How many ways can you embarass yourself?

(posted by Ron)

  • “Oh, I didn’t know you were pregnant?”….”I’m not!
  • “Wow, you’ve really lost a lot of weight.”….”Nope, I weigh the same as I did the last time we met.”
  • “Did your daughter find what she was looking for?”….”My daughter?  Oh – do you mean my wife?”

In our seminars we taught the tool – “leave your judgments in the parking lot” – early in the day.  The topic may sound strange but to our workshop participants it meant to leave their judgments outside the door of the training room.  Leaving them behind enabled them to learn more quickly and take in ideas they might find out of the ordinary.

Have you ever been guilty of any or all of the three situations above?  Perhaps you’ve been the recipient of one or more of them.  I have been asked many times if Gayle is my daughter.  One evening when we were dining out a with a male friend closer to Gayle’s age than me, the server actually argued with Gayle about to which of us she was married.  To get him to stop she finally looked him in the eye and said “look – you are on thin ice here and you might want to stop!”  I still don’t think he believed her, but he did shut up.

Most recently we were in a vintage clothing store in Las Vegas with our friend Dixie.  She and Gayle were in the dressing room when the owner of the store asked me the “daughter” question above.  In this case, however, he was talking about Dixie.

Whether you realize it or not there is an inherent judgment in each of the above questions.

  • “Let’s hope you are pregnant – surely you couldn’t be that large without having a baby in there.”
  • “You sure do look better now – I thought you looked pretty big before.”
  • “An old guy like you could not be in a relationship with an attractive, significantly younger woman.”

I wish I had been quicker on the draw and said something like, “oh, they are both my wives,” or “no, she’s my girlfriend and the other lady is my wife.”  I wasn’t.  I said “she’s a friend and Gayle is my wife.”  True, but not as witty or pointed!

His question seemed particularly clueless when you consider that Las Vegas may have the largest number of age-gap relationships per square foot than any other city in this country.  At least it looked that way to me (yes, I still have judgments only I was thinking “all right – good for them.”)  In the hotels and casinos there were a lot of older men with younger women.

So I ask you to leave your judgments somewhere else and relate to people as individuals, not cliches.  Let people tell you about their pregnancies or weight loss (“hey you look great” works better than “have you lost weight?”) or relationships.  Don’t embarrass them or yourself by presuming you know what’s going on.

Gayle and I have worked on dropping our judgment that people are automatically looking at us when we walk into a room.  When we assume (judge) that other people are judging us – then shame on us – we’ve become the judge.

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