We all want to be right. We give 5 stars to training programs that let us be right all the time. We can be certain we will use what they are teaching because. . . we are already using it. We can only be right all the time if we’re not encountering anything new.
Life does not let us get it right all the time because it is always giving us something new to deal with. We step into complicated situations every day, situations where there is too much noise to know exactly what will be required.
Imagine this. You have a busy day and you encounter lots of obstacles as you rush from one thing to another. The traffic lights are always against you. The elevator is always slow. Even the coffee machine makes you wait.
You are on your way to a meeting with someone who is in the middle of a big, engaging project. Your meeting will interrupt their stream of thought. Except when it doesn’t, because that person is distracted by the buzz in the background of the next task, the next problem to solve.
Now imagine that you want to do two things in your meeting. One is to understand the information you need to exchange. And the other is to understand the other person. This is normal and this is very complicated. Without skill and discipine, you won’t be able to discern the difference between the noise and the signal. Is this person not interested in what you have to say? Is it taking too long to connect?
Our default is to throw some words at each other and move back into the stream of our day. Often, we leave with partial (misleading) understandings of both the information and the relationship. Unless we have taken the time to build skills that allow us to clear our own state, pay attention to the other person’s, and only focus on information after we have made a real connection.
It’s possible to cut through the noise. But it takes more than an understanding of the problem. It takes practice of the skills.
