The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 420 - Jen’s Big Oopsie

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hello, Jen.

Jen: I have something I want to talk to you about. I literally don't know if this is going to turn into an episode of this podcast.

Pete: Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm. Sounds familiar.

Jen: But I'm eager to have a conversation with you about this, because I really want to learn. So, Pete, I need to talk to you about my big oopsie that I made.

Pete: Oh my gosh.

Jen: And my daughter's extraordinary response to it.

Pete: Oh, okay. Responding to oopsies. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: What oopsie? Talk to me. You never make mistakes. What are you talking about?

Jen: I make lots of mistakes, but this one was really big, and it was foolish, and it was just not necessary. So, listeners, before you go, "Jen, didn't you know that?" No, I didn't know that. I don't have TikTok. I'm not on TikTok. Okay? So, this is a TikTok oopsie.

Pete: Okay. I don't have TikTok either, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to help. But this will be funny.

Jen: Okay, I'll tell you about the oopsie. But the thing I want to talk most about is what happened after. My daughter, Cate, has a TikTok account specifically for her music. She records lots and lots of videos. And then, she drips them out over time. So she's got quite the library of drafts stored of songs she's written, songs she's covered, promotional materials for upcoming singles, etc. And it's all stored in the drafts folder on TikTok. Now, last weekend, we don't have to get into the why, but Cate got into a little bit of trouble with me. She got grounded, and lost her TikTok. She lost her phone.

Pete: Access to TikTok, yep.

Jen: But I, in a parental bully move of like, "And I'm not effing around this time..."

Pete: Yeah, yeah. This is so relatable, by the way, for every parent that's ever listened.

Jen: I took her phone into my room and deleted both TikTok and Instagram from her phone, thinking, "Once she's ungrounded, I'll add them back. I don't want to have any chance of her using these apps while she's grounded." Okay, so the people with TikTok already know where this is headed. But for the listeners who don't...

Pete: I could guess.

Jen: So I reinstall the apps on her phone after the grounding is over, and I give it back to her. And maybe an hour or two later, she comes into the living room, completely calm, and says, "Mom, did you delete the actual apps from my phone, or did you just block them?" "Oh, I deleted those apps, Cate."

Pete: "You better believe it. I'm proud of it."

Jen: She said, "Unfortunately, Mom, when you deleted TikTok, you also deleted all of my drafts, because they're stored locally on the device."

Pete: Who knew?

Jen: I said, "How many drafts is that?" And she said, "About sixty. It's about four months worth of work."

Pete: Oh my god.

Jen: She said it that cool as a cucumber. And I said, "Oh my god, Cate, I'm so, so, so sorry. I didn't know. I didn't know." And she goes, "I know you didn't know, but now you know." I said, "If that was me, and you had just deleted four months of my work, I'd be throwing a fit right now." And she said, "Well, I'm not happy, but there's nothing I can do about it. So, we move forward."

Pete: What a response.

Jen: And Pete, this is what I want to talk to you about. The night before this happened, we had been rewatching Little Women. Specifically, we were talking about that horrible scene where Amy burns Jo's manuscript. And Jo is beside herself, despondent, inconsolable. That is how I would have been if someone had done that to me. But this kid was like, "You didn't know. I forgive you. Let's move forward." I don't understand. And I want to. I want to be like that. Help me. Is this something for therapy, or is this something for the podcast?

Pete: Who knows? Let's find out. I feel like there's some credit due to you here, because Cate must have learned some version of responding in that way from you and Mark, somewhere along the line.

Jen: Okay. I will accept that compliment, even though I feel a desire to deflect it. But I'll accept it.

Pete: Yes. I appreciate that. The other thing I hear you say (which I agree with) is, to me, this is the response we strive for.

Jen: Right.

Pete: The response to a calamity, a mistake...a disaster is perhaps a little bit too extreme a word...but a mishap, an oopsie, to be understanding, accepting, calm, stoic, and to communicate all of that very clearly.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: To go, "Yep, you made a mistake. Yep, you didn't know. And there's nothing I can do about it. So, we move on." You could line up any number of mindfulness teachers, any number of stoic philosophers, and go, "How would you want someone to respond in this situation?" And they'd be like, "Just like Cate did."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: So to me, this is the reaction I strive for, and one should strive for.

Jen: It reminds me of community guidelines and principles that are overtly stated in communities I'm a part of, as an ideal that we are seeking to reach but I don't know that I've seen it in practice in this way, which is, "Assume best intent."

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And I really do feel like she understood and accepted immediately that it was not my intention to do that or to hurt her. And she just took that at face value.

Pete: Yeah. She's smart enough to go, "Well, it's not like Jen thought, 'I'll delete all sixty of her drafts. This is what I'll do.'" She was like, "Actually, she had no idea that's what she was doing. She just deleted the app."

