Social skills 102: Handling an issue that worries us

Hi guys, this is another occasion when I am trying to get something off my chest and it's not a straight forward situation so I am turning this over to you to try to see how I can best handle the situation. As my regular readers will know, I am going on holiday with my family to Spain very soon and my parents are worried because I am taking my nephew skiing. Yup, they are worried that he would fall down and get hurt; so in today's post, I'm going to talk about what my mother said as a case study of how I would use my social skills to handle the situation a little better. Okay, so my mother started by saying that my nephew needed to be careful but my mother is very inarticulate and doesn't have a wide range of vocabulary, so instead she kept repeating to me that my nephew needed to be careful so he wouldn't get hurt. She then even suggested that you can still see the mountains and the snow from the hotel room window, suggesting that if she was going on the trip with us, she would simply look at the scenery from the hotel room and not go skiing. This is evident that she is thinking about the whole issue entirely from her own point of view rather than my nephew's point of view. As she is highly autistic, she is completely incapable of looking at an issue like this from another person's perspective.

Step 1: Find out exactly what you're worried about

So my mother is worried about my nephew possibly getting hurt during skiing - now that's a perfectly legitimate concern of course, but what is she actually worried about? Given that my mother knows virtually nothing about skiing, then does she actually know what her fears and worries are based upon? And of course, she was talking to me - not only do I have over 20 years of experience skiing, I'm the one taking my nephew skiing. So naturally, I know exactly what the risks are and what kind of accidents we would be wary of. Now I could actually talk about the most common accidents that beginners may encounter when skiing but that could take an entire blog post. So let me deal with two 'worries': one that is completely valid and another that is highly unlikely. So for the place where beginners fall a lot is getting on and on ski lifts - this is because some lifts move fairly quickly because they are under a lot of pressure to get hundreds of skiers up the mountain, especially on weekends and public holidays when the ski resort can be extremely crowded. When you get to the front of the queue, you have only like 2 or 3 seconds to get into the right position and sit down as the chair lift swings round to pick you up. I can do this with ease as I have been riding chair lifts for over 20 years but beginners may not realize how little time they have to get to the right position and thus struggle to get onto the chair lift. This has resulted in an accident earlier this year near Vancouver in Canada where an 8-year old child didn't get on the chair lift properly during loading and then slipped off the chair lift moments later, but thankfully the boy was saved by a group of quick thinking teenagers who sprang into action. Here's a news report on what happened at Grouse Mountain in BC, Canada.

Likewise, similar accidents can happen when people try to get off the chair lift - again, you have like a one second window when the ski lift reaches the right position and you have to push off the chair, ski away and avoid the people who had just gotten off in front of you. There's nothing technically difficult about that maneuver but again, it is just that tiny window of opportunity leaving you no margin for error. Getting off too early or too late will result in falls and crashes and even if you do get off at the right time, beginners who are nervous often fall the moment they get off so I have learnt to quickly avoid the person in front of me if I see that s/he has fallen. I have seen a beginner fall whilst trying to get off the chair lift, only for the person coming up front behind to fall right into the first person who had already fallen. Are ski lifts dangerous? Hell no. I see them as straight forward as taking the escalator in a mall - you just have to know what you're doing and be aware of your surroundings. In fact, accidents don't happen when you're trying to do difficult tricks when you're skiing, usually they happen when people are not concentrating. So a skier who is engrossed in conversation or trying to take pictures whilst on the chair lift may be so distracted that s/he doesn't realize that it is time to disembark and isn't ready, resulting in a fall. The chances of accidents happening with ski lifts malfunctioning are very rare, though it has happened in Georgia recently in the ski resort of Gaudari, though I would say that the health & safety standards in a poor country like Georgia is nothing like what one would expect in the EU. But heck, I still skied in Georgia earlier this year and had a wonderful time there actually! My only complaint was that my hotel was noisy so I couldn't sleep well at night.

