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I so do not think of myself as a disrespectful person. I don’t intend to be disrespectful. I never wanted to harm people. And yet, like all of us, I’ve been biased, I have prejudices, and I have bullied others. So what can you do when you get feedback that you’ve been disrespectful? I will tell you what not to do. I’ll tell you what I’m tempted to do in that situation.
There was one time when I was giving a presentation, and I was making kind of an offhanded joke about myself as short, blonde, and southern and how other people responded to that. And I didn’t understand the other side of those stereotypes. And a woman in the audience stood up, and she said, “You have no idea how offensive what you just said was,” and she left the room in tears. And I didn’t know what I had done wrong. And instead of doing what I should have done, I just sort of raced to an apology, to move on and finished the presentation. And that made a bad situation worse because it looked like I didn’t care what I had done wrong.
So what did I learn from that situation? I learned to say when I get this kind of very painful feedback, and I say this inside my head, not out loud, I say, “AAAAAC.” And “AAAAAC” has a very specific meaning for me. There’s five As and a C. First of all, I realized that it’s my job to be aware of what I did wrong. It is not someone else’s job to educate me, and it’s certainly not the job of the person that I was just disrespectful to educate me. The second thing that I need to do is to acknowledge what I did wrong and to acknowledge as publicly as possible what I did wrong so that other people don’t make that same mistake.
The third thing I need to do is accept the consequences. Sometimes I have been in situations where I failed to acknowledge what I did wrong because I didn’t want to get into trouble. I just have to accept the consequences. And not only do I need to accept the consequences, the fourth A is to make amends. I need to go beyond what is required of me by the letter of the law or the letter of company policy. And only after I’d done those four things does my apology have any meaning. So do those four things before you apologize. And then the C in AAAAAC stands for change. I think we all have people in our lives who keep making the same mistake over and over and over, and then they keep apologizing for it. And pretty long, that apology becomes an irritant, not a balm.
So that’s the way I should have responded when I was in that situation of being the person who caused harm. And I tell a lot of stories in the book about different times when I bullied people, different prejudices that I’ve had, that I became aware of, different biases that I’ve had. Really hard to become aware of these things. But as my son’s baseball coach said, “You can’t do right if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.”
So if you’re the person who got the feedback that you said or did something disrespectful, AAAAAC. Don’t do what Jennifer Freyd calls DARVO. DARVO stands for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. It’s very tempting to do that. Someone tells you that you were disrespectful and you say, “That that was not disrespectful. I can’t believe you’re doing that to me.” So you deny, you attack, and then you’re like, “Poor old me. Why are people always picking on me?” Don’t do that. AAAAAC. Don’t DARVO.