A writer friend and I were discussing books recently and I made a comment that surprised her. “If I don’t like a character, I can’t read the book.”
She shook her head. “I don’t need to like characters to enjoy books.”
I was pretty flabbergasted. Knowing that we’d liked some of the same books in the past, I started asking questions about what she meant by “don’t need to like.”
In my golden retriever brain, you see, everyone starts at positive. I like you until you make me not like you. So me not liking a character means they’ve done something to really offend me. Otherwise, it’s pretty easy for me to like people right away.
For her, as she described it, everyone starts in neutral. Neither like nor dislike. And some people stay in neutral forever because they never do anything to make her like them, but they also never make her actively dislike them. Characters are the same. They fascinate her, whether she likes them or not (if they are well-written), and the story can interest her, from a neutral position.
My brain definitely did not compute that. There’s almost no one I feel “neutral” about (characters, shows, books, people, organizations). I am either for you or against you. (And the things I am against are very few and far between.)
So the two of us (my friend and I) started asking people, “where do you start?” in an effort to understand how to contextualize how they felt about certain things. And of course, we also started taking guesses about people in our immediate circles, significant others, family members. If someone was raving about a restaurant, I’d want to know, “but do all restaurants start off positive? Or do they start off neutral?”
I asked a family member who is very high in Restorative the “where do you start” question and he said, “everything starts in the ‘no’ column” and then they have to prove themselves as a ‘yes’ before he’ll say he likes the person, or the show or the restaurant or the book. Otherwise, he uses the famously Restorative label of “adequate” if they manage to move up to neutral.
When he gives me a restaurant recommendation, I know it will be good. When he likes a person, I automatically like them. (I mean, who are we kidding, I automatically like everyone, but more so when he likes them.)
But also, when he doesn’t like something, I know he starts out with ‘no’ the way I start with ‘yes,’ so I often still try the things he doesn’t like, just because I can’t always be sure if I’ll like them or not.
But this “positive – neutral – negative” conversation has been coming up for me a lot lately in coaching, as well. It isn’t just a friendship conversation or a recommendation question. It’s a work question. A personal question. A success question.
Where you start matters.
And I’m not a person who believes we all need to start from the same place. I know there are some Positivity/Developer/Futuristic/Includer people who will be frustrated that I’m not trying to encourage everyone to start from ‘yes’ because they believe it will make things easier or better. I don’t believe that’s true. There’s nothing “everyone” needs to do.
I do think it’s important to think about where you start, though. What’s your default? And as I’ve found with my friends and family, it might be different for different things. (I start from neutral on coffee and food, for instance, because my standards of what I want to spend my time consuming are so high. I don’t want to spend my time consuming crap when we have so few meals on this planet. And to be honest, after being in Australia where the coffee was so amazing, I might actually start from negative on coffee now… I assume it will be bad. And then I’m never disappointed.)
But this can explain things like how I feel about my sales or my engagement or my releases or my speed. What are my expectations? Do I start from a place of expecting that things will be good, or that they will be bad? Or that we have to wait and see? Do I feel neutral about things? Does that positive – neutral – negative starting point impact how I feel about the results?
Where you start may matter more than almost anything else.
What about you? Do you have a sense for where you start? (Knowing there’s no wrong answer, and also knowing that you won’t be alone, no matter what you say.)
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