So the second implausible accident that will never happen is being trapped in an avalanche - that's so unlikely because the ski areas in any Western European ski resort are constantly, carefully inspected everyday and night. Technology plays a huge part in keeping the ski resorts safe from avalanches - using everything from webcams to drones, the people who operate the resort know exactly what the snow condition is in every inch of the resort. If there is any risk of an avalanche happening say if a lot of snow builds up on a cliff face after a snowstorm, then the excess snow would be cleared away (by dynamite if necessary) to eliminate any risk. This is because the ski resorts are often crowded with thousands of tourists and you can't run the risk of allowing a catastrophic avalanche injuring and killing dozens, even hundreds of tourists. Are there skiers killed by avalanches? Yes there are, but these are expert skiers who are skiing off-piste, venturing into areas which had not been inspected for avalanche risk. The vast majority of the skiers who just stick to the prepared pistes within the patrolled areas are totally safe from avalanche. Avalanche is a problem that would affect mountain climbers far more than skiers - this is because the ski resort is such a carefully managed tourist attraction whereas mountain climbers can sometimes scale extremely tall mountains and they have no idea what the conditions are until they get there. In any case, even if small avalanches happen, they are not deadly. Therefore you are far more likely to hurt yourself when you slip on a frozen puddle in the carpark of the ski resort than to ever encounter an avalanche.

But heck, my mother didn't even mention the word avalanche. Actually, I'm not quite sure she is even familiar with the concept of an avalanche, but regardless - she was clearly worried about 'accidents' happening when skiing but when I pressed her for more details about what she was worried about, she could only say, "he could fall down and hurt himself". And at that point, I have to remind myself that my mother can be very child-like at times - you need to be quite mature and intellectual to be capable of that kind of critical thinking to analyze a topic like, "what kind of accidents happen during skiing and how can we prevent them". But that's the kind of conversation I would have with an adult and unfortunately, my mother talks like a 6-year old child with a very limited vocabulary and totally incapable of dealing with more complex concepts or coming up with an intellectual response. So yes I get it, she is worried about her precious grandson hurting himself whilst skiing, but she has absolutely no idea what kind of accidents could happen during skiing. As an autistic person, she is only capable of seeing things from her own point of view and she doesn't know how to try to get information from another party to gain a deeper, more meaningful understanding of a topic. You can see why any kind of social interaction, even a simple conversation with my mother can be quite frustrating at times. But let's go onto step 2:

Step 2: Categorize the risks we are dealing with

There are two ways to categorize the risks we are dealing with - so firstly, we can look at the likelihood it can happen. And secondly, we need to find out what the consequences are, how serious would it be? So let's deal with something we have talked about already: falling down when trying to get off a chair lift. What is the likelihood of it happen to a beginner? Well, pretty high actually, it happens a lot. What are the consequences? Actually there are hardly any consequences because these are not serious falls that will result in any kind of injury because you're not falling at high speed when you get off the chair lift. So even if you were to fall over, you simply pick yourself up and laugh it off. So armed with that knowledge that falling as you get off a ski lift is quite likely but wouldn't lead to any injury, we now have a much clearer idea of what we're dealing with. Let's look at another common problem that we can encounter during skiing: losing your personal belongings. You'll be amazed how often that happens, people drop everything from their phones to their wallets because they have put those items in a pocket without a zip and when they are skiing, the items become dislodged and fall out. What is the likelihood of this happening? Well, that depends on how careful you are when it comes to placing these items in a pocket with a zip (and you must remember to do the zip up tightly each time). I have a friend who lost her phone during skiing because she took her phone out to take a photo, but when she put the phone back in her pocket, she forgot to zip it up and well, that was a careless mistake! So, what are the consequences: well, losing something like a passport, phone or wallet on holiday can be extremely inconvenient and you really do not want that to happen to you.

Once we have developed a very clear idea of all the risks and dangers we are dealing with, then we can then focus on the ones which are both likely and have serious consequences. So as I was writing this article, I decided that the most likely problem I can prevent is losing one's belonging whilst skiing, so I had asked my sister to make sure that everyone must have a jacket with at least one pocket with a secure zip so no phones, wallets etc would be lost whilst skiing. And as for the dangers that we are unlikely to face (such as an avalanche or a really serious fall during skiing) then the sensible thing is not to worry about something like that happening, given that we're unlikely to need to face it. The key point about this exercise is to gather enough information about what you're worried about and then categorically either address those legitimate concerns with concrete action or dismiss those which are so extremely unlikely. This is such an important step because without this information, my mother is like the blind leading the blind - her worry for my nephew is not going to keep him safe or prevent any accidents at all. The irony is that she doesn't even have to do any of the hard work: she can simply address the issue with me and I can handle everything, she doesn't even need to lift a finger at all. Yet somehow, there's this massive blind spot in her problem solving ability whereby she doesn't seem to know how to ask for help when she doesn't have the answers, even if the person who has all the answers is there staring right at her.