Jen: But how do we activate assume best intent or assume at least good intentions with that quickness? Because I do feel like if it were me, I would not have been that quick. I would have assumed some other things first.

Pete: Yeah, it's definitely quick. I feel like the question that comes to mind for me is, what's the most generous assumption you can make in this situation or the most generous interpretation? If you can start yourself there or try and get there quickly, you can probably get to a place where you are able to be more calm. Because you might think, "The most generous assumption here is she had no idea she made a mistake. Okay, I get that. I make mistakes too." But the most generous assumption being, in your situation, "She had no idea," which is also true. And so, that enables me to then almost relate to that more. I feel like I can relate more to, "Oh. I didn't realize, and I just made an absolutely stupid mistake," than I can to, "She vindictively locked herself in the room and deliberately sought to ruin my musical career," which is not true.

Jen: Oh, god, no. It's so not true. Because I think she's so amazing.

Pete: I know. And that's, I think, the other thing. So, there's other parts of this. I feel like part of what feeds into her getting there quickly is she knows that. It's not just the most generous assumption is, "Mom made a mistake." It's, "Oh. And Mom absolutely loves me and my music. There is no way she would have done this intentionally. So, that is true." I feel like there's a quiet confidence (that you didn't name) that I just, I feel like would be present in your daughter, to go, "It's all good. I got this. I could do that again. I could come up with more. I've got so many songs, so many ideas, so many ways to create more videos. These are not the only sixty ideas I'll ever have." I feel like there's a confidence in her own ability to reproduce what was now gone, that I think adds to that level of calm. If Cate was the kind of person who thought (which she's not), "These are the only ideas I will ever have. And I have to hold onto them, like death grip them because I can't lose them," I imagine the reaction would be slightly different. And that's where I think the living with you and Mark, having you as parents comes into it, of her understanding of creativity and ideation and coming up with things is such that she is able to hold lightly a situation like this where you lose some of those ideas, which I don't think everyone would be able to do.

Jen: Yeah. So, I'm now trying to ping this out beyond my own little circle. I'm thinking about how, it's so funny, any time I'm trying to connect the dots in this podcast, my mind immediately goes to auditions. And maybe it's because they're such high stakes situations and there's such a weird hierarchy in the room and people don't know each other, but like there's something so important happening in such a very short period of time.

Pete: Well, it's like, and there's so many hopes and dreams all colliding in one place. It is a microcosm of a creative life all in one little tiny place.

Jen: Oh my god. Something about how you just said that hadn't really occurred to me before, which is funny because I've been doing this a long time. But like, everybody's dream is at stake in the same moment.

Pete: Right. Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of how Brené Brown and Adam Grant have recently talked about why they love sports metaphors for leadership. Because they're like, you have leadership sort of amplified and compounded to such an observable, viewable, constrained amount of time, where it's like, "We have a vision. We have a goal. We have a team. We have a strategy. We've got to make it happen. We've got to respond to setbacks." Like, all of this happens in such a confined amount of time that would take, you know, I don't know, years in a corporate setting to observe all those things. And I feel like the audition is an even more compounded version of that, like dreams, creativity, hopes, fears, goals, skills, techniques, all of it is like...and you've got what, four minutes? Six minutes? However long it is. Like what?

Jen: It's wild. It reminds me of one of the Four Agreements. Which, I'd point listeners to that episode, except I'll also warn you there's a honking car horn in it. So, don't be surprised. That was a very controversial episode. But the idea of, "Never take things personally." I feel like this is a good example of not taking things personally. And going back to connecting the dots to the audition room, when so much is at stake. Sometimes, I'll have clients come to me after an audition and report like, "They really didn't like me. They were so rude. Like, they never looked up. The reader was out to lunch. I think every accompanist in the city hates me." You know, things like that. Where, if you are able to go like, "Wait a minute, assume best intentions here. Release the need to take this personally." What might actually have been happening in the room where the person couldn't look up from their notes while you were doing the scene? Maybe it's because they liked you enough that they wanted to have good notes on you, so that at the end of the day, they could be your advocate. Like, it doesn't mean that the accompanist hates you if they made a mistake. Maybe they got a cramp in their hand. I don't know. There's just something about this that feels like a reminder that it isn't always about you, even when you are at the center of the moment.

