Massaging Maturity

It took ninety seconds for me to warm up my soup in the cafeteria at the community college where I work. In that mundane countdown, I overheard words that offer to change my life. One young guy earnestly entreated another, "Dude, don't lie to me. How are my massages, really?"



I don't plan on starting our massage therapy program in which these two kids were presumably enrolled. As Chris Gardner's memoir The Pursuit of Happyness challenged, I can go to school with everybody I meet. I can learn from what they have to teach me. My perceptions will lie to me. Sometimes my acquaintances and friends will also shade the truth in service of convenience. It takes a particular kind of mature courage to ask how our intentions are experienced in our actions.



Seeking feedback where this guy did may offer a beachhead in the battle against self-delusion. He wanted input on how well he was developing the skills that would translate into his livelihood. The least introspective among us can admit that if we expect someone to pay us for our work, we will need outside intervention to perceive that work as others perceive it. From the moment we understand the concept of a job, we have people who model the full range of openness to feedback from the working world. There are hindrances to a growth mindset even with the language of objectivity offered by most vocational environments. Not without reason, we connect our job title to whether or not we will have what we absolutely need. Asking for how others perceive us in our work role is, in an easily skewed sense, a distant relation to asking whether or not we deserve to avoid starvation in the future. The honesty to confess that our needs have generally been met even when we haven't worked or our work execution hasn't been perfect is both breathtaking and ordinary. This true humility is a small step, and a giant leap.



Where we bolster the courage to ask that student's question, we do so in a piecemeal fashion.  When she was about the same precocious and perceptive age as this week's epiphany in sneakers, Helen Keller wrote in The Story of My Life,“One painful duty fulfilled makes the next plainer and easier.” Once we ask how it is to be on the receiving end of the roles in which we consider ourselves most trained and proficient, at work, we might develop momentum toward asking the same question in more ambiguous and adventurous endeavors. Don't lie to me. Am I communicating as clearly as I think I am when the metrics are less measurable than they are at the office? Don't lie to me. What is it like to be downstream from my habits as a husband? Don't lie to me. What is it like in the flow of a friendship with me?

Questions that cultivate vulnerability and answers that make the most of it are both developed over time.   Just as John Ortberg in Everybody's  Normal Until You Get to Know Them insists that friendship cannot be microwaved, neither can a relationship in which healthy confrontation is normal.   Even our closest confidants, after all, spend most of their words in superficial communication with people who don't really want to be confronted. A friend of mine who is my apostle of openness to criticism from others in this season of life admits that his willingness to speak candidly has its limits. When a fellow coach asked for such input and then immediately began to reject implementing it, my friend began to mentally count strikes like a baseball umpire. Three rationalizations later, he realized that the other coach didn't really want candor.

If we seek honesty from others that will help us grow, then, our efforts to respond to their feedback in small and debatable areas will welcome more openness. Digesting honest feedback begins when we stifle the self-justification with which we have so much practice. When we manage this, our responsibilities are not finished. Glacial and begrudging change in response to someone's feedback won't deepen our relationships or the capacity of those relationships to help us, either. If we are to purposefully cultivate connections that foster personal growth, there may be no more enriching fertilizer than changing the words we speak. If we incorporate grateful references to the ways in which others have helped us by confronting us, we are planting good seed for the habit of continued growth. Now, if I can just find the kid who planted wisdom in my life by minding his own business and talking to his friend…