ENGINEERS AND SYMPATHISERS

Are you naturally an engineer, or a sympathiser? I'm not saying one is better than the other, or even that they are mutually exclusive things. I'm just interested to know which you tend to be.

You need some context. Here you go: someone comes to you with a problem. You have a choice: be an engineer and start fixing it straight away, or be a sympathiser and provide some comfort first.

Now, I'm being a little simplistic I suspect. It of course depends on a whole bunch of other things. I'm also aware that I'm subtly revealing which of the two approaches I take, although I kind of wish it weren't quite so obvious.

So, let's break it down a bit. Imagine somebody phones you and tells you that they're in a lot of financial trouble and they just don't know what to do. They are crying on the other end of the phone. Sympathy or engineering? Which approach is best?

Here's another one: a good friend is struggling to communicate with their partner. They know the problem and they tell you the symptoms over a tea in town. Do you naturally feel like fixing it for them, or providing a listening ear?

The chances are that if you're an engineer... you actually see both approaches as a slightly different type of fix. The only difference is timing.

Of course (though it's easy to sweep it under the carpet) your first micro-reaction is probably an inner sense of responsibility that's suddenly been heaped upon you by the other person. After all, they trust you! They've come to you! That brings the pressure to be wise, clever, kind, honest, or just the friend they're expecting, and you don't have long to decide how you're going to respond to reciprocate and preserve the trust. Engineers delight in a problem to be solved and you can't hold them back.

If you're a sympathiser of course, you might tend to see much further than fixing the problem. You see a person in a mess. You might say nothing at all, wrap your arms around your friend and let them cry until there are no more tears left.

Sympathisers are good at this. They're brilliant at guiding the conversation so that the other person reaches some positive step of their own without being told what to do.

It's possible that we need both. We need a balance of straight-talking problem-solving honest advisers, and those silent listening ears who let us rant without trying to help and fix everything for us.

Of course, as much as we're engineers and sympathisers, we're also (more likely) in a mess ourselves from time-to-time. I wonder, do engineers need sympathisers? Do sympathisers need engineers? Who needs whom?

It might be a little simplistic to imagine that our subconsciouses already know how we would solve a problem and so always need the other type of friend in that situation. What certainly is true is that big situations always seem much bigger from the inside, and emotion will always affect our judgement. There is nothing like a cool head, outside the bubble to view the whole thing from a different angle. That's why, "Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed."*

So, which are you? What are your thought processes in the middle of someone else's mess? How about your own? Would you like to be more of an engineer? Would you like to be better at sympathising? Have you ever expected one of these responses from someone, and been given the other? Or is this just all over-simplified and undefinable?

Probably. But I'm definitely going to think very carefully the next time it happens to me.



*Proverbs 15:22