Don’t give me information for problems I can’t solve

Our kid, was still a new born. There was an issue with him. I have to admit I don’t even remember what the issue was at the time. But I remember this conversation.

The midwife that helped us said: “So this is a big problem!” She explained, she gave details, and so on. After a while one of us asked: “Okay, that’s all pretty informative, but what can we do?”. “Oh you can’t do anything, we just have to wait for now.”

This shitty moment teached me a valuable lesson for service interactions:

Don’t overwhelm me with informations about problems that are out of my power.

Obviously it makes sense to know there is an issue, but when faced with a stressful and new situation (like having a baby) it’s definitly not helpful to create an information overload with data, opions and contextualization that are interesting but not actionnable at all.

With this experience I learned to always ask myself: Is there something I can do? If no, then let’s not focus on that. A good service provider asks himself this question for me so that I don’t have to invest mental energy on stuff that will produce stress without actions.

This article has been adapted in a more comprehensible English by the lovely Joanna Bienz.