Pete: Oh. I mean, "It's not about you," is like a phrase I think about all the time. If I'm onstage giving a keynote, one of the things going through my head is, "This is not about me at all."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Which sounds counterintuitive, because you're like, "But you're the person on the stage. And there's an audience, and they're there to hear what you have to say." I'm like, "No, it's not about me. It's about the people in the room connecting with an idea. And maybe that idea comes from me. Maybe it comes from one of the Q&As. Maybe it comes from a breakout. It doesn't matter. It's not about me. It's about serving the people in the room."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: I just feel like Cate demonstrated this idea that's talked about a lot in some of the meditation apps I've used over the years, Waking Up being one, Headspace being another, The Way is another one. I use a bunch of them interchangeably. And it's often talked about this idea of labeling, where if you observe your thoughts, you can label things as thinking, you can label things as feeling. And in naming them, in labeling, it actually brings you back to the present moment. And one of the ways I talk about this is the labels we apply change the way we interact with things. So we often label things good, or we label things bad, or we label things different, or whatever. And actually, the truth is things just are.

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: It's our labels that create the reaction and the emotion that we associate with them. So I just feel like, for what it's worth, Cate just is such a beautiful example of this just was.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And how she responded to it was her choice. And Viktor Frankl, in his famous book, A Man's Search for Meaning, talked about between stimulus and response, there is a choice.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: So I mean, it's hard to put into action all the time. Because, you know, we're humans with a lot of emotions, and a lot of fears, and a lot of hopes and dreams. But if we can, remind ourselves: Between the stimulus and response, between the thing happening and how we choose to react to it, there's a choice.

Jen: Okay. So I'm going to give you the second act of this oopsie.

Pete: Oh my god, after all this time? Come on.

Jen: So, she tells me that it is what it is and let's move forward. She goes into her room. I go to my computer and start frantically googling, "How do I get back drafts?" And I'm watching videos. And I'm reading things. And I'm asking Claude. And I'm like, I'm really manically trying to find a solution.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And I find several sources that say that I can take her phone, and I can wipe out the whole phone. And then, I can find a backup from two days ago on her iCloud and restore the phone to that. And then, since everything's stored locally, it'll be on that. And I'm like, "Okay." And I go into her room. And I go, "Cate, I think I found a solution. I can get these drafts back. I just need you to give me your phone. I'm going to like, I'm going to fix this. I'm going to fix it." And she was like, "Mom, I've already let it go. Like, you're causing yourself all of this upset. But I'm not in this state with you. Like, this is 100% you freaking out. So I'm telling you, you don't need to keep googling this. You don't need to wipe my phone. We're just moving on." I was like, "Wow." Twice. I even thought like, I was going to come in now a hero. I started as the villain and now I'm the hero. And she was basically like, "Will you stop putting me in this victim place?"

Pete: It's so funny. This is like, I just, I can't help but feel like there's a whole lot of parents listening to this story, relating. Where, you know, the kid is the one that started in the wrong, hence the grounding. And then, all of a sudden, it's like, "Wait, you've now got the leverage because you've taken the higher ground. And now, I the parent, am the one in the wrong, and I'm frantically trying to fix everything. How the hell did this happen?"

Jen: Yes. I mean, two separate issues. But yes, they are connected to each other. And sometimes, as a parent...and I've learned this time and time and time again over the sixteen and a half years that I've been a parent, and I can only imagine that my parents, being parents for fifty years, keep learning this too. Sometimes, your kids are the greatest teachers you'll ever have. And because they are reflections of you, you learn so much about yourself, if you're willing to open up to the fact that they actually are very wise, even if they're young.

Pete: Yeah, confrontingly so. I feel like they reflect back to you all of your quirks and insecurities and worries and fears and hopes and dreams. The pediatrician we had when Ollie was born, I'll never forget this, came into the hospital to check in on Tracey and I and Ollie. You know? And Ollie's like a day old. And he says, "Yeah, how's everything going?" And we're like, "Well, you know, he vomited in his sleep. And like, oh my god, like we had to clean it up. And he might've choked." And the pediatrician was so calm. He was so Cate, in this moment. And he was like, "Did it bother you or did it bother Ollie?" And I was like, "I mean, Ollie was fine. He just kept sleeping. He literally just kept sleeping. But like, we were so worked up and wound up about it." And he was like, "Yeah, he won't choke in his sleep. It's okay." And then, he walked off. And like, that question, "Is it bothering you or is it bothering Ollie," I think about all the time.

Jen: That is so genius. Oh my god. I haven't thought about that story in a long time. But when I hear you tell it, I'm like, "God, that is such an incredible reframe. Such an incredible reframe." Okay. Before we go, Pete, I just realized that I had set this up as a big oopsie. And one of my favorite books that I gave to Cate when she was a little baby (so maybe you're right about this) is called Beautiful Oops.

Pete: Nice.

Jen: And it's about turning mistakes into things of value. And I feel like that is what Cate did for me in this situation. She took my big oopsie and she turned it into a beautiful oops.

Pete: That is so good. Next time I have an oops, next time Ollie has an oops, next time I observe someone having an oops, I'm going to think, "How could this be beautiful?"

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.