Take it from me: Everyone is a basket case. Some can hide it better than others. It’s a deeply freeing concept.
Judging Others by Their Mistakes
I already showed you how to make yourself immune to the criticisms of strangers. Now it’s time to learn how to be less critical of others, for the social benefits, but also to protect your mental health.
When others make mistakes that complicate our lives, our most common reaction is anger at the offender. At the same time, we know everyone makes mistakes for all manner of reasons we don’t understand at the time. If we use that standard to judge others, it will keep us busy hating half the people we meet. Worse, you might automatically apply the same standard to yourself and end up baking a big ol’ self-hatred cake. No one wants a self-hatred cake.
Rather than judge others by their mistakes, I recommend a different standard: Judge people by how they respond to their mistakes. That’s a standard you can hold yourself to with some chance of success.
Usual Frame: Judge people by their mistakes.
Reframe: Judge people by how they respond to their mistakes.
When you observe someone handle their mistakes with confidence and empathy, fully acknowledging any harm done, you’re seeing the best a person can do. We can’t expect people to be error-free. But we can certainly ask them to handle their mistakes with class.
When a person handles their mistakes well, you instinctively trust them. And you probably should. If you want to be trusted in your own life, that’s a great model to follow. Make your mistakes, apologize if needed, and announce your plan for avoiding the same mistake in the future. People will notice.
Lateness
Do you know anyone whose lateness is so epic that it defies all explanation? If you ask why they’re late, they might offer reasonable explanations such as traffic delays or some hold-up at work. But over time, you notice the same people are always late while others are nearly always on time. That’s probably not a coincidence.
What’s up with that?
You probably assume the always-late person in your life is incompetent or uncaring or both. But I’ll bet you can rule out uncaring because the lateness almost certainly applies when no one pays the price but the perpetrator. And you can probably rule out ordinary incompetence because people of all capabilities can be either habitually late or punctual.
I was baffled by the phenomenon of the always-late until I heard an expert explain that people with ADHD are not “distracted” as we commonly believe; they have time blindness. They live in the now, meaning they act on the most interesting or critical thing in their immediate surroundings instead of doing what they need to do to satisfy their future hopes and plans. They are blind to the existence of their future selves whenever they’re in the moment.
For contrast, I’m generally on time for everything. I also have an ability to visualize imaginary futures in such vivid detail that they influence my immediate actions. When I do the right things in the present, I see my imaginary future take shape the way I’d like it. You could say I live in the future. Intentionally. Here’s the reframe.
Usual Frame: People who are always late are either incompetent or uncaring or both.
Reframe: Some people have time blindness.
The value of this reframe is that it changes how you feel about the always-late person. Perhaps it helps them understand themselves, too. The lateness isn’t personal if it happens in every context. My experience with the always-late agrees with the experts. No amount of better planning or incentives helps the always-late because they are not intentionally late; they are oblivious to the future. It isn’t personal. It’s just how they’re wired. You will have to adapt if you want them in your life. They would adapt to you if they could.
That said, people are different, and I suspect a gifted hypnotist could help an always-late person develop a habit that supports punctuality. The trick would be to add some sort of trigger that can happen in the “now” to connect an always-late person to their schedule and timeline.
I have a lifelong habit of never being out of sight of a clock or my phone when I’m getting ready for anything. I check the time reflexively every five minutes or so and micro-adjust my schedule as I go. I doubt the always-late impose clocks on themselves as aggressively as the always-punctual. But it might be a habit that could be developed, perhaps with help.
One of the most useful ways to view human behavior is that we are just as trainable as dogs. No offense intended to dogs. If you get a reward for a thing and repeat that pattern, you build a subconscious habit. This is true for any animal, including you. For example, some dog owners teach their dogs to make eye contact on a regular basis while walking together to “check in.” You do this by giving the dog a treat for randomly looking in your direction until the behavior locks in. Once it locks in, it becomes a habit outside the dog’s conscious control. In effect, you reprogrammed the dog.
Now imagine a human with a smartwatch and an app with an avatar of your choice that does nothing but compliment you and remind you to stay on task whenever you check the time. Everyone likes compliments, even from machines. That’s why video games give you rewards for achievements and slot machines make happy noises for jackpots. Those are forms of compliments, or affirmations, and they’re addicting. If you could create an addiction for checking your smartwatch—to get your reward every five minutes—then it reminded you to get back on task, would that make you less late?
I don’t know. It probably depends on the individual and the quality of the app. If you want to be late less often, or if you want to help someone else in that situation, I recommend experimenting to see if you can form an addiction to some sort of reminder that can become a subconscious habit.
The “poor man’s” version of this would involve complimenting yourself every time you look at a timepiece, as in, “You are so smart,” or whatever doesn’t sound weird to your ear. Start by doing your micro affirmation no matter the reason you notice the time, even if you only saw a clock in your visual field by chance.
Ideally, you want your compliment to yourself to be something you would naturally be reminded of in your daily actions. “Smart” works well because we’re always judging our actions as smart or not. Over time and with repetition, anything that makes you think of your own intelligence or that of anyone else should trigger a reflex to check the time.
I am writing this at Starbucks near my home, and I have reflexively checked their clock a dozen times . . . and they don’t have a clock. But my brain wants the clock to be right above the service bar. So I keep looking for it, by habit, about every five minutes. I don’t have a lateness problem, and you can see why.
I doubt ADHD—or whatever causes future blindness—can be cured by subtraction, as in making it disappear. I think your best bet is to add habits—like software patches—to tame it.
I had one stepdaughter who got ready for school as soon as she awakened and used the extra half-hour before the drive to her campus for personal entertainment. Her sister did the reverse—she sought entertainment when she woke up and got ready for school just before she needed to leave. Guess which kid was on time every day and which was often late.
Having a good system for being on time matters. Perhaps a hypnotist or counselor of some sort could help an always-late patient build such a system.