Growing up, my bedroom tended to be messy. Honouring the long-established tradition of stereotypical exchanges between mother-and-child, Mum regularly asked me to tidy it. Sometimes I did, but it would quickly slide back into a chaotic state.
While attending boarding school (aged 16-18), I would make my bed, but leave everything else all over the place. Teachers sometimes suggested that I tidy my room, but these suggestions were never enforced; I would typically give a “hmmm, yes,” and then do nothing. Considering the comparative value of having a tidy room rather than a messy one, taking the time to maintain tidiness just didn’t seem worth the investment.
At university, there were no reminders. My clothes, books, and musical instruments were typically strewn across my room. Any visitors would be hosted in communal areas, so there was no social pressure to maintain a tidy bedroom.
Indeed, procrastination was perhaps my only consistent room-tidying motivator until one conversation caused me to completely and permanently switch to keeping my room tidy.
I was working in Liberia, visiting a field base, and staying in shared accommodation. I had agreed to vacate my room in order to enable a colleague to stay there, and he arrived a few hours before I had moved my things out.
He asked whether the items in the room were mine, in order to ascertain whether I would need access to the room later in the evening to recover them. I confirmed that they were. He commented “ah, okay. I always think that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they organise their s#!t.”
My items weren’t particularly badly- or particularly well-organised, but his comment resonated with me and caused an immediate turnaround in the way I view tidiness.
For the past five years, I’ve kept my personal items neat and orderly. I’ve come to see it as an external expression of my inner neatness. Internally, my way of thinking relies on clear, oft-binary structure: pros and cons, logical steps, right and wrong, contributors to stress and to peace. Perhaps growing older can accentuate one’s more extreme traits.
Retreating from that tangent, let’s return to my simple central thesis: messenger over message.
How was it that earlier suggestions on tidiness had had next to no impact, only for one comment to cause me to alter my approach completely?
While the indirectness of the comment may have helped, I think it comes down to the fact that the colleague who made the comment is someone I love and deeply admire, to whom I wanted to give the best possible impression about my character and ability. His example of relentless service, humanity, thoughtfulness, and commitment to advancing our work through force of will has left a lasting impression on me. To this day, he is the person who has most significantly influenced how I approach work. Hands down.
I’m convinced that my perception of him is what led to his off-hand comment having such a profound impact.
It’s not that my Mum or my teachers were unvalued messengers. The way they perceive me meant (means) a lot. They just weren’t appropriate messengers for the message about tidiness.
So, where do we do we go from here? Perhaps we can consider a couple of questions together:
- Take a moment to recall conversations that have profoundly impacted your worldview or approach to life. Who was the messenger? Did something about that person (or those people) cause the message to stick?
- Are there any messages that you feel that you’re repeating again and again to the same person, with no perceptible impact? Consider how they may view you, as the messenger. Could you potentially seek out a messenger more appropriate for delivering the message, or even change the way that the recipient views you, so that the message you’re giving resonates more strongly?
The irony of this piece isn’t lost on me. I realise that what I hope to communicate through this blog is deeply impacted by the way that you view me. My credibility as a source is more important than the way in which the messages I convey are structured and presented. Our selection of the messages we choose to consume is arguably based heavily on our perception of their sources, so perhaps that’s in my favour. No hard feelings if I’m not the right messenger at this moment, though.