I’m not 100% sure I grokked this post, but a thing that it makes me think of, which may or may not be relevant:
One thing that’s particularly hard (in my experience) is to maintain positive vibes while giving critical feedback. It’s not just that you need to couch the feedback in a way that doesn’t sting. Even if it doesn’t sting, it can shift someone out of a satisfying and/or useful flow state.
This is particularly important in domains where being in a state of playfulness or flow is important to whatever your task is. The most salient domain to me is music.
I have observed people who can totally give feedback to a group of musicians that feels like it takes the energy of the room, transforms it somewhat, and returns it to the musicians with words like “yeah man! groovy. Let’s try it again and try out [x quality].”
Whereas when I’m music-directing and hear something that sounds off, the default thing that happens is that I stop, think for a minute (and I think have a somewhat angry looking expression on my face because that’s what my resting-thinking-face looks like), and then figure out what to say and then say it, and then by that point it doesn’t matter how I word it or what expression I have, I’ve already harmed the energy in the room.
The solution as I understand it tends to involve two things:
cultivating “resting good vibes” as an overall stance, which is somewhat complicated (and maybe is what the OP is describing, not sure if we’re talking about the same thing), so that even if you’re sitting and thinking for a minute it communicates something more like tranquility than “I’m thinking about how to politely criticize you.”
gaining domain expertise in the subject matter you’re critiquing, so that you don’t have to pause as much, since part of what kills the energy is the pause itself. If it takes me a minute to figure out what as wrong with a thing, then at best I can transmute the energy from “high excitement” to “tranquil reflection”, and sometimes I really needed the high excitement. Whereas nowadays, I’m slightly better than I was 5 years ago at quickly noticing what was off about a thing and having a cached way of talking about it.
Yes, this is very related to the benefits of what vibing is. I think that “communication with emotional flow” is as close to a succinct description of vibing as I’ve gotten to. By respecting the emotional energy in the room you can be honest without breaking the vibe of flow.
On a more meta note, I really appreciate that all of your comments on my posts seem to make an effort to model the norms I put in my commenting guidelines. I don’t know if it’s intentional or not but it is appreciated.
I’m not 100% sure I grokked this post, but a thing that it makes me think of, which may or may not be relevant:
One thing that’s particularly hard (in my experience) is to maintain positive vibes while giving critical feedback. It’s not just that you need to couch the feedback in a way that doesn’t sting. Even if it doesn’t sting, it can shift someone out of a satisfying and/or useful flow state.
This is particularly important in domains where being in a state of playfulness or flow is important to whatever your task is. The most salient domain to me is music.
I have observed people who can totally give feedback to a group of musicians that feels like it takes the energy of the room, transforms it somewhat, and returns it to the musicians with words like “yeah man! groovy. Let’s try it again and try out [x quality].”
Whereas when I’m music-directing and hear something that sounds off, the default thing that happens is that I stop, think for a minute (and I think have a somewhat angry looking expression on my face because that’s what my resting-thinking-face looks like), and then figure out what to say and then say it, and then by that point it doesn’t matter how I word it or what expression I have, I’ve already harmed the energy in the room.
The solution as I understand it tends to involve two things:
cultivating “resting good vibes” as an overall stance, which is somewhat complicated (and maybe is what the OP is describing, not sure if we’re talking about the same thing), so that even if you’re sitting and thinking for a minute it communicates something more like tranquility than “I’m thinking about how to politely criticize you.”
gaining domain expertise in the subject matter you’re critiquing, so that you don’t have to pause as much, since part of what kills the energy is the pause itself. If it takes me a minute to figure out what as wrong with a thing, then at best I can transmute the energy from “high excitement” to “tranquil reflection”, and sometimes I really needed the high excitement. Whereas nowadays, I’m slightly better than I was 5 years ago at quickly noticing what was off about a thing and having a cached way of talking about it.
Yes, this is very related to the benefits of what vibing is. I think that “communication with emotional flow” is as close to a succinct description of vibing as I’ve gotten to. By respecting the emotional energy in the room you can be honest without breaking the vibe of flow.
On a more meta note, I really appreciate that all of your comments on my posts seem to make an effort to model the norms I put in my commenting guidelines. I don’t know if it’s intentional or not but it is appreciated.