293: 🍝 Are you a Spaghetti-Twirler or a Spaghetti-Thrower?

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on so stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

If you're an asker, bravo. I admire your courage. I really do. I admire that askers are willing to throw all the spaghetti and just put their launches out there, put their things out there and just see who is on board and game to help out. We can all learn from the askers. If you're part of the more considerate culture, the spaghetti twirlers around the fork like me, you're more thoughtful. Maybe give yourself permission not to say yes or feel inclined to say yes to those askers. Just because they're asking you a question doesn't mean you have to say yes. And it doesn't mean that everyone puts as much thought into asking as you put into asking. So then maybe it's not such a big deal if you need to say no. What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Back in 2015, when I was hard at work writing Pivot, morning, noon and night, I was living in this little tiny studio apartment in Nolita in New York City. I had a friend reach out and say, hey, do you mind if I crash on your couch? To this day, I still feel somewhat bad about my answer, but every bone in my body was saying yes, I mind. And so I told this friend no. I'm so sorry, but I'm deep at work on the book and given that I don't even have a bedroom door, I need every ounce of sleep I can get. I'm just not in a place where I can be hosting right now. I felt so bad. This friend needed a place to crash and should I have just said yes? Should I have rolled with the punches? Would it have been nice to have company? Ultimately, I decided to honor this feeling that deep down, no, it wasn't what I needed and wanted at that time. Sometimes when I think about what to say yes or no to, I think, would I go out of my way to initiate this request if I wasn't on the receiving end of it? But why is it to this day that this little anecdote still stands out to me? That I still feel a little guilty? That I still wonder if I should have said yes? This comes down to a crucial distinction and something that you might find helpful as you consider requests that you get in your life about who the request is coming from and the intention or even how much thought went into the request itself. I had a major aha moment around this that changed how I view these types of requests forever when I read Jocelyn Glei's fantastic book Unsubscribe. The book itself is about email and how to be more mindful and how to handle considering inbound requests. She points to this original sort of viral MetaFilter post from 2007 where the poster Andrea talked about the classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture. Let me read you a little snippet from this MetaFilter reply. It was a message board from somebody who had a friend of their wife asking same situation as mine to crash on their couch, and he was feeling this sense of resistance but didn't know how to put words to it or what to say. Alright, so Andrea writes in her response, in some families you grow up with the expectation that it's okay to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture. In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guest culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly. You'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma. It takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept. All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you're a Guest Culture person, and you obviously are, then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you're likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated. If you're an Ask Culture person, Guest culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression. Obviously, she's an ask and you're a guest. And Andrea writes, I'm a guest too. Let me tell you, it's great for, say, reading nuanced and subtle novels not so great for dating and getting raises. Thing is, guest behaviors only work among a subset of other guest people, ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signaling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you'll have to embrace ask behavior. Otherwise, you'll spend your life in a cloud of mild outrage at the cluelessness of everyone.

All right, I love this post so much. I love that Andrea in her response to this guy writing about the conundrum of the couch surfer. She clearly delineates these two types of people. And once I had this awareness from reading it in Jocelyn's book and I'll also put a fantastic article in the show Notes from Oliver Berkman I realized that some people are willing to ask for whatever they want from anyone and everyone, and they just assume that if you don't want to do it, you'll say no. I call them spaghetti throwers. They throw a bunch of spaghetti out into the universe and see what sticks and they don't put a lot of thought. They're not mulling and, you know, in consternation about whether they should ask and who they should ask and how to ask so that they don't step on any toes. They are just part of that ask culture. They will grab a whole handful of spaghetti, throw it out there, and be delighted at who says yes. Now, I come from guess culture. I come from the land of. Well, it's definitely not spaghetti throwing. Let's call it like very intentional spaghetti twirling on a fork. Like I'll twirl and twirl a thought and a request so many times so it's neat and perfectly formulated and only then when I'm really sure I have the perfect bite assembled do I offer it to someone and ask for something. So let's say I'm a spaghetti twirler. Cacio e pepe is one of my favorite indulgent dishes, by the way. All right, so in contrast to the spaghetti throwers, if you're someone like me, you're part of guest culture or a spaghetti twirler carefully twirling on your fork. You're so nervous to ask other people for things that you assume when someone gives you a request that you need to say yes. And this is where a lot of people pleasing and guilt comes in. I can speak for myself that I know how much thought I put into requests and asks, you know, for favors that when someone sends me one I sometimes forget that they might be a spaghetti thrower. They might be just throwing all kinds of stuff at the wall and they could care less if I say yes or no. They trust me to be my own person, have my own boundaries, and say yes or no whether it's joyful or not for me. Meanwhile, I'll be on the receiving end in my email inbox and my text messages like absolutely wringing my hands, like, what do I do? Should I say yes? Oh no. I've even done this with podcast pitches. People pitched to the podcast. Maybe they were a loose connection, a friend of a friend, and I wasn't jumping out of my chair to say yes, but there was this little element of, well, they asked me, so maybe I should say yes. There's that should word. When the day and time came for the interview, I didn't want to do it. I didn't have the energy. I wasn't looking forward to it. And the times that I've gone ahead anyway and recorded, a lot of times I don't even end up airing that content or that interview because my intuition was saying something about this just isn't a fit. But in the moment, I kind of got caught up in the spaghetti thrown my way and just said yes because I was simply on the receiving end. I didn't ask that question that I stated at the beginning. If I, Jenny, were to initiate this, would I want to do that? Would I go out of my way to initiate this if I wasn't just considering something on the receiving end of an ask?

