Flex and Frooms, Flex and Frooms. This is the Flex and Frooms catch up podcast. Flexi who is the philosopher who said an unexamined life is not worth living?
I couldn't tell you. Do you remember Plato? Socrates is one of them. Yeah, one of the boys.
Never get my utube teacher told me that, and I thought, actually, I'd prefer to not think about it, and my life's pretty good anyway. I was at a party recently and the person who was hosting the party was inviting everyone in. It was like a relatively small gathering, so I would have assumed that they knew everyone's name. But people were coming in who they'd met once or twice, and they
started doing this thing that I found quite grating. And I realized that I found it greating because it's something that I do, something that I don't want to do, but I can't help myself. And that is you've seen in the wild Flexi getting people's name wrong. So I struggle with people's names. I hate it because it's the most pedestrian bad thing to be bad at, and it seemingly has a very obvious cure, which is to pay attention.
But trust me, I'm paying attention, and I'm definitely like when I meet someone i'm thinking about, I'm paying full attention to them. I think I am at a party, like if I have a conversation, I'm not like looking over your shoulder, sorry if I have before my usual usual thing. But yeah, this person kept getting everybody's name wrong. So they would do a thing where they go for the sab and they'd be like Lily, like my name's Lillian.
They're like, okakay, I mean that's that's close enough, or like Lucy and he'd be like, my name's Lillian.
Yeah.
And I was watching this unfold, thinking, King, get it together, please get it together, like it's not that hard. And then I had to. I had like a raven moment, so I was like far out, that's me in a man.
So what about that situation meant that you couldn't like sympathize with them because like, oh damn, I do that too, Like got you, King?
I sympathized the first few times, but then I was like, King, what I do when I have had this bad of a strike, right? Is I just stop with the names? We just say hey you hey, you like yeah, which is dangerous as well. But I think once you've tried one method, you have to accept defeat and be like, yeah, I'm gonna have to like hurt some feelings today. Yeah, I'd rather than have to someone has to like constantly correct you more than once.
Do you reckon? Do you reckon? This person was just like not self aware or just a bit of a scatter brain, because I can imagine once you do it a couple of times you have to, you would double down and be like, I'm just I'm just a person who gets names wrong. That's me.
Yeah, because then you don't want to make it feel like you only forget some people's names.
Yes, exactly, like I do it to anyone. Yeah, yeah, I'll do it to you.
Yeah. I could feel his brain ticking over every time, so I think he was trying. But then also he wasn't really pulling it off.
So what's the moral of the story. Don't try unless you can get it right.
The moral of the story is I still want to learn to be better at names. But the moral of the story also is charisma gets too fast. So if you can just play dumb but also like really pay someone attention.
I think it's why charisma playing dumb.
No, no, no, no, charisma is getting away with playing dark? Got charisma? Isn't playing dumb with a little bit of a charisma and like looking people in the eye and like paying them attention in other ways, Yeah, you can get around this very stupid.
So this guy's biggest flaw was that he wasn't charismatic.
Don't make me say it trying to do it in a polite way. No, I want to know, like an example of when you've seen your behavior reflecting in someone else and you've made you think twice about how it makes other people feel.
The situation reminds me of a friend that I used to have, and she is what I would describe as a textbook extravert, like extravert in every circumstance, and back in the days, I really used to appreciate that behavior because I only looked at it as overwhelmly positive to be a person who walks into a room, lights it up, gets excited, makes jokes like how could that ever be
a bad thing? But because we were part of a group of friends, she was never my close, close friend, but we always hung out a lot, a lot, a lot. So after years and years of being her friend and recognizing that she wasn't just a textbook extrovert, she was just obnoxious. And it took a little second because I really like this, This would have been like high school.
Coming out of high school. I really emulated her behavior because I was like, she is so cool, she's so like confident and loud, and she says what she wants and she'll like talk to anyone. But she just was not self aware, so she could never see even if it wasn't appropriate, she would do it anyway. We could be in a beautiful restaurant. I'm not talking five star dining, just a really considered environment where someone's coming up to you asking for what you want. She wouldn't stop talking.
She would like, wouldn't acknowledge anybody around her, would you know, point at people across the way and be like, wait, I love that outfit, And I just I don't know if it's because that transition from high school to you know, adulthood, you actually asked to gain a bit of sentience about who you are outside of just being a person with friends. You're like, wait, who am I when I'm not accountable
for the people around me? Who am I when I'm just myself, and so I really had to challenge the part of myself that was like which part of myself is extroverted for joy and which part of myself is extroverted for like control, because she could not help but control every environment that she was in, and it was like militant in the way, and she couldn't take any feedback and she wouldn't like nothing could pass through. And it was interesting though, because I thought I was the
only one who noticed. And that's the hardest thing about when you become self aware about your behavior, You're like, surely nobody else knows but me, right, So maybe in your situation, you're like, surely nobody knows, or this person's situation, I mean, they might have been like, surely nobody knows that. I don't remember names, Like surely nobody's clocking this, but everybody's clocking it, everybody. And so in this instance, with
these friends, I never said anything. When that group eventually like disbanded, as high school groups do, when you pick your little subgroups. That was the thing. Oh, you know, she's just so hard to be around. She's not self aware, I said. When you have your own insecurities, part of you is like, oh my got everybody knows, but other part is like nobody knows, it's just me on the inside, and affirming that the things that you don't like about
is off people see. I was like, I need to start making sure that the person that I'm presenting is the person that I'm comfortable with. And so then I had to make sure that like, Okay, I'm going to talk to you the same way that i would speak to my mum, the same way I'm speaking to a boss because I don't want there to be confusion about who I am. And to this day, I'm sure that girl never really understands like what happened? Like how did you all remain friends? And I didn't like, why am
I on the fringe? And who are we to tell her? It's very sad.
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