The Back of Your Head

"Mom, the back of your hair looks like the parting of the Red Sea!" exclaimed my adolescent daughter from the back of the mini-van.

"Really" I wondered?  "I thought it looked pretty good from the front."

My daughter's assessment wasn't a particularly attractive one. In fact, I didn't much like hearing it. She wasn't very tactful. She actually sounded embarrassed to be with me. Her comment would have been easy to discount. After all, she was a teenager and I was an adult. Perhaps she was just feeling cranky and decided she would have a go at me, her mother. If she really cared that much about my feelings, she might have shared her perspective in a different way. What did she know anyway?

Nonetheless, I checked the back of my hair. Imagine my surprise when I discovered she was right.

This interaction with my daughter reminds me of how difficult it is to hear something unpleasant about ourselves. Even though the words may be true, if they have the slightest sting to them, how easy it is to "shoot the messenger." When this happens we often miss the opportunity to receive feedback important to our health, well-being and relationships with others. Consider the plight of a hypothetical person I'll call Mindy.

Our Blind Side

"Mindy thinks of herself as a kind, loving, generous person, but she's not that easy to have as a friend," confessed Sara. "Whenever we're together she always dominates the conversation. She says she's interested in what's going on with me, but before I can get out more than two sentences she's off on a tangent about her own interests or experiences."

When we think about things that may need to change in our lives to help us be "healthier," it's important to recognize that health is not just about one's physical fitness. According to the World Health Organization, health embodies physical, mental and social well-being. In other words, you may have your weight at optimum levels and be able to run a 5K with no difficulty, but still not be healthy.

Mindy's unhealthy relational habits, however, are more difficult to address than a sedentary lifestyle or being overweight. First, Mindy is not aware of them. She is blind to the way she talks about herself far more than she listens attentively to others. She occasionally wonders why she does not have more friends and then attributes this problem to busy schedules.

Mindy wants to be effective at work, but relationships with colleagues suffer from the same issues that plague her personal life, i.e., she's full of talk about herself, but overly sensitive to helpful feedback from others. When Mindy struggled with declining performance indicators for a project for which she was responsible, Tony, a close colleague, tactually tried to suggest some changes. Even though Tony was as gentle as possible, Mindy rejected his comments as "critical" and "uncaring."

"You, of all people, should know how hard I've worked on this Tony," she retorted with a wounded tone. "I can't believe you would say these things to me."

Mindy does have people in her life who love and care about her. They would like to share with her about their experience of her, but she resists hearing even the smallest suggestions about the impact she has on others. Their tolerance and patience have allowed her to persist in her bad habits but sadly many of those closest to her are beginning to distance themself because they can only handle Mindy in small doses.

"She's just too needy," they say. "She always wants your approval, but if you say anything that doesn't agree with her—even when she asks for input and you're trying to help—she just gets angry."

Am I Mindy?

It's probably easy to read this and substitute the name of someone you know for Mindy's name. Most of us have people in our lives who are difficult—at least for us. The problem with focusing on others, however, is that it's a lot like viewing your hairstyle only from the front; there's a lot in the back you don't see. If we want a better estimate of our social well-being, i.e. relational health with others, it's going to take more than a cursory glance in the mirror. Next week I'll talk more about how to get an honest relational appraisal of yourself. In the meantime, I think I'll go take another look at the back of my head in the mirror.

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