A Bitter Pill Is Harder To Swallow
I know my headline is a famous saying, but I didn’t understand it until recently. You see, every now and then I have random epiphanies from random events. Very random events. I learned the true meaning of this saying quite literally from one of those random epiphanies. This one had to do with feeding my cat…
I was at my house one morning eating breakfast. Phone Calls From Home had been sub-par on our work ethic, so I was going to have a meeting with my band-mates and ream them out (yes I know… It was mean and wrong and never worked well, but it was back in 2010 when I was young and naive). I was trying to figure out the best way to tell them how bad we were doing (I was much more negative… back then).
After breakfast, I was told I had to feed Trooper, one of our house cats, a pill to make it feel better because it was sick. As I gave it the pill I thought to myself, “Please be a good tasting pill so I don’t have to fight you, pin you down, and shove this pill down your throat. It would be easier for both of us if you just enjoyed the taste of this pill and swallowed it on your own accord.” Sure enough, the pill tasted good and the cat ate it quick. As Trooper was chewing, a light bulb turned on in my brain and I said, “My band is like this cat!” and then my sister looked at me weird because what I just said didn’t make sense.
But it made sense to me.
I’ll put the two scenarios together… The pill is like the news about our band sucking. The cat is my band. And I am me in both scenarios. Ok. So if I give the bad news to the band like I was planning on doing, they would swallow it like a bitter pill: They know it is healthy to hear how our band is doing, but they would be fighting the news because no one wants to hear that they are sucking, ever. So in the same way that the cat doctor thought, “Hey, let’s make this cat pill good tasting so cats will actually enjoy it”, I started thinking, “Hey, let’s make this bad news sound not so bad, and more optimistic so everyone will be down to work hard to bring our band to the next level.” It’s not enough to simply tell something to someone if you want to affect change in them. You have to actually make them want to hear it.
No one wants to swallow a bitter pill, even if it is good for them. In the same way, no one wants to hear the truth sometimes, even if it is good for them. So you treat your friends like you would my cat and treat your words like you would treat that pill: Make the words feel better so the person swallowing them actually wants to swallow them. You don’t have to lie and you don’t have to over-fabricate. Just make the pill taste better.
Thank you Trooper for the great revelation. I still don’t like you though. You gave me scars with your talons.