Step 3: Now we know what the risks are, how can we reduce the risk? 

Oh yes, risk reduction is an important part of reducing our stress levels! This is because it is scary when you don't know what you're dealing with but you can become a lot more pragmatic when you get enough information to make sense of the challenges. So, there are plenty of ways to mitigate the risks when it comes to participating in any kind of sport. Hence in skiing for example, the way to avoid accidents on chair lifts is to alert the operator that you're a beginner who needs help - the operator can then slow the whole system down by as much as 50%, doubling the amount of time you have to get onto the chair lift safely. Most operators will do this as a matter of routine anyway if they see a young child, but there's no shame in asking for this kind of help. And so for my nephew and my sister, they may need to learn how to ask for help in Spanish and/or Catalan when using these chair lifts and that would go a long way in preventing any kind of accident. So yes, they would have to memorize the phrase, "Ayudame por favor, soy un principiante." (Help me please, I am a beginner.) Actually, beginners aren't that likely to mess up getting on and off the chairlift because they are usually quite careful - the accidents tend to happen to far more experienced skiers who think, "oh I can do this in my sleep." I saw this woman, an experience skier, fall off a chairlift because she was trying to text when she was getting on, so she was looking at the phone instead of where the chair lift was and sure enough, she lost her balance and then fell flat on her face as the chair lift knocked her over. Being overconfident can also lead to mistakes and accidents like that.

Worrying for the sake of worrying doesn't solve any problems: so let me give you a very real problem I am facing. I have a family history of diabetes - so that makes me genetically more predisposed to getting the disease myself, however, there's a lot I can do to ensure that the chances of me getting diabetes are very low. For starters, I read up on diabetes - I made sure I was empowered with the knowledge and understanding. Then I knew exactly what I had to do to prevent diabetes, such as making sure I do not become overweight by watching my diet carefully, cutting out sugar and doing loads of exercise regularly. Thus I am taking active steps to take control of the situation - but that's not what my parents are doing. They know we have a family history of diabetes, but they do not get the information they need, they do not understand what diabetes is and without that knowledge, they are not taking any active steps to lower their chances of getting diabetes. Yet they still continue to worry about becoming ill with diabetes in their elderly years. It is no fun to be worried and whilst we can't prevent problems in life from happening, we can always take very practical steps to deal with them so we can take back control of the situation and not be worried. And to make matters worse, my mother is a Christian who prays a lot but praying doesn't solve anything! She's merely asking her god to solve her problems but when she opens her eyes, nothing has changed and she doesn't take any kind of responsibility to look for solutions or answers to these problems. She's better off asking me to solve her problems - at least I'll get off my ass and try to help in a more pragmatic manner. This is why I wanted to write this piece to illustrate how normal people deal with their worries.

Step 4: Have I done enough to reduce the risk? Have I eliminated enough risk by changing my behaviour?

So after having gone through the first three steps, you can then look back at what you have done so far and decide have you done enough to reduce the risk involved to a level that you are comfortable with. Certainly it would be unrealistic to think that we could eliminate risk totally from avoiding accidents during sports to avoiding developing diabetes, but are there enough factors that we can realistically control? Let's take an example where I may say no, not enough has been done to reduce the risk, I don't think this is a good idea, I won't do it. I recently came across a Youtube video about a village in the Philippines where they race a kind of bicycle/scooter made from wood (see video below) - it looks kinda scary because it doesn't have any kind braking mechanism! The locals mostly rely on gradient to get speed, hence they would race this downhill in steep mountain roads. So if we were in the Philippines and I was offered the chance to ride one of these down a hill, would I do it just to get an interesting video for Instagram? With all due respect to the culture and traditions of the Filipino tribe who love their wooden scooter races, I would respectfully decline as I think it does seem quite dangerous and I think there are better ways to appreciate the local culture without actually getting on one of those wooden scooters. I would leave it to the locals who have plenty of experience in racing those things and I would be an appreciate member of the audience watching the race. But if you offered me the chance to cycle through those same mountains on a proper mountain bike (with good brakes), then I would gladly say yes because that would be a lot safer.

