#369 – What do you hope your "excellent" unsolicited feedback will do?

Moral superiority is an Ego-driven disease. Once in your system, it turns you into a judging machine––System 1 in full throttle. Symptoms include eye-rolling, scoffing, tsk-tsking, and, among its worst manifestations, doling out unsolicited feedback.

I have that disease too. It's a feature of the human mind––of that part of the mind where your Ego and the Ghosts live.

Your Ego makes you believe that the tribe will shun you if you're not useful. And your Ghost of Need to Prove (GoNtP) makes it its job to show everyone you're indispensable.

What they don't tell you is how your "genuine desire to help" will land when your help wasn't asked for.

Years ago, during a singing workshop in Madrid, a fellow student sang an MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) song. Since she didn't speak Portuguese. Since she didn't speak Portuguese, some words tripped her up, throwing off the bossa nova rhythm.

She was standing in the middle of the chair circle, the pianist waiting as she tried to pronounce the offending verse, the teacher next to her, helping her.

Only I spoke Portuguese, and, in my mind, "I owned bossa nova" because it played at home since before I was born.

My GoNtP triggered, I stood up and went to her, bypassing the teacher––after all, I was a vocal-technique teacher, a trained phonetician, an MPB connoisseur, and a fluent speaker of Portuguese.

I told the student what she was pronouncing wrong, which was the reason she couldn't get the words into the rhythm. I was so right.

Ha!

Needless to say, my "helpful feedback" cost me my relationship with the student and the teacher.

But I was just trying to help!––my Ego and GoNtP argued, as I sat back down on my chair in the circle.

Was I? Or was I trying to show that I, too, was a teacher of singers? That I, and not them, mastered Portuguese phonetics? That I granted permission for who could sing bossa nova and who couldn't?

"Moral superiority" in its purest form. Destructive, useless, and embarrassing.

What unsolicited feedback will you stop doling out to shut down your Ego?

Love,

Carolina