Asking Someone For What You Want Is Helpful For Them (15/30)
I'm writing 30 posts in 30 days. This is number 15.
Specifying your needs can make it easier for another person to make you happy, which is often what they want to do. For example: spaghetti.
I worked in fine dining as a server and bartender for years, and I wasn't very good at it overall. I dropped shit, I messed up orders, I forgot important information, and, when I started out, I'd speak in paragraphs when I needed to speak in sentences. (Eventually, I restrained myself by setting a target word count: I tried to speak around 50 words on average to each table, unless they wanted to engage me in conversation.) My technical skills were never more than adequate, overall.
However, by the end of my career, I was excellent at one thing: I understood that my proper mission was to make guests comfortable and ensure their needs were met. I tried to make them happy, and I thought a lot about how best to do this.
But guests often made this difficult by concealing their true feelings.
For example. Sometimes I'd notice that a guest had sort of picked at their food in a circumspect manner for ten minutes. And I'd stop by and say, hey, sorry to interrupt, but it doesn't seem like you're having an exquisite time with this spaghetti. And they'd say, in a sort of meek way, It's Fine. And I'd say, okay, but. All else being equal, if I brought you a different plate of pasta, no cost, no judgement, just a frictionless tastier food experience, would you be enjoying this dinner more? And they'd sort of guiltily smile and allow me to procure them a more delicious item. And then they thought I was the best person ever, for accomplishing this extremely simple task.
This dynamic is perfectly understandable. Most people don't want to make a fuss. Many people have watched TV shows where Gordon Ramsay is angry. Also, some diners probably didn't want to hurt my feelings, and also sort of unconsciously lumped together me and the restaurant into one large entity—as in, rejecting the spaghetti would be, in some way, rejecting me.
But, ultimately, my overriding interest was providing a positive experience. Our interests were aligned. They thought they were sparing me an inconvenience by holding back, but really they were making it harder to achieve the common goal.
This dynamic occurs so often. In personal relationships we think it's better to stew quietly over our discontent rather than just say what would help us. (I do this and am trying to do it less.) In professional relationships we don't ask for things that are perfectly within our rights to have, and then we dislike our work. We hire people to help us, like coaches and therapists, and then we don’t want to bother them, as if being bothered weren’t their job. And so on.
One self-improvement meme that goes around is Ask For What You Want. And it's a good one: much of the time, you can get a lot more out of the world than you’d suspect if you simply raise your voice. However, the frame is usually somewhat mercenary. It's portrayed as a way to get ahead, to throw off the shackles of conformity and self-deprecation that are keeping you down.
It is those things, but there's another framing, usually ignored. When you ask for what you want, you're allowing someone else to exert compassion.