Hiya. Thank you for drawing my attention to your mention of me here.
However, his skills at working with people aren't always the greatest :) (Although they're a lot better now than they used to be).
Interestingly, I've been hearing this a lot from many people, not just people on LJ. And not just the first bit of that, the bit in parentheses too.
At first, this seemed encouraging, because it implies that I was improving, even though I didn't know consciously what exactly I did to improve. Over time, it became less encouraging, because the following could be concluded from it: either 1) I'm not improving enough, maybe I'm converging towards (and will therefore never reach) a point of acceptability?, or 2) the statement that I was improving is dishonest or at best an overstatement, and its purpose is to "discharge" the frank judgment and lower the risk of me taking offense at it.
This is one of the reasons why I'm having so much trouble improving my social skills. People aren't frank enough with me. Every once in a while someone pulls up enough courage to post something like you did here, but they always add something on to it which supposedly makes it sound like "it's not all that bad after all", just so they don't have to run the risk of having me yell at them (which, of course, I would never do).
I love to help anybody with questions that I can answer. I'm sure I can teach some Perl to people, or SQL, or anything else I know. You just never walked up to me to ask a question. And I bet I know why: It's likely that, because you already thought I wasn't good with people, you anticipated that you'd receive a less friendly or less helpful response from me than from, say, Mark, so you just went for Mark instead. Then you got into the habit of asking Mark, and never got around to verifying your suspicion about me.
Uhm, well, I don't really know what I'm trying to get at. Just trying to pour out some thoughts here. Anyway ... you (or anyone else who is reading this) can certainly help me improve my social skills if they want to. All you have to do is to drop the curtain of courtesy and tell me exactly what you think I'm doing wrong.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-04-14 05:07 pm (UTC)However, his skills at working with people aren't always the greatest :) (Although they're a lot better now than they used to be).
Interestingly, I've been hearing this a lot from many people, not just people on LJ. And not just the first bit of that, the bit in parentheses too.
At first, this seemed encouraging, because it implies that I was improving, even though I didn't know consciously what exactly I did to improve. Over time, it became less encouraging, because the following could be concluded from it: either 1) I'm not improving enough, maybe I'm converging towards (and will therefore never reach) a point of acceptability?, or 2) the statement that I was improving is dishonest or at best an overstatement, and its purpose is to "discharge" the frank judgment and lower the risk of me taking offense at it.
This is one of the reasons why I'm having so much trouble improving my social skills. People aren't frank enough with me. Every once in a while someone pulls up enough courage to post something like you did here, but they always add something on to it which supposedly makes it sound like "it's not all that bad after all", just so they don't have to run the risk of having me yell at them (which, of course, I would never do).
I love to help anybody with questions that I can answer. I'm sure I can teach some Perl to people, or SQL, or anything else I know. You just never walked up to me to ask a question. And I bet I know why: It's likely that, because you already thought I wasn't good with people, you anticipated that you'd receive a less friendly or less helpful response from me than from, say, Mark, so you just went for Mark instead. Then you got into the habit of asking Mark, and never got around to verifying your suspicion about me.
Uhm, well, I don't really know what I'm trying to get at. Just trying to pour out some thoughts here. Anyway ... you (or anyone else who is reading this) can certainly help me improve my social skills if they want to. All you have to do is to drop the curtain of courtesy and tell me exactly what you think I'm doing wrong.