So in summary, here are the four simple steps I would take when I encounter a worrying situation:

1. Do research, gather information, talk to different people, find out more about the situation
2. Categorize the different risks and threats we are facing
3. Identify ways to reduce the risks by changing our behaviour
4. Evaluate if we have done enough to make the situation safe enough

Perhaps all this sounds extremely obvious, perhaps you already do all this as a matter of routine - this is why it is extremely frustrating for me that my parents seem to lack this basic common sense to deal with issues that worry them. I suppose this begs the question: where do we learn social skills like that, to deal with problems in life? I don't think anyone actually sat me down and gave me a vital life lesson on this topic but the closest I have actually come to this is that very structured approach to structuring one's research when I did my degree in geography. Now it doesn't matter what subject you study at university, at some stage you would probably be asked to do some kind of independent research as part of your degree and it follows pretty much the same process. You identify a problem that you wish to explore, you set out your hypothesis about the subject matter and explain what you are trying to prove with your research. You then do your field work, carefully collecting the data and then you present the data and your findings, before concluding if your findings did prove your original hypothesis or if it didn't, why you think it wasn't the case. This kind of university style research is very structured because the neat structure makes it easy for the person marking your work to understand it - you don't want to present a rambling essay which is confusing to decipher; your research can be about the most complex, groundbreaking nuclear physics but your presentation style has to be concise and clear. The aim is to share knowledge, not confuse your reader. Now that kind of academic discipline is the closest I ever got to being forced to be quite discipline in the way I approached a challenging topic and of course it was very helpful indeed.

So is my mother the person she is because she simply didn't go to university? I don't think so - I have met a lot of adults who don't have much of a formal education, yet they are extremely pragmatic, rational and practical when it comes to solving complex problems in life. I think it has a lot to do with the kind of challenges they face with at work and my mother is a retired primary school teacher. The kind of problems she presents her students in the classroom tend to have a simple solution and the students are told to follow a prescribed formula which will always lead to the right answer, such as in the case of long division. So if the student is presented with a question like what is 2025 divided by 15? Well, there's only one correct answer: 135. How about a question from primary school level science? Mrs Tan has taken a bottle of milk out from the fridge and left it on the table, within a few minutes, small droplets of water start to appear on the surface of the bottle. What is the process that has created the water on the surface of the bottle? Answer: condensation. It is a fairly simple question that requires a one-word answer and it doesn't even require the student to explain how condensation actually works - it just requires the student to identify the process as condensation. Yes perhaps I am stating the obvious: the primary school syllabus isn't challenging and is very straight forward. My mother has spent her entire working life in an environment with very simple, straightforward 'right' answers so when presented with far more complex problems in real life without obvious answers - she is simply stunned into confusion and inaction.

Now I have teacher friends who may say, hold on a moment Alex, she was a primary school teacher - the primary school syllabus may be simple but teaching isn't. It can be a simple process if you get smart kids who soak up the information like a sponge and can just get on with learning pretty much on their own. What if you get a child who has behavioural issues or learning difficulties? Trying to get such a troubled child to learn under those circumstances is a difficult challenge and we're not dealing with mathematics or science here, but child psychology which is an very complex subject. So has my mother learnt anything about child psychology after having spent her entire working life as a primary school teacher? Certainly, she has encountered a lot of challenging students over the years but whether or not she has learnt how to deal with them effectively is another matter. All I can say is that given her parenting skills that I had experienced first hand, I wouldn't rate her as a good teacher given that she tends to lose her temper when she doesn't get her way. So when a student performs badly, she would blame the student for being stupid and lazy and start deflecting blame before anyone could suggest that the fault may lie with the teacher. Unfortunately, whilst my mother was in a work environment which allowed her to focus on the easier tasks (ie. the relatively simple primary school syllabus) whilst effectively ignoring the harder aspects of her job (ie. child psychology with troubled students). In her defence I don't think she's doing it out of malice - I just don't think she is intelligent enough to process complicated problems, hence her default approach of simply worrying instead of tackling the problem(s) head on to find a pragmatic solution quickly.

