This is my dog, Annie. She works with me most days. At night, she sleeps in my daughter’s room. She doesn’t ever complain.
What she does do, when startled, is bark in a circle, going round and round and round. It’s loud, annoying, and wildly ineffective.
Watching her get startled this week gave me a new New Year’s resolution.
I’m going to put an end to complaining. It’s loud, annoying, and wildly ineffective.
That’s not the same thing as saying I’m not going to get upset or be bothered or take action when I see things that aren’t right.
What it means is I’m giving up the type of free-range complaining that solves nothing, upsets me and others, and doesn’t rectify what upset me in the first place.
Instead, as a working parent who knows that whatever I do is going to be watched more closely by my daughters than anything I ever say, I’m replacing complaining with a four-prong approach to dealing with all manner of annoyances. I’m hopeful that it will help me solve more of the problems I can solve, support others who are solving problems that are beyond me, and accept when neither of us has a solution.
Step 1 – Listen: I’m pretty good at listening, but I can be too quick to jump to the second step, which is trying to solve the problem. I’m going to listen longer and be more thoughtful before responding.
Step 2 – Speak Up: This is the antidote to complaining. If something is bothering me, I’m going to say so. I’m not going to complain into the ether; I’m going to say something to the person or people who are causing the problem. I’ll try to do it in a respectful way. That might not always work but it’ll be the default mode. And either way, it’s still better than complaining to people who can’t do anything about it.
Step 3 – Support: There’s lots I don’t have the power to change. But I can get behind other people who do have that power. I can support them, I can encourage them, I can speak out, I can draw others to them with the goal of supporting them in solving what I can’t.
Step 4 – Ignore: As a parent, there are so many annoyances that I might complain about. Some of my top small ones include other parents, other people’s kids, bureaucracy, calendar scrambles, snow days on big workdays, rain on fun days. Easy to complain about all of those, but what good is it going to do? Ignore and move on.
Will my new strategy work? Or better will I be able to stick to it and not revert to complaining? I’ll let you know.
