in their area of expertise is not really working for you. And it's okay that you're not great at that because you don't have to be great at everything.
These are just some examples. Like I can't know for you without knowing whatever example or whatever situation in your life hasn't gone the way you wanted it to. But I trust that you will know, hearing me talk about this, there will be something that will come up right away and you'll be like, “Oh, it never occurred to me that I could connect with myself about that, be emotionally attuned to myself, be tender with myself.
And then also still tell myself the things that need to be corrected that may be hard to hear. But when I've connected to myself emotionally it's so much easier to say those things that will be hard to hear and it's so much easier to hear those things that will be hard to hear.”
And maybe you had a parent in your life who was able to show up for you like this, who did connect with you before they corrected you. And so maybe this is intuitive and something you already do. And if so, that's really amazing and you can revel in that and enjoy that. And maybe even become more skilled at it because whoever your parent was, they were a human being. And human beings are like not always good at everything, even if they're really good at some things.
And if your parents weren't able or didn't do this for you, I just want you to know, that doesn't mean you're fucked. That doesn't mean you can't ever have this capacity. You can learn, you can teach it to yourself. And it can be something that you can get really good at and have like in your pocket as a skill.
I also want to take a moment to say I do think it would be wonderful if all of our parents had been like this. And I do think we're all deserving of that kind of care and emotional attunement from our parents. And the world being what it is, it's not what we all got, and we can still have really magical, satisfying, fantastic as fuck lives. And we may also need to spend some time grieving, and being sad, or being deeply angry that people didn't attune to us in this way.
I know that for me, I've done a lot of what could be called self-parenting, like self-reparenting where I have learned to give myself the things that I wanted from adults that I didn't get. And that's been really valuable, and really rewarding, and really painful, and really hard. And it's a really specific thing to be able to do that in a way that it's not about blaming our parents or blaming the adults around us.
I think one of the things about being in the human incarnation is just realizing that people will for sure let you down. And it sucks, and it's fucking terrible, and it's also part of it for pretty much every single human, I think. I think even humans who have lives that look really magical and fantastic from the outside, they all still have something, they all still have a place in their lives, in their hearts, in their minds where they're suffering. They all have things they're struggling with.
None of us are getting that perfect experience. And I think it's also okay if you want to believe that it's not cool that you didn't get the things you needed. Because it's not cool. It's just, in my opinion, part of this incarnation, part of this life. And so, for me, what I want for myself is to decide that I'm not fucked just because I didn't get something when I was like six years old, and you're not fucked either.
Now, is it a lot more work to learn how to do this for yourself as an adult? Yeah, probably it is. I think anything where you are not having the experience you want in your life, literally any area where that's happening, whether it's being able to connect before you correct with yourself, or whether it's wanting to make multiple six figures a year in your business, or whether it's wanting a significant other and not having one yet. Any area where you don't have the thing you want is going to require growth.
I think that's okay. I actually would even go so far as to say I think it's a beautiful thing. I think humans are built for it. I think we're built to continue to learn into adulthood. And we're always, always also allowed to rage and grieve about the shit that we didn't get at times when it might have been developmentally really, really powerful for us to have it. So that's sort of a both and thing.
Okay, so I want you to think about a place in your life where maybe it might be really powerful for you to connect before you correct with yourself. And then to go through sort of that conversation of doing that. And it may be helpful to say it out loud to yourself, like talk back and forth with yourself. It may be helpful to write it down. I think there are a lot of different ways you could do it, so try it in whatever way feels fun and interesting to you.
And then yeah, let's also take a minute to say I do think this will be really useful for any relationship you have in your life, whether it's a relationship where you're literally parenting a child, whether it's a relationship where you are the child of a parent.
Yes, according to this book the direction it's supposed to go, “supposed to go” is that parents do it to their kids. But if you want to, you could try this tool on your own parents. If there's something where you want to ask them to do things differently, you could try connecting before you correct just to see if maybe you like that experience of it.
I want to be really clear, I don't think you like owe it to anyone to connect before you correct. I just think it is a powerful tool to have in your toolkit. And I do think it probably makes it easier for people to hear feedback.
You don't have to make it easier for people to hear feedback. But from what I understand from a lot of my clients, they want to give feedback and they want to do it in a way that feels yummy and connected. And so I think this is a way that could feel yummy and connected, and that's why I want it to be available in your toolkit.
So you could do it to your own child, you could do it to your own parent. I do also think, if done well, this could be done in a professional setting. You could connect to your boss about something that's going on with them before you make a request, or an ask, or say something that does or doesn't feel good to you.
It could be a way you handle a conversation with a colleague you've been really struggling to have a good relationship with. It could be a way to handle a conversation with one of your direct reports. And, of course, life isn't all about family and work, so I think this would be something that could be really useful in friendships as well. And also in your relationship with your significant other if you have one.
So I think there are all kinds of relationships where this could be really useful. It can be useful, like I said, parent/child relationships from both directions, work colleagues, work hierarchies both directions, friendships, your relationship with your significant other. I think anywhere where you want to have a connected relationship and you also want to make a correction or ask for something to be different, this could be an incredibly useful tool.
And it's also something you can just have conversations with people about. Like I just had a conversation with Alex about it and without my really even asking her to incorporate it for our relationship with each other, she could see the value of that. So it's something you can talk to people about. It's something you can just quietly implement yourself and see what happens. But it's also something you can talk to your team about like, “Hey, do we want to do this?” Or talk to your family about like, “Hey, is this useful?”
And then, of course, the circle back to the main point of the podcast, I think it's an incredibly powerful tool for you to use for how you talk to yourself. And I think for people who want to have a wildly satisfying life and career, that often involves doing really big, interesting things. And when we do really big, interesting things, we fail a lot. We make a lot of fuck ups. Things don't go as planned.
And in order to be able to tolerate the discomfort of that, being able to have this connected way of correcting yourself may give you so much more softness and so much more levity to be able to go do that scary, difficult work.
And listen, if you want to do this work in community, I want to do this work in community with you too. And right now I am enrolling clients for the next round of Satisfied As Fuck, it's going to start in February 2023. It's going to be amazing. This round that I'm doing now has been truly incredible and awe inspiring. And I think doing this work in community makes the work exponentially faster and just so powerful. And people build these connections that can last way longer than the group program.
So if that sounds like exactly where you want to do this work, come sign up for a consult at my website and I will talk to you all about how you can have a satisfying as fuck life and career.
All right, that's what I have for y’all this week. Have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher.
Previous
Previous
112. Going Against the Grain
Next
Next