You're My Third Best Friend
How this sentence crushed a 3rd grader's spirit, and how EAs can learn from this
My 3rd grade daughter texted me from her Gizmo watch and said “we need to move”.
When I picked her up from school, she was angry and annoyed. Turns out, her best friend, whom we just had over for a sleepover a couple weekends ago, had told her that day that my daughter was her THIRD best friend.
The audacity!! Cue *gasp*.
In comes overprotective, and now equally annoyed, mom. So naturally, I told her “well, you don’t need to be friends with her anyway, she doesn’t deserve your friendship!”
HA omg just kidding, I would never. LOLOL. Deep down inside in a corner somewhere, did a part of me want to say that? May…be. But she’s 8, she can now go repeat things I say at home, so I know better (ugh it’s so hard being a parent).
Over the next several days, we had talks about friendships, and she seemed to understand and feel better.
Fast forward to this past weekend, and that best friend came over for a playdate. I took the two girls out to dinner, and we were chatting about friends at school. My daughter brings up the best friend thing and asks “who’s your first best friend?”. And she answers “Joe, because I knew him since I was a baby”.
Then my daughter asks “what about Emily?” and the friend says “oh I don’t know, I met her in 2nd grade, so maybe like my 16th best friend or something like that”.
And then it occurred to me. The numbers that this friend is attributing to her best friends has nothing to do with how much she likes that person or enjoys hanging out with them like I and my daughter thought. It literally is the order in which she met them in her life!!
I asked her, just to make sure I was understanding it correctly, and she confirmed, and then looked at me like “duh obviously, why else would you number your best friends”.
This whole time, my daughter was upset because she thought that by being a third best friend, she was liked less than her friend’s first and second best friend. But it really meant that my daughter was the third friend she met in her life that is still her friend (they met before kindergarten).
This made me realize how common misinterpretations and misunderstandings happen even in our lives. And now that we have texts and emails, tone of voice or assumed tone of voice adds to those misunderstandings.
As an Executive Assistant, how many times have you run into situations where what you said to someone got twisted, what you typed in Slack as sarcasm got taken seriously, what you sent in an email got forwarded and the tone was misunderstood because the person it was forwarded to didn’t have context?
Or how many times has your executive asked if you have a second to chat, and you thought you were getting fired? It’s not just me, right?
In order to keep our cool, remain calm through chaos, represent our executives well, do our job well, and be a good leader, I really believe we need to be mindful of these things:
Don’t let misunderstandings linger - go straight to the source and figure it out
If you don’t understand, ask and clarify
Don’t get sucked into the drama - stay out of it or put a stop to it
Don’t assume the one side of the story you heard is all truth, no matter how believable - there are two sides to every story
Don’t jump to conclusions
Don’t assume you know someone’s intentions
Don’t waste emotional and mental energy on something that might be nothing
The reason I can say all this now is because I’ve been through so many situations where I did the opposite of the above. And guess what? It backfired every time, just like how my daughter came home angry and upset that day because of how she misinterpreted what her friend said, when the reality of the situation was so innocent.
Learn from my mistakes. Change your mindset. Change how you interpret the things people say and write and do. Control how you react to situations. Have empathy and assume best intent from others. Don’t get in your own head. Don’t get in your own way. Drown out the noise.
Become a better, stronger you :)