To give you an example of just how my mother can be stunned into inaction, I left Singapore in 1997 after I finished my NS. I went to study first in France and then in the UK. I didn't communicate much with my family when I left, remember this was before the age of Skype and Whatsapp so those long distance phone calls were expensive and I mostly emailed my sisters to let them know what I was doing in Europe. I found out many years later that in the period when I had just left, my mother was so worried about me - she was wondering if I was eating properly, if I was studying hard enough, if I could adapt to life in the West and knowing her, she was probably wondering if I had been getting drunk all the time, taking loads of drugs and having loads of sex with strangers everyday. The sensible thing to do would have been to ask me to call home regularly so I could reassure her that I was okay as well as give her an idea of what my life was like at university. But no - she didn't communicate with me, despite the fact that my father told me that she was so worried that she couldn't sleep at night and had no appetite at mealtimes. That really surprised me as I thought that the most logical, sensible thing to do would be to simply talk to me so I could put her mind at ease, but again, she was stunned into inaction and simply wallowed in her worry. I remember telling my sister, "if Mum doesn't tell me she wants to talk to me, if she doesn't tell me that she is worried about how I am getting on in Europe, how the heck am I supposed to know what is going on? So does she expect the rest of us to somehow telepathically read her mind if she doesn't say anything to us?"

Well, my nephew is going to be 17 in 2020 and he will begin NS very soon sometime in 2021 or 2022. I am wondering if there's any way we can try to train my mother to be more rational with the way she handles her worries because I know she will be worried about my nephew - I am worried too because we both care about my nephew but the difference is that I know how to handle that kind of situation. I would apply these four simple steps as described in this blog post whilst I know my mother will just stare out of the window blankly whilst worrying herself sick. Heck, never mind my nephew going into NS - he has started working part time after he completed his O levels. I am of course delighted that he has chosen to do so especially since it was his own decision. The sooner he gets the taste of working life the better, then he will have a far more pragmatic approach to his education in relation to what he has to do to earn money in the real world. Could my nephew run into trouble at work? Sure, that's a possibility we cannot prevent but we can work through this and deal with it in a practical manner. My mother's response however is to plead with my sister not to let him work and literally to lock him at home during the school holidays so he will come to no harm - which is utterly totally ridiculous. A far more sensible approach would have been to work through the issue with my four simple steps - but given how my mother is so autistic and has zero social skills, I guess even that is beyond her. Fortunately, in this case, nobody listened to my mother because, well, she's just being fucking ridiculous and my nephew is happily working - but it saddens me that my mother is probably staring blankly out of the window, worrying about my nephew at work right now and that is just so unhealthy.

Am I able to avoid all diseases simply by totally cutting out sugar, having a very healthy diet and exercising regularly? No, but I feel a lot better about having lowered my risks by taking such practical steps that will have a huge impact on my health. Likewise, can I prevent my nephew from getting bullied whilst serving NS simply by talking to him about it? No, I cannot - but I would feel a lot better about having discussed the issue with him, making him aware of some of the problems he is likely to face and teaching him how to cope with difficult social situations. There are plenty of issues in life that do bother and upset me but instead of just staring out of the window and worrying, I prefer to get busy doing something practical that will help me deal with the situation in a very pragmatic manner. I earn the right to stop worrying if I know that I have made a genuine and constructive effort to assert control over the situation. And after all that, if things still go wrong, like if I still get diabetes after not having touched white sugar in years, then at least I can say hey, I tried my best so I can't feel bad about the outcome. So there you go, that's it from me on this topic. What do you think? Can we somehow save my mother from her own stupidity and poor social skills? Can we teach her how to handle her worries in a more pragmatic manner? Might there even be a weird sense of martyrdom in the way she worries about us? Or is what I described typical of old people with poor social skills? Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.