Give Someone a Chance

Published April 3, 2013 | By admin

Failure (Photo credit: awsandlight)

If a person tries to do something differently, make sure you don’t turn their attempt into a failure because you don’t want to be disappointed again and find it easier to expect and accept failure again. Is it easier to expect failure and have it happen than it is to expect success and have a failure instead? People can develop a negative attitude about other people and can make it difficult to impossible for that person to change. Failures are easy to see while successes can be easy to miss if you have a prejudicial attitude. Often initial attempts at changing behavior are hard to see and it can be seen as accepting too little to reward small, seemingly inept changes in a person’s behavior. Initially it may be harder to be “good” than bad and the person’s knowledge of what constitutes acceptable behavior is limited and may not meet many of the other person’s criteria. In fact, it may even initially look more like unacceptable behavior than acceptable behavior. For example, a husband’s idea of dressing appropriately to go out might consist of putting on clean clothes, i.e. khaki pants and a new tee shirt while the wife expects a dress shirt or a polo shirt and a sports jacket or sweater. The poor husband might get bawled out instead of praised for this attempt to dress appropriately.