We'll be right back just after this.

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on or in tradition, a bold cranberry and winter spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season, and only for a limited time. Sprite Obey your thirst with Venmo Stash. A tag on one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back with Venmo Stash. Get up to 5% cash back when you pick a bundle of your favorite brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo Me Stashterms.

There are two rules of thumb here that have stuck with me. One. I heard from Alex Rodriguez. Who he was the guest lecturer for the Strategic Pivoting course at Stanford taught by Allison Kluger. She used my book Pivot as the course textbook, which is such an honor for the Stanford Graduate School of Business course. And Alex shared with the class his 10 touches rule that when he makes a new connection, particularly somebody that he wants to build a relationship with, he does not ask for anything from that person until there have been at least 10 interactions. Similarly, my friend Dori Clark, in her latest book the Long Game, she talks about the one year rule that when she makes a new connection, she doesn't ask for anything for a year. So she gives that relationship time to breathe, time to unfold before asking for anything at all. And I'll put the link to that conversation in the show notes because that one happened over on the Free Time podcast, Adam Grant also talks about slightly different categories than what we're discussing here. In his book Give and Take, he talks about givers, takers and matchers. Givers go out of their way to give and be helpful. Takers are always looking. What can I take there? I would say takers and askers have a lot in common and then matchers are a little bit more of a tit for tat. I have friends like this too, where oh, you help me with something. Quick, quick, let me help you with something. And they always kind of want to make sure the scales are balanced, but you can tell when things start to tip in an uneven way. And in fact, beyond the couch surfing conundrum, I've had friends where I'll make a new connection and then every single message from that person is an ask. So maybe they are part of ask culture and they're not trying to be offensive, they're not trying to be a taker. They're present as very lovely and wonderful type of person. But for me, as someone who's so much more thoughtful about making requests, it can feel uncomfortable to have just one ask after the next after the next. To continue our food metaphor, I liken this to someone who's at a buffet, who's asking, what can I take from every single dish? Ask, ask, ask, take, take, take to a potluck. At a potluck, those are the givers. Each person brings their own unique creation. You bring that you're looking to give. You're looking to bring your dish and add value to the situation. I share all this for a couple reasons. One, build awareness about the type that you naturally lean toward. If you are an asker, bravo. I admire your courage. I really do. I admire that askers are willing to throw all the spaghetti and just put their launches out there. Put their things out there and just see who is on board and game to help out. We can all learn from the askers if you're part of the more considerate culture, the spaghetti twirlers around the fork like me, you're more thoughtful. Maybe give yourself permission not to say yes or feel inclined to say yes to those askers. Just because they're asking you a question doesn't mean you have to say yes. And it doesn't mean that everyone puts as much thought into asking as you put into asking. So then maybe it's not such a big deal if you need to say no. And then finally, what's your rule of thumb for relationship building? Are you someone who's at a buffet looking for what you can get from new connections, or are you the potluck looking for what you can bring and just as much as you can? I do think that the more you can be the potluck person and bring value and give and give. Good things do come back around even if it's not from the same exact person. There's no need to keep tally tit for tat. Oh, I want the scales to be precisely even at all times. But I guarantee if you come to the table with a giving mindset, be considerate, don't feel bad when you need to say no, and then trust that others will do the same. Maybe it can give you a little more courage to put your asks out there too. You might never become a spaghetti thrower, but how can you nurture relationships over time and give enough so that when you do come to ask for for a favor, someone is leaping out of their chair to say yes? As Jocelyn closes this section of the book, the perspective shift that she invites us into is what if you stepped into the asker's shoes every time you got an email that felt like an imposition? Rather than assuming the sender expects you to say yes and resenting the unwanted obligation, assume they think it's a long shot, she writes. Reframing the situation like this makes it easier to put the ask in perspective and consider the opportunity with a relaxed attitude. Once you level the playing field between the possibility of saying yes and the possibility of saying no, it becomes easier to gracefully decline inquiries that don't align with your priorities. Remember, email martyrdom doesn't increase your productivity, it only increases your blood pressure. Acknowledge that you always have a choice in what you take on and make it. Thanks so much for listening everybody. And you can always leave a voice memo in reply, or if you have strategies for saying no or or considering things like this. I'd love to hear them. Leave me a voice message@pivotmethod.com ask that's pivotmethod.com ask thanks again for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day. Everybody.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter. Enny Blake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.