To speak without labels

When I’m patient with other people, I’m more patient with myself too. Patience can mean willingness to wait, which is a virtue, and patience can also mean willingness to expend effort to put oneself into others’ shoes, also a virtue. How about expending effort to look at what’s really going on, in order to decide how to respond? To me, that’s also patience.

If I scatter my speech with labels and exaggerations, I’m displaying my (impatient) frame of mind, not portraying what I want to describe. 

I hope I’ve never said anything like this, but as an example: “This old lady in the supermarket was so spaced out – she was camped out in front of the frozen vegetables for like ten minutes.” This pretends to report facts, but that’s not what’s happening. The speaker is showing their own mental state: their lack of patience and their sense that they should not have to be patient. “Old lady,” “spaced out,” and “camped out” are judgmental labels. “Ten minutes” is an exaggeration.

When I back up and re-describe frustrating situations using neutral language (rather than judgmental language), I can feel my mind calming down. If I said, “This woman in the supermarket stood looking at one thing for quite a while. It was frustrating because I had to decide whether to wait or come back,” then maybe next time I’m impatient in the grocery store I’ll be able to calm down in the moment, and go straight to deciding — wait or come back later — without angrily judging the person in front of me. 

It feels better to be calm. Besides that, I’ve undoubtedly hesitated in front of someone at the store without knowing it. We all have.

Another example: “The teacher was a complete nutjob and didn’t know what he was talking about.” It doesn’t describe the teacher. It says the speaker was overwhelmed and is defensive. Without labels: “The teacher seemed so disorganized that I couldn’t even follow his thread, and I think he was even wrong about a couple of things.”

A more neutral, closer-to-accurate look at an unpleasant situation helps me to respond well instead of reacting out of either defensive or aggressive reflexes. It is compassionate language, but I call it patience because it gives me an opening in which to think clearly.

The higher the stakes, the more important it is to describe the situation neutrally. With a problem in a relationship, if I can describe only what was said and done, without putting an interpretation on it, I might then have the presence of mind to ask questions of myself or the other person, and to de-escalate, and come to an understanding. 

What if it’s yourself you’re talking about with labels? “I was so screwed up when I was in college, I did some really stupid things. My parents thought I was crazy.” 

I’ve said things like this (not these things) about myself, and I’ve been coached to use compassionate language. Instead, “When I was in college, I was affected by things that had happened earlier and I had no practice at making adult decisions. I made some mistakes that I regret. My parents must have wished they could help me.” 

Stated that way, the language might prompt the speaker to take a more open-minded look at the mistakes or at the parents who had seemed to meddle. He might ask himself, “Do I actually regret my mistakes? Or did some good come out of them?” Or it might spark greater warmth toward the parents, imagining them wishing they could help.

One first step to reframe an anecdote is to tell it without using the word “is” (or form of it). “Is” leads to a label: was spaced out, was camped out, was a nutjob. If you don’t say “is,” or “was,” and don’t use a label, you have to describe the person by their actions. 

I sometimes imagine I’m a news reporter from another country, describing interesting people and interactions, trying not to color the description with my own emotions. To describe myself more compassionately, I try to tell the story in the third person, as if talking to a friend about another friend. If somebody does something that bugs me, I ask myself if I’ve done the same thing to or with someone else — and the answer is usually yes.