The things I have learnt so far…
I hate this playing it by ear business. I have seen it used more out here in the past few weeks than ever in my life. I translate that as “You are not really that important and if something better comes up, I will definitely be doing that. But I dont really want to tell you that and so I am going to play it by ear instead.”
So what does one do when someone says “Lets play it by ear.” Just assume thats its not going to happen and find a different person. Last night I went through a mental list of all my friends and how they interact with me. Noone plays it by ear. They just tell me they dont want to do it. And they call when they say they will. And they never ever blow me off unless its a major emergency. Jesse actually called me to let me know that he started working on a major project and wouldnt be available to hang out with me for 2 weeks. Talk about honesty. I think I am spoilt now with such honest communication.
I think unless you know someone really well, playing it by ear is a nice way of saying goodbye.
I did an interesting exercise once with my team where all of us wrote down the percentage chance that they’d attend an event based on the following responses:
- I’ll be there
- Maybe
- I should be able to make it
- Probably not
- I’ve got another event that night so we’ll see
- I’ll be playing it by ear
- etc. (just think of common phrases)
Not surprisingly, we learned that the percentages really varied across the board. Moreso, it was interesting to see how different the %’s were compared to mine. Fun exercise!
Comment by audrey — October 11, 2008 @ 3:06 pm