Don't be like the boiler man.....

Acknowledgement - it’s a superpower within us all, and it’s got me all excited! 

I’m sure you get the concept of acknowledgment already. But - sorry to break it to you - it's likely you’re not doing it enough. We need to acknowledge others as much as we can. Especially if we want to build trust, rapport and intimacy.  

I shared this with my husband Hamish – and as I birthed my eager thoughts on the topic, the penny dropped. Like – CLANG!  

“OMG!”, I said, “THIS is the thing – the thing that I’m always going on about to you!” He looked confused, as was reasonable: there’s a million things I could be going on about at any one time.   

What I meant was ‘The Thing’ where I relate something (admittedly, probably at length) and he says nothing when I finish, then I say – you're not listening to me! And he goes: I AM listening to you - and proceeds to relate back to me the last points I made.   

And then I wail – that's not what I mean!!  

I suddenly understood why we get nowhere with this occasional stuck-record conversation. It's not that he’s not listening. He IS listening, but he isn’t then acknowledging what I said at the end!  

And this makes me feel like I've just done an audition for BGT, and Simon and the team have all quietly left the stage without a word of feedback (a Cowell death-stare would be preferable, right?).   

Acknowledgement is having someone bat the ball back over the net, so you see that you do exist and that what you said did land. And unlike a Cowell death-stare, acknowledgement should make you feel better. More grounded, perhaps even a little spent – but in a good way.   

We all need acknowledgement - but if you didn’t get the attention you craved as a kid you might need it more. It’s an energy thing as much as an ego thing: a beautifully simple way to resolve what someone's said or done into something tangible and, hopefully, meaningful.  

Especially if they’ve shared something they’re hoping will resonate. It’s about them and for them, and it happens when you see – or hear - them.  

Basically, just because we don’t require a full answer, doesn’t mean we don't need to be acknowledged.  

And - as I was to discover a few days later with our boilerman – acknowledgement is also an important and easy way to say sorry - without even having to say sorry - result!   

Long story short: after much time wasted trying to work out how to turn on the pre-heat function on our new boiler (yawn!), I made a chirpy video of the confusing display, and sent it to the engineer who installed it.   

But when he showed up, instead of having a little tinker with the buttons, he starts dismantling the thing!? I’m hovering - trying to fathom his lack of interest in the display. I’m like: ooh, is it something to do with an internal timer? No, he says. And I’m bemused as to why this previously friendly chap is all a fluster....  

He finally blurts out that he hasn’t had anyone want their boiler set with a pre-heat function in years. YEARS!  

And another penny drops. Ah I see - I say politely - so you didn’t set it up for us to be able to use the pre-heat function? This he reluctantly confirms.  

He’d basically not bothered to ask me on installation about our preferences, made an assumption, and left us with a boiler that didn’t have all its features working. One might even say not fit for purpose.  

Which is a bit of a cheek – but actually I wouldn’t have minded: he'd explained why he’d done it - so it wasn’t careless and anything to make me fear the thing was going to blow up.  I didn’t need or want an apology per se.   

But what I did need was acknowledgement. Acknowledgement that he’d not fully set up the boiler, and that my time had been wasted trying to solve a problem which, it turned out, I could not.  

Acknowledgement here would have served as an apology. And this makes it a super-duper beginners' way into the art of apologising. Because let’s face it, many people feel that saying sorry will literally kill them. I know I used to. And maybe boilerman figured that if he didn’t apologise - then he simply hadn’t inconvenienced me one jot.    

But I’m sure he’d have felt far less flustered if he’d just acknowledged what happened! And it would have cleansed the air in the kitchen of uncomfortable tension – a roiling mix of my confusion and his bluster.  I would have liked him more not less if he’d acknowledged his quirky-settings-mini-fiasco and its impact!  

Anyway, the upshot is that my acknowledgement radar is now on high alert. Not in a paranoid stressy way. In fact the opposite. I’m loving acknowledging those I encounter whenever I can. And it’s a beautiful thing to see how we all soften when we’re on the receiving end. Told you it’s a super power! 

And it doesn’t have to be anything big – though that can be great, especially for people less willing to celebrate their gifts and achievements. Just make it authentic and kind. Because that works for the bigging-up-each-other-acknowledgement, and the acknowledgement-as-proxy-apology.   

Just imagine what a lovely world we’d live in if we all acknowledged each other on a regular basis!  

So this Pollyanna invites you to consciously acknowledge those around you whenever you can – to feel wonder at your power to soften people’s hearts and flush away hard feelings.   

So much better than silence, or - heaven forbid - a death-stare.  

Let me know how you get on!  

Until next time