How Much Fairy Dust Is Too Much Fairy Dust?

With a lovely story about "fairy dust" I discovered that just because I am trying to make things "better", doesn't make them so!

By Natalie Ashdown.

I had a lovely coaching session recently where I had the opportunity to reflect on a situation that I rather regretted.  A team member gave me a copy of an article that they had written for a blog and asked for some feedback.

I was in a bit of  a hurry and didn’t fully digest the article and wanted to be able to read it quickly and then post the blog. I was having an extremely busy day.

Anyway, as I was reading it I could quickly see how improvements could be made, so I asked if I could quickly type my thoughts in as I went.  She agreed.

What happened however, was that I was quickly re-writing the whole article – cutting and pasting and chopping and changing.  I rewrote the heading, explaining as I was going along what I thought it needed to be and say. 

I wasn’t doing any coaching and didn’t ask her anything about what she was actually trying to achieve.  I just got it to the point where I thought it was better and I felt that I was being really encouraging. Her work was a really great effort, really good thoughts, but I wanted to make it better!

Then I couldn’t do anymore, so I turned to her and said “by the way I’d cut that paragraph out too!”

The look of horror on her face.

“That’s the paragraph I liked the best”, she said.

“I’ve killed it, haven’t I,” I said and then tried to explain what I thought it should look like by showing her one of my blogs.

It was her first ever article.  First attempt at really writing and documenting something that was important, from the heart.

I had done more than killed it.  I had stomped, squashed, splattered and destroyed it.  So I quickly saved it and emailed back to her (in front of her) with a sort of line like “So anyway, you get what I mean!”

When I debriefed it with my coach, he asked “what role or character was I trying to be in this story?”  I said that I wanted to be a fairy - sprinkling fairy-dust over things to make things better.  But that I had totally destroyed the story and I was more like the King ordering “off with her head!”

How much fairy dust is too much fairy dust?  What was driving me to sprinkle fairy dust anyway?  Was I a good fairy or a wicked fairy?  All good questions!

Then I had this image.  I had sprinkled a little fairy dust, sure. But then I up-ended a whole bucket of fairy dust on the team member and her article. I had this vision of a little person smothered in fairy dust and trying to dig her way out saying “Ah, hello, anybody? Kind of suffocating here! Dig me out…anybody?”

Poor little person!   Too much fairy dust can smother a person!

So it was a good reminder about how important coaching is! Fancy the coach forgetting to do coaching!  Shame on me really.  And also a good reminder that you can have all the best intentions in the world and they can back fire if you go in too hard, too strong, or even inappropriately.  I was fixated on fixing the article, rather than thinking about the person who wrote the article and how she might feel – until the damage was done.

But it’s only shame if you don’t learn the lesson and I certainly did. I was a bit embarrassed.

I pulled the team member aside the next day, explained my positive intention and the fairy dust story and really gave her a heart-felt apology.  I wanted her to know the mistakes that I had made and the lessons that I had learned. It was a terrific conversation and we both got a lot out of it. 

We have cleared the air and everything is terrific - not that it wasn’t great beforehand, the rewriting of the article had knocked her confidence a little, but she understood where I was coming from and thought everything I was saying was great.  By the way, that’s no excuse for my behaviour, just because she’s ok with it!!

However, funnily enough, I do not feel that the story is finished because she hasn’t finished writing her article, and the article hasn’t been posted.  I killed the story!  I killed the opportunity!  So now, I feel that I will feel unsatisfied until it is actually resurrected and posted.  Oh I do hope she does it soon so that this story can have a happy ending!

What have you learned about "making things better"?