When I
speak with a dad I’m working with to see how his latest video submission has
turned out. He tells me it was magnificent.He’s so proud of his son.When
next we meet,we agree to watch the
footage together.I patiently, quietly
take in what I see, and I gingerly reach for the pause button.
“Dad,” I say.“I am so interested to know what it is that you are seeing in this footage that has made you so excited and proud.”
He says,“Well, we were baking together, (dad is a wonderful chef as a hobby) and my son knows the difference between an 1/8th teaspoon and a 1/4th teaspoon.Without even reading which one is which.Even if they are not side by side for comparison!He memorized all the ingredients and can practically make the pancakes himself!”
I smiled and agreed that those were all very impressive elements to what we had been watching together.
I continued,“However, I don’t care about any of that. At all.”
“That’s
not our work,” I went on to say. “The
memorization, the measuring spoon differentiation, all of that is static,
static, static.I am interested in
seeing, not how he makes the pancakes all by himself, but rather how he collaborates
with you, and you with him on making them.I care about how the two of you discover together how much of any given
ingredient goes in next. I would be thrilled to see how you put too much or not
enough of something in to the mix and afford yourselves an opportunity to
problem solve together. Even if
it means there’s a cup of salt instead of sugar in there, and you go so far as
to fry those bad boys up and find they are harder than rocks…together.That is our work.”
How difficult it is to avoid the trap of being proud of those exciting moments where a rote skill appears to be extraordinary.Not that a parent shouldn’t be proud of every success, but not at the expense of collaborating and problem solving.
Interestingly
enough, the following week, when the same dad presented me with another video
to watch, he appeared almost crestfallen.He dejectedly handed the dvd to me and said that he felt it was a
complete debacle.I assured him that I
would, in fact, be the judge of that.
We began watching father and son working together to change a light bulb.There were a lot of missteps, it’s true, until there was that flash, that brilliant moment I had hoped would arise.I paused the footage. This time I asked dad what he saw.Dad looked a bit perplexed as he admitted that he noticed a shared laugh between them.I exclaimed that he saw correctly! That was the work I’d been looking for.That fifteen second gem of dynamic collaboration between the two of them.Where his son caught the humor and joined in with his dad as they laughed, together.I told him that I would take those fifteen seconds any day, over the prior week’s fifteen minutes of static.Just then, the proverbial light bulb went on for dad.I could almost make out the glow just above his head. In that precise moment, dad was able to shift his perspective to value the dynamic interactions over the static ones. He got it.
Melissa Reiner has been an RDI Certified Consutant since 2009 and lives in Santa Monica, California. Click here to email Melissa.