Have you ever watched a baby stare at its own hand with utter fascination? I feel this way most of the time. People fascinate me. Words fascinate me. The way life orchestrates just the right set of circumstances that can lead to personal evolution…FASCINATING!
A short time ago, I started a new part time job in an environment I have enjoyed in the past and whose product offerings I know a good bit about. In truth, most aspects of the position will be easy for me. I know it is silly, but I feel guilty for choosing a path of ease. But as it works out, life has a rigorous syllabus for each of us and when we choose “easy” it finds wily ways to deliver our needed growth edge! And let me tell you, this new work environment has given me a trove of personal insight that feels remarkably relevant to this project, and I can’t wait to share it with you.
Quite early into my first day on the job, I learned that our location had been selected for a “corporate audit.” Not surprising, this fact carried some conscious weight for my manager. And now, with only 5 days into my training, I can tell the “impending audit” is like a sword of Damocles hanging over our collective heads and it is clearly coloring my early experience.
I have no way of knowing the actual employment implications of this audit. But I can feel my manager’s insecurity and anxiety. And I can tell it is affecting the team, that outside of its influence, seems friendly, supportive, and agreeable. As we work through checklists and take personal stock of our performance, I feel our shared burden of an unrealistic goal. Although we do not know the exact date when the auditing team will arrive, suddenly, EVERYTHING must be done in a VERY SPECIFIC WAY… and BEFORE THE AUDIT. What effect do you imagine this is having within my work environment? How do you suppose it is affecting our interactions with each other?
Well, to illustrate the point, allow me to share one anecdote. I have two people who have been specifically tasked with my training. There is a multi-page list of information and tasks they must go over with me and when that check list is complete, we each sign off on it. While sharing a lengthy shift with one of my trainers, I needed to break up the one-sided information flow and decided to ask her a few questions about herself. We were enjoying some banter when our manager walked up and sternly reminded us that my training check list must be completed before the audit. Because her chosen communication was driven by anxiety, it held some less pleasant attributes that left us each feeling the sting of being sanctioned. Not surprisingly, my trainer became far less thorough in her information sharing and far more motivated by the check marks that gave the appearance that I had been fully trained.
In many ways, I understand how my manager feels. I remember feeling a sense of dread and insecurity when Ken and I received notice that our business was scheduled for a routine sales tax audit. I worried about the adequacy of our bookkeeping and the financial implications of the almost assured gaps in our tax knowledge. I was restless and panicked as I tried to find and fix lapses in policies and procedures. Let’s face it, auditors do not come out with the intention of handing out gold stars. They are there to find ways in which you either do not understand or are not being diligent in following prescribed policies and practices. And it is an incredibly uncomfortable position having someone insinuate themselves into your little slice of the world with the sole purpose of finding errors.
I humbly believe much of what we are experiencing in our current social climate is not all that different than what I am witnessing in my work environment. Collectively we are responding to what feels like an impending “fault finding” mission. Many of us mean well and are doing the best we can in life. We are trying to prove our understanding and proficiency while fearing what may be discovered and judged as wrongdoing. Our natural response to this kind of internal anxiety is to project our insecurities onto others and start hyper vigilantly monitoring others with rigid social rules. And just like when my trainer and I felt reprimanded, when quick accusations arise, our instincts are to convey an appearance of competency, rather than working through the difficult and often clumsy task of acquiring, integrating, and mastering new knowledge.
Does this ring true for you?
For a while now, I have been unusually interested in how some behaviors can appear objectively similar but are experienced entirely different. For example, what is the observable difference between a search and an audit? What is the ostensible difference between a study and a scrutiny? By literal definition they are the same. But does not an audit feel remarkably different than a search?! And is not a study experienced quite differently than scrutiny? That is because the intention of the exploration and what is being sought is tacitly different.
YOU.logy developed both as a reaction to our current social polarization and out of an authentic recognition of a skill set that developed quite unwittingly as a picture framer. Over several decades I learned that my best framing