Take Off Your Shoes First

Adriel Frederick spent his career learning to understand users. The hardest skill?

'The hardest part is taking my own shoes off. Basically going, Yo, okay, I came into this, there's something I wanted, I got to get rid of that. Now just talk to this person and try to understand what's going on with them, what they care about, what they're scared of, what they're excited by.'

With your toddler, this is impossibly hard. You come home tired. You have an agenda: dinner, bath, bed. They have a completely different agenda: play trucks for infinity.

Your shoes are still on. Their shoes don't even fit you.

'Once I was able to get out of my shoes, clear my mind, try to get into their head, then I could find a nice happy middle ground.'

The fight isn't between your agenda and theirs. The fight is getting your own agenda out of the way long enough to actually hear what they're trying to tell you.

Take off your shoes first. Then you can see theirs.