Coaching assignment II - The ladder of inference

Last year I was doing a six months internship for a financial institution. That internship was taking place in the dealing room of the bank, the place where all the traders, brokers and sales people are located. As you can imagine this was a very stressful environment because people have to take important monetary decisions very quickly. My function was to manage all kind of problems those stressed people could have. My boss, Georges, was a very human person in that world (which I perceive) which doesn’t take into account feelings. Of course, he had to follow the general trend and put his feeling away to be efficient and be integrated.

One day he asked me to do a work for him and I was sure I hadn’t all the information I needed to do it. I was feeling I needed more training from him. I used Field One conversation and said “I’m not sure I can do all of that task by myself, I may need your help”… 30 minutes later I said to him I needed his help for the whole task. He yelled at me saying “You should be able to do that task by now”. Then, I tried to justify myself and he answered “I will do that work, don’t do it anymore”. I stayed calm and said I just needed more information but with an angry voice he said “NO! I will do it because you said you can’t! Final word!”

At that moment the data I selected was “angry voice” “you can’t do it” “don’t do it anymore” “final word”

My interpretation of that situation was very negative. To me, if someone was yelling at me it was because that person wasn’t satisfied and didn’t like me. I thought my boss had a bad opinion of me and thought I wasn’t doing my job well. The fact he avoided the discussion was the worst, to me he didn’t even want to talk about it, I was hopeless so why loosing time trying to fix that? I came to the conclusion that he wouldn’t trust me anymore and would just give me very simple and meaningless work to do until the end of my internship.

Due to that I adopted some beliefs thinking that it is bad to say we can’t do something. I was thinking “next time I will just pretend I can do it, I will do what I can and if I have troubles something I will just be insincere and say I don’t see the problem”. I thought that in that way I wouldn’t get in trouble again not saying I had problems. Or, second option I thought I’ll just say “I can’t do it, I don’t feel comfortable with that” until the end of my internship. Of course I was angry.

I realized that after that event I wasn’t very involved in my internship anymore. Moreover it was harder to communicate with my boss, it was hard for me to go to see him and have a “friendly” conversation about everyday life.

At the end of the internship I had a meeting with Georges in order for him to asses my internship performance. I was surprised to see that he was satisfied with my internship performance. We talked again about that incident and he finally told me he reacted in that way because he was stressed and he wanted to go faster doing the work himself. At that moment his own boss was putting such pressure on him that he didn’t have time to explain me more details about the work. I finally realized how my interpretation of that situation was flawed!!!