Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #11: Avoid Imposing Values
We’re at the halfway point of Leadership Step By Step’s exercises! This week’s exercise was to avoid imposing values on other people. What exactly does that entail? To start, avoid using the terms “good”, “bad”, “right”, and “wrong”, but with a stretch goal of also avoiding “should”, “appropriate”, “better”, and “worse”, among a few others. Not forever, but just for the purpose of this exercise and seeing what comes of it.
The idea behind the exercise is to become more aware of your unconscious judgment of others – if you say a movie is “good”, what does that even mean? To some people, it might mean entertaining. To others, it might mean that it had subtle depth that requires comparing/contrasting studies against concepts in philosophy to truly uncover meaning. In the end, the term “good”, has no real meaning of its own and simply shows your own personal bias or judgment, which can very often be taken as demeaning. After all, am I in any position to tell you whether the way you dress, or talk, or make movies, or like your coffee is “good” or “bad”? Probably not. Is anyone? Maybe not.
This exercise is another that Josh had challenged me to do several years ago, when he was helping me develop my podcast interviewing skills, so it was not new to me. It has, however, become a skill that I consciously choose to keep in my day-to-day life. I think that I have gotten to a point where I’ve eliminated a great deal of my ‘value impositions’ from my usual speech.
In many cases, I find that this challenge is just a matter of finding a better way to replace these words: instead of using “good”, rephrase using “I like…” (i.e. instead of “that movie is so good!”, use “I really like that movie!”). Instead of saying “worse”, use more detail to describe what exactly you think has worsened (“The dialogue in the second book didn’t hook me as much as the first” instead of “the second book was worse than the first”). This not only eliminates your value judgments, but it also allows deeper, more meaningful communication.
Since being tasked with this exercise, I have become very conscious of my usage of the words “good/bad” and “better/worse”. I haven’t necessarily eliminated them from my vocabulary, but I use them far more sparingly and often make note of it when I use them. I will admit that some of the more difficult-to-eliminate words like “acceptable”, “appropriate”, or “should” still often escape my lips, and I often feel like I haven’t found a good way around using those terms yet. Even so, I feel like this change to the way I communicate has really helped in my ability to connect with others.
Since I removed many of these value-loaded words from my vocabulary (or at least got to the point where I only use them when I consciously decide to), the way people react to me and my speech changed dramatically. In general, I think that people naturally have an opposing reaction to value judgements. For example, if I say “the new Bruno Mars album is really good.”, then many will react immediately with “Yeah, but…” and tell me what isn’t good about it (even if they like the album!), whereas “I really like the new Bruno Mars album!” is generally met with agreement, or at least acceptance. It’s quite difficult to convince someone that they don’t like something that they say they do. This means that my conversations with others have become more thoughtful and meaningful, less adversarial, and have allowed me to connect better with others.
This exercise is one that I really think we should all do at some point (Gah…”should”…Another judgment). I want to re-emphasize that the point is not to eliminate these words from your vocabulary, but to use them consciously and intentionally – to think about when you’re being judgmental and be hyper-aware of when you allow yourself to judge and how it is affecting your conversation. It is a skill that, when mastered, can really help improve how you connect with others.
