Teachers, how often has something come up during a lesson and you freeze: Do I forge ahead or just scrap the lesson and address what’s going on?
You have more options than you may think! Striking a balance between sticking with the plan and changing course is about seeing the range of possibilities and making a choice that will help most in that situation.
Check out the video for more:
Stick to your guns – or – Don’t sweat the small stuff
Well which is it?!
Should I stick to my guns and be persistent… even if it causes me anguish?
Should I not sweat the small stuff and just let things go… even if they are really important to me?
The answer is, of course, that it’s best to find a balance!
“Sticking to your guns” is advice people give when they are suggesting that you persevere. Persevering is when you keep trying to do something, accomplish something, get your way—no matter how hard it seems, no matter what obstacles you face. Thinking about perseverance, you can imagine a fist clenching onto something tightly.
And there are times when it’s beneficial to persevere. For example:
Persevering a little helps when you’re stuck on a math problem and you need to just try another solution to get the right answer.
Persevering a lot can be necessary in certain situations, like pushing back against a company that’s overcharging you for something you’ve bought and hoping you’ll just give up and pay the unfair amount.
But persevering too much, or at the wrong time, can often make situations worse. If you persevere and insist that a classmate change a word in a paper you’re writing together because you don’t like it, even though her word is still right… and she’s explained it to you… and it really just comes down to a difference of opinion—that could end in a damaged relationship with your classmate.
Sometimes it’s just not the “right fight.” Maybe that was a time to let it go.
“It pays to be overconfident”
That’s according to a recent study that claims overconfidence leads to higher social status and “peer perceptions of social and task skill.”
I can’t help but have a gut response that says, so many people can see right through that overconfidence or are just put off by it. But even if we accept the research, does that mean we should always trick ourselves into thinking that we’re the best?
Not according to psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, says straight up, don’t be too confident. He sees overconfidence as the trait most likely to lead to terrible decisions. In a recent interview, he described overconfidence as:
the kind of optimism that leads governments to believe that wars are quickly winnable and capital projects will come in on budget despite statistics predicting exactly the opposite
So, then, what are we left to think? If we’re super confident then we may get the respect of our peers, but make bad decisions. If, on the other hand, we doubt ourselves constantly, won’t that impede our drive and damage our self-image?
It seems, once again, that what we need to do is strike a balance. Find that middle ground between:
extreme self-confidence that can cloud your judgement
and
extreme self-doubt that leaves you powerless
There’s a huge space in between, where you find the confidence to tackle challenges, and at the same time the questioning necessary to find the true best solution.
The Balance Challenge is all about making decisions that work best for you and the people around you. Finding the right balance between confidence and questioning can help guide the way.
Opinions are like bellybuttons: everyone’s got one.
I recently mentioned the AppleWatch to a friend, and before I could finish my sentence, he said, “Oh my GOD! The AppleWatch is SO dumb! Why would anyone want something so useless and so expensive?!” I was caught off guard—I was about to mention something I like about the watch, but all of a sudden I felt like I couldn’t say anything positive about it.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. And everyone has the right to express their opinion. But there are lots of ways to express your opinion, from a brief mention to a forceful tirade. So which should you do, and when?
The first thing to do is consider whether it makes sense to share you thought or hold your thought. Some opinions are better left unsaid if all they’ll do is hurt someone.
So if you decide to share your opinion, should you be enthusiastic and passionate? Or calm and measured?
If you feel very strongly about your opinion, you may decide to share it enthusiastically. You state it with passion, because it is a very strong belief. It’s like a tidal wave, crashing to shore with incredible force!
There are times when it makes sense to share your opinion with this much fervor. With friends who agree with you about how awesome the Minions movie was, be enthusiastic!
But if you are too enthusiastic, or too enthusiastic at the wrong time, you may have become “overzealous”—spending an extreme level of energy expressing a belief. You could anger or bother the people around you.
So if being too enthusiastic is a problem, what’s the alternative? Being measured. This is like calm waves on the ocean, moving slowly and evenly.
Being measured is when you share your opinion in a calm and reserved way. When talking about a controversial topic, or with someone you don’t know well, it is often helpful not to share too enthusiastically.
But as with all things, being too measured can be a problem, too. People may think that you don’t care about your opinion. Being too measured could be mistaken for indifference. In those cases, other people in a group may make decisions without you, because they assume you don’t care. For example, don’t let your team at work decide everyone needs to come in an hour early if you have a very long commute and can’t make it!
Better than one extreme or the other, it’s best to find a balance between those two extremes:
There are a lot of choices in between too enthusiastic and too measured. When having discussions in a group, consider just how enthusiastic or how measured to be when sharing your opinion.
Remember that sharing opinions has an impact on other people: it can make them uncomfortable, angry, or disappointed. OR it can make them interested, curious, inspired, or constructively challenged. And other people’s reactions all come back to you!
“It’s my way or the highway.”
I write articles for my job. I tend to write long articles, including lots of details. I like it that way! That’s how I write, and I think it’s good, and how it should be. The problem is, the articles get sent to hundreds of teachers to read and use. So my colleagues sometimes give me feedback to shorten an article, to take out some details.
I sometimes feel like telling them to “take a hike!” It’s my way or the highway, as they say. What I mean is that I don’t want the feedback. In those times, I feel I am the only person who could possibly know what’s best for me and my work. In other words, I want to stick to doing things my way.
