Lost Arts- Being Gracious

Being Gracious

The Oxford dictionary defines being gracious as kind, indulgent,
courteous and beneficent to inferiors -the irony of that statement
will not be lost on most.

 

It seems to be en vogue these days to treat others as though they were
inferior whether it is at work, in the grocery store or driving home.
If ever you needed to see where people aren’t gracious just watch cars
trying to merge into traffic during rush hour in any of our major
cities. Being gracious used to be a no brainer, if someone was in
need you helped out. Today however pitching or tuning in requires
putting yourself aside and picking up a lost art.

Being gracious is really about being present with someone, regardless
of who they are or what they are saying. This seems hard to do when
you have a telemarketer on the end of the phone after a long day at
the office. However in most cases that person is trying to pay their
rent or pay their college tuition. They did not choose the job because
of all the perks that come with minimum wage jobs, they are doing
because it is all they have. So being gracious requires you to spend 3
minutes to let them have their say. Then you can politely decline them
without having made them feel inferior.

Being gracious doesn’t mean you have to listen to everything. Think
about the office gossip. You aren’t being gracious when you indulge
them. But the next time a child tries to tell you something that is
REALLY important, and no one could possibly hope to follow the logic-
smile and listen. Be gracious, allow them that moment. You will have
lots of moments for yourself, every once in a while let other people
have theirs.

Who's to blame?

Too often we let other people catch our mistakes instead of recognizing them and learning from them. When this happens we enter into the blame game. In the blame game nobody wins and everybody loses.   

How do you avoid the blame game?

Admitting when you have made a mistake and growing and learning from it allows you to be humble. Admitting a mistake and learning nothing from it is just plain stupid.

How to learn from your mistakes

First assess what really happened without any emotion. Write out the problem and remove any judging, blaming or emphatic words. Here are two examples of the same story.

Judging words

I was running really late for work because the elevator in my building has been slow for the past three weeks. When I finally got out of the lobby an idiot was parked in the loading zone and I had to go all the way around him. By the time I got to the bus stop I had missed the bus. The city has such a poor schedule that I had to wait another 15 minutes for the next bus. My boss is a real stickler for timeliness so even though I was only 15 minutes late, he made me work the extra time- even though I would have done it anyway.

Descriptive words

At 8:30 I left my apartment for work. The elevator took 5 minutes to arrive on my floor. When I left the building I walked around a parked car. The time was 8:40, I know this because my bus was leaving and it arrives at 8:40. I boarded the next bus at 8:55. I arrived at work at 9:15. I worked until 5:15 at my manager’s request.

When you remove all the judging, blaming and emphatic words it becomes easier to see what the real problem was and learn from it. Unfortunately many of us have grown up on a healthy diet of blaming others (I blame reality tv J ) and it becomes hard to see where our responsibility lies. Once you can see your responsibility in the problem you can often find the solution and the learning opportunity.

In this case the employees should have gone to his boss and admitted that he had not left enough time to get to the bus stop. Accepting his responsibility the employee would have learned the lesson and probably offered up the remedy instead of the supervisor having to mention it.

 

Sara Rylott

Ready2fly