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Different people have different skills, and this isnāt necessarily a āproblemā to be solved. It sounds like the feedback you received suggests that you might find a different (less social) role to be a better personal fit. Why not look into that, rather than trying to āproveā the feedback wrong?
It might help to reconceptualize the situation. Thereās no such thing as being ātoo confrontationalā, period. But there is such a thing as being ātoo confrontationalā for a particular task or role. That role might be better suited to someone with a different personality type. Again, that doesnāt mean thereās anything wrong with your personality. It may just be a poor fit for the role youāre presently looking into. In the face of such mismatches, itās rarely worth trying to change your personality. Instead, Iād suggest looking for a role thatās a better personal fit for you and your particular strengths.
(Not that I have any special insights here or anything. And I obviously donāt know anything about your particular situation, besides what youāve shared here. Itās just a general thought, in case it might be helpful.)
Hi Richard, thanks for the input :) Thatās a fair point, and I have considered it. The problem is that, after meditating over this, talking to friends, etc, I just cannot bring myself to believe that I am more confrontational than average, or even than the average community organizer. I just donāt see evidence of this beyond this incident. This is a difficult thing for me to say because I feel that I will be perceived as stubborn, as somebody who is engaged in motivated reasoning, etc. But if I said anything else I would be lying. I donāt know if Iām the only one who feels this, but sometimes I fear that we are creating an environment in EA where people donāt have the space to respond sincerely to criticism. I sometimes feel a bit like Iām forced to accept any criticism immediately without questioning it because thatās what it means to have a scout mindset. This cannot be a good thing. There must be a balance between resisting criticism too much or too little.
Besides, even if I am a bit more confrontational that the average organizer, Iām not convinced that I should give up and choose something else thatās a better fit for me. Iām not perfect at anything. no matter what path I choose, I will have to work on myself in someways to become better at that job. I would only give up on a path if Iām a sufficiently bad fit. And I donāt think Iām bad enough at community building that I should just give up on it. Moreover, at this point Iām kinda in too deep into community organizing. If I stop now the community will die. I considered this possibility with people from the community and they encouraged me to continue. The community is growing, there are often new people who show up excited to the meetups, it feels unreasonable to disappoint everyone and stop everything just because 2 people who donāt know me concluded that I am too confrontational after one isolated incident.
Also, I am a rather insecure and risk-averse person in general, so usually when Iām excited and confident about something it actually means I can do a good job at it. I guess I can accept that itās a bit useless to spend too much time trying to figure out whether I really am or not more confrontational than itās ideal for a community organizer, but I think the implication is that I should look for ways to be friendlier and more agreeable, after all it canāt hurt to improve in those dimensions, no matter how unconfrontational I may already be.
Ariel, a lot of what youāve said here shows that you have humility, a growth mindset, and a care for the greater good that outweighs your ego. Examples: being open about the incident with your members and asking for their feedback, same thing on this forum, being thoughtful about your approach and willing to work on yourself. Those traits make great community organizers.
You got a group that clearly relies on you. Community organization is an auction market (people step up and fill needs based on whoās available at the time and has what skills and remaining gaps can be filled by others) as opposed to a winner takes all market (there a single metric and can only be one best eg. in many entertainment and sports professions.) Different aspects of community organization as a community grows require different skills. It sounds like you have the skills to maintain what you already have and youāre running into challenges with something new, which is natural.
Grant seeking is a different skill set than community organizing, and youāve only gotten feedback about being confrontational in a grant seeking context. Even there, thatās not much feedback since itās from two people from one grant from one org. Iām not familiar with how the EA grant process works but most proposals for most grants (across the board, not just EA) get rejected. Iām not sure what kind of support you got for your second grant. Iāve worked with nonprofit leads who sought plenty of support for both grant writing and prepping for conversations with decision makers. Itās up to you how much you want to develop vs delegate this skill.
Also, something thatās not considered confrontational to people in one country might be in another. It could help to talk to people from the countries where the decision makers reside to learn about the local norms. You can also bring people along to your 1-1s to handle different kinds of topics. If people give you feedback that youāre confrontational in the future, you can also ask them what about your behavior came off as confrontational.
It sounds like your question got Alice thinking. Itās unfortunate that she didnāt respond to your message. As you said, she might not have seen it. I usually try to get peopleās contact info on multiple platforms (and message them on multiple platforms if they donāt respond on one) to make it easier to get their attention.
Once you hit a ball to someone elseās court, itās out of your control whether it comes back in a way that helps you and your group, stays on their side of the court, or eventually comes back in a way that helps others rather than you and your group. Some people are good at driving these conversations in directions where theyāre more likely to benefit their groups and might be worth learning from. That said, thereās a lot of manipulative advice out there and I admire your for taking a direct, curiosity based approach instead. At the end of the day, the progress we make in educating others and probing their critical thinking doesnāt always benefit us directly but can still better the world.
Itās smart that youāre already focusing your attention on decision makers with aligned values eg. EA. Itās hard when you have a hard time finding sponsors even within groups you see as your tribe. You mentioned being an EA newcomer. Things might get easier as you get more of a lay of the land. You might find people who hear your points more easily and connect you with other people and orgs who can help. It sounds like youāve already found a good amount of support eg. for your second grant. People who make big wins happen for communities eg. grants get a lot of praise but itās the people who keep showing up for their communities in the meantime who hold them together.
I have mixed feelings about this because I donāt know enough about the situation.
Conflicts:
There are things that people are naturally better at and worse at, and the law of comparative advantage does make sense vs. There are things that people could get good at but donāt because they donāt believe in themselves and donāt try aka imposters syndrome. (I think this may result in some lack of diversity in tech, STEM, EA, etc.)
I think the EA community might lean more towards trying really hard to match people with what they are good at /ā not bad at. I think the EA community may underestimate that when people try and want to get better at a skill (or that they arenāt good at something because they donāt believe in themselves and donāt try to get better), they can get much better at it and surprise themselves and others by how much progress theyāve made.
It seems to me that community building is what excites you a lot at the moment, which means that there is a lot of potential for improvement because you care about improving.
Are there other things that also excite you as well? It could be good to enjoy community building and try other things too (though I realize that this may come with a lot of emotional baggage)! (As someone whoās been rejected from community building grants, I still feel the emotional baggage and it still makes it hard to make clear-headed decisions)
CEA has a different perspective than the community members who are seeing the community building happen on the ground. I think that getting feedback from the people who in your community is more accurate. I agree with notabot that grant-seeking and community building are different skills. I also agree with Dancer with it being very plausible that CEA made the right decision given the little information they had, but it doesnāt mean that you did anything wrong with your community building.
Sorry to hear that youāve had this experience and thank you for writing such a non-confrontational(!) post. I imagine many people have similar stories.
I think the following things are plausibly both true:
Grantmakers made a reasonable decision given the information available to them at the time and shouldnāt spend any more time evaluating your grant proposals for a while.
You shouldnāt update much on their claims that youāre too confrontational.
Grantmakers are in demand. The existing ones have very little time on their hands. They are generally making decisions on much less information than people are used to in the wider world in an effort to deploy funding quickly without too much fear of error to address urgent problems.
This can understandably be incredibly frustrating for unsuccessful grant applicants who have good reason to believe that the grantmakers made a mistake. Iām not sure if thereās a good solution to this situation just yet (and Iām saddened by the recent loss of the expanded grantmaking capacity from the Future Fundās regranting system), but the one thing I can recommend is that you at least donāt put too much weight on grantmakers having made a correct evaluation here.
Iāve only taken a cursory look at your work but I for one am glad to have you in our community :-)