ADHD: Always Criticize Yourself Before Others

"While I used to lose friends all the time because of my big mouth, now I seem to both attract and keep them."

Image by Azmi Talib from Pixabay

Sometimes, good advice for people with ADHD is just generally good advice. Dale tells a story similar to one I learned when taking the Dale Carnegie course 50 years ago. It’s still timeless.

Dale in San Francisco learned how to give criticism without giving offense:

Being the ADHD person I am, I tend to blurt things out. I’m smart, and often know the solutions to other people’s problems, even before they do. I figure things out quickly. And often what I’m figuring out is how somebody else screwed something up.

Used to be that I’d always just tell people what I was thinking, particularly when I saw how they were doing something wrong After all, that’s how I talk to myself about myself. But people would take offense, get upset, and for years I couldn’t figure out why other people were so sensitive, and so stupid for not wanting to know how to change and fix whatever it was they were doing wrong

Then I went to work for Billy. I work as a waiter in a nice restaurant here in San Francisco, and it’s always easy to make mistakes. You drop glasses and they break, you mess up orders (we take them from memory here, but that’s another story), sometimes you say the wrong thing to people, and so on. Being a waiter pays well, but it can be a very difficult job. I don’t think most people realize how hard it is.

Billy owns the restaurant, and he’s my boss. And when I first started working here, I noticed that there was something different about the way he criticized me and the other waiters and the cooks and the busboys and everybody. He’d never say, “You made so-and-so mistake.”

Instead, he always would preface his criticism with a very short story about how he’d once made the same mistake himself. Then, after this moment of self-revelation, he’d go on to tell us that we’d done the same thing and he didn’t want us to do it again.

When he was offering opinions about things, instead of just a straight correction or order, he’d often preface his comments by saying, “I may be wrong—I often am, you know—but I think that...”

By criticizing or correcting us this way, he totally took the sting out of it. I was amazed by how some of the most prickly and sensitive guys who work here as waiters would take criticism from Billy that would have infuriated them from somebody else.

And it wasn’t because Billy was the boss: these are guys who’ve told dozens of former employers where they could shove their job. It was because the way Billy corrected you always made you feel he understood the problem, that he wasn’t judging you, and that he wasn’t putting himself above you.

After a few weeks of working for him and seeing how consistently he used these techniques, I asked a couple of the other guys how they felt about it.

“Isn’t he just trying to manipulate us?” I said. “Isn’t he just trying to butter us up so we’ll take his orders without a fight?”

Several agreed that that might be the case, but so what, they said. When he’s right, it’s stuff that needs to be said, and at least he’s saying it in a way that doesn’t hurt.

I was amazed. I expected that people would think that he was being a manipulator, that his prefatory comments were gratuitous and maybe even demeaning But instead people took them just the other way.

So I started doing that myself. When I’d correct other people, I’d preface my corrections with a self-confession, or a comment about how often I’m wrong, although I think that I’m right this time.

Now, it’s almost like people are lining up to be my friends. While I used to lose friends all the time because of my big mouth, now I seem to both attract and keep them. I’ve never had more friends in my life. And Billy has promoted me to head waiter, so I’m the boss of the other waiters, and I use his technique with them, too, and it’s amazing how rarely I get in fights with people now.

It’s so simple, but it is such a powerful technique. I wish I’d known about this in high school!