The problem is, there are times when advice from others is actually very helpful to me. (In fact, I should probably make this blog post a little shorter, according to the feedback of some readers…)
For lots of people—including, but not only folks on the autism spectrum—it can be hard to know when to stick to your way of doing things, and when to be open to advice and try new ways. Let’s explore—
Sticking with your way of doing things is like an anchor, firmly planted in the ocean floor. It doesn’t move, doesn’t budge for anything or anyone. This can be important to do at times, like when you are 100% certain that you need to take a break from a long work meeting (your way), even if others are insisting you stay.
But too much sticking with your way, too much of the time, means you vehemently insist on only doing things the way you do them. You then ignore the advice other people give, even if that advice will actually be helpful for you. There are times when a friend, relative, teacher, or coworker gives you advice that will be helpful—even when you feel like your way is better.
So what’s the alternative to sticking with your way? It’s trying new ways of doing things. For this, we use an image of a sailboat, whose route is guided by the wind. This is when we are open to advice and feedback, we listen to and consider the guidance of our relatives and peers and make changes in our behavior according to their suggestions.
This is not to say that you should always be open to new ways of doing things! If you only try new ways, you can lose sight of the important things you’ve learned about yourself. And if the advice comes from someone who doesn’t know us well, or who does not have our best interest in mind, trying their way could be harmful to us.
So what to do? Strike a balance!
Are there times when you should try new ways of doing things? Absolutely, yes. Are there other times when you should absolutely just stick to your ways? Yes, also. Let’s think about the balance of the two.
But be sure not to fall into the only trying new ways trap. Obeying the directions every classmate and teacher without question can lead to uncomfortable or dangerous choices.
But it doesn’t hurt to be open to new ideas. When a trusted person gives advice or feedback, rejecting it immediately means you fall into the stick with my way trap, and when that happens you don’t make tough things better.
If this is helpful, read more about some other balances that are connected to this idea:
I make a promise to make my next blog post shorter, with fewer details. I’m open to trying that new way to make my posts easier for everyone to read!
For an explanation of the Balance Challenge framework, see Balance Breakdown, always accessible on the top navigation bar.
What do you say to whom, and how much, and when…?
People usually don’t address their six year old sister with “Your Honor…” and they rarely say “Sup?” to their principal.
We don’t speak the same way to everyone. We make changes to what we say based on our audience – who we’re with, and what’s going on.
Let’s look at a couple decisions we make about changing our language for different audiences – WHAT, and HOW MUCH – by thinking about balance.
Do you discuss details of upcoming dentist appointments with your friends? Not usually – that’s something that’s typically discussed with your parents.
Do you say, “Good afternoon” to classmates? Probably not that much – that’s something reserved for someone like a teacher.
So what topics do we raise, and what words make sense to use, based on whom we’re with?
A helpful way to think about this difference is through balancing casual and formal language.
Casual and formal language can be hard to define explicitly. In general, casual language is words and topics that we say naturally, the first things that come to mind. Formal language describes words topics that we think about and consider, and possibly censor, for a particular type of person. For example, if you were late to school one day, you might tell your friend: Damn. My stupid alarm didn’t go off. But for your science teacher, that doesn’t match how she’s expecting to be spoken to – for her, it would be more like: I’m sorry, won’t happen again.
The main question to think about is:
There’s a whole other aspect of considering our audience: after we’ve figured out what to say, we have to consider how much to share.
When talking about my favorite TV show to my friends who also watch that TV show, I can get into an incredible level of detail about all the evidence I have for my theory that a certain character didn’t really die… If I try to explain that much to my mom – who hates the show – she’ll be totally disinterested and confused. She won’t know the characters or the plot points, and she’ll probably not care!
This speaks to the need to balance how much we explain and how much we skim.
This balance of our language is again based on who we’re with, but this time, it has more to do with the topic than our status connection to the person. It helps to think about:
Of course, it’s sometimes challenging to figure out how much someone knows, and how interested someone is. But it helps to have it be “on our radar,” something we think about and consider.
For folks who want something more concrete, a helpful visual is this slider. It represents the same elements of the balance, but as a continuum from one extreme to the other. Our decisions about how much to “lean” toward one side or another can all fall somewhere along the slider:
For example, on our explain ~ skim balance, when thinking about talking to dad’s friend about pi day (March 14, or 3/14, so named for the number pi which begins 3.14), it probably makes sense to be somewhere around 80/20 skim. He may or may not know or be interested, but it couldn’t hurt to mention.
…but in after school science club, it might be good to be more like 60/40 explain about pi day – to talk about it, and in some detail, but not so much detail that it takes the whole club time.
In the U.S., people sometimes refer to our right to free speech to mean we can say whatever we want to whomever we want. In reality, there are often negative outcomes to making mistakes about what we say to whom. Talking about a topic to your boss that he finds inappropriate (too casual) could lead to getting fired. Talking in too much detail about something that a classmate isn’t interested in (too much explain) may mean they avoid working with me in the future.
The Balance Challenge is all about the thinking we can do in social situations to help us create the best outcomes for us and the people we’re with. Balancing casual and formal language, and explaining and skimming, can help to do just that.
And as always, remember this advice is not just for folks with ASD, but for neurotypicals as well. Anyone who knows me (or reads this blog…) knows that I myself can always benefit from trying to lean more toward skim!
For an explanation of the Balance Challenge framework, see Balance Breakdown, always accessible on the top navigation bar.
Balance Challenge 