Sometimes ya gotta just Shut Up!

The spirit often tells me this; "just walk away" or "don't say another word". I have been a champ in the past at lecturing and nagging. This example from L & L points out a better way.

Maya approached me about the problem she was having with her daughter. "Jim, you told us to lock in empathy before telling kids the consequence. (Empathy, we'll discuss in another post) I have to tell you that it doesn’t work. I do it and my daughter just goes off on me.""Oh, that's not good," I responded. "Demonstrate to me how you did it and maybe I can help." "Well, she missed her curfew. So when she came in I said, 'I'm so sorry you missed your curfew. I warned you about it, but you did it anyway. Now you're grounded. I'm sick and tired of you thinking that you can do any old thing you want to do. We've got rules and you are going to follow them.'" Maya's incident reminds us of the two ways we can cause Love and Logic to backfire on us. The first is to use anger. The second is to use too many words. Maya did both of these. In this case, Maya's first mistake was saying, "I'm so sorry." Talking about how we feel is not empathy. Empathy refers to the other person or the situation. It would have been better had she said, "This is so sad. I'm going to have to do something about this, but not now. I need to think it over first." Had she said that, and then spent some time cooling down, she would have probably recognized that her added threat and lecture would make things worse.