A different set of parents

I've been watching documentaries about football managers lately. Mourinho, Gerrard, Klopp, Walter Smith. Different eras, different clubs, different temperaments, and the more of them you watch the more obvious it becomes that the thing separating these men from everyone else isn't on the tactics board. It's man management. Which, when you watch closely, means one specific thing: they treat every player differently.

Mourinho knew which player needed an arm around the shoulder and which one needed winding up. Walter Smith, by every account from every player who ever worked under him, was a father figure first and a tactician second. As a Glaswegian that one lands differently for me. The tributes when he died barely mentioned formations. They talked about how he made people feel, and how he seemed to know what each individual needed on any given day.

That's the part I keep turning over. Not that they treated players differently, but that at the very top of the game, treating everyone differently is what treating everyone fairly looks like.

This past season I coached my son Levi's school football team, and the same truth applies at that level too, just with smaller humans. But this post isn't really about coaching. Coaching is just where the thought showed up.

Nobody meets the same me twice

Here's the uncomfortable version of the same idea, pointed at myself.

I might turn up to a training session having had a bad day, and be unintentionally short with a kid. I'd say I'm a pretty chill coach, which is precisely why it matters when I'm not. Kids calibrate to your baseline. One sharp word from a chill coach lands like a shout from anyone else.

Meanwhile the kid I'm being short with might have had a really tiring day at school and simply isn't on it tonight. Neither of us knows what the other one walked in carrying. My bad day meets his tiring day, I read his flatness as not trying, he reads my tone as being in trouble, and two misreadings compound in about four seconds. Nobody did anything wrong, and something still went wrong.

The same thing happens with clients and direct reports. Everyone you work with has a different personality, a different way of hearing things, a different set of pressures you can't see, and somehow you're meant to be all things to everyone at the same time. I've written before that two people can't be all things to each other. I stand by that. Yet the job of managing people, whether it's a squad, a team, or a family, quietly demands that you try anyway, knowing you'll fall short of it daily.

The kids in the house

All four of my kids experience me differently than their siblings do. Not because I have a policy about it, but because they're four different personalities and I'm a slightly different dad depending on the day, the sleep, and what's sitting unresolved in my head from work. Each of them is quietly assembling their own version of me from the versions of me they happen to get.

And then it goes back a generation, which is the thought that actually prompted this post. My siblings and I grew up in the same house, for the most part, until Mum and Dad moved to New Zealand in 2003, and I'm increasingly convinced we each got a different set of parents. Same people, different parents. I don't mean anything dramatic by that, and I'm not going to unpack it with examples, because the people involved are real and I love them. I just mean that birth order, personality, timing and circumstance meant that the parents who raised me are not quite the parents who raised them.

The move to New Zealand only widened it. From 2003 onwards we were each relating to the same two people from a different distance and a different stage of our own lives, collecting different chapters of them. If you have siblings, sit with that one for a minute. I suspect it applies to you too.

Full footage

There's a mechanism underneath all of this, and once I saw it I couldn't unsee it.

Strangers and acquaintances get snapshots of us. The person you see once a month at a meetup is always cheerful because you've sampled them twelve times a year, probably at the thing they enjoy. Your family gets the full footage. Every version of you, including the ones you'd rather nobody saw, on a daily release schedule.

We usually say familiarity breeds contempt, and I've come to think that proverb is only half right. Familiarity breeds exposure. Contempt is one available response to the footage. Grace is the other. The proverb just assumes you'll pick the worse one.

Which reframes something I'd always had backwards. I assumed the people closest to us know the real us. Maybe what they actually know is the range of us. Closeness isn't where people turn out to be consistent. It's where their inconsistency finally becomes visible, and that's not a flaw in closeness. That is closeness.

The invoice

Here's the confession that sits under all of it.

I forgive my own bad days automatically. I know the backstory, I know the broken sleep, I know the thing that went sideways at ten o'clock that morning, so my sharpness gets filed under circumstances. Other people's sharpness gets filed under character. I extend myself an unlimited line of credit and invoice everyone else on receipt.

I don't think I'm unusual in this. It's just rarely said out loud. We experience ourselves as a moving average and everyone else as whatever snapshot we happened to catch.

The great man managers seem to run the opposite accounting. When a world-class player trained poorly, Walter Smith's first question wasn't what's wrong with him. It was what's going on with him. Same data, different filing system, and an entire career built on the difference.

There's a reason that posture is familiar to me, and it isn't football. It's how I've been dealt with by God, whose consistency is the one thing in this whole arrangement that doesn't fluctuate with the day he's having. Mercies new every morning is a promise made by the only party who doesn't need it extended back. The rest of us are inconsistent people asking other inconsistent people for a patience we're slow to hand out ourselves. Grace isn't my idea. I'm just downstream of it.

In closing

So this is the instruction I'm trying to live by, on the touchline, in the house, on client calls, and thinking about the people who raised me: assume the tiring day, not the character flaw.

The kid who's flat at training probably isn't lazy. The client who's short on a call probably isn't difficult. The parent you've been quietly judging for thirty years was a person having days, same as you're a person having days. You're getting a snapshot, or you're getting the full footage, and either way the generous read is more likely to be the true one.

I'll still get it wrong. Some Monday I'll be short with a nine-year-old who spent his whole school day holding it together, and I'll be the bad day in someone else's story about inconsistent people. When it happens, I hope they assume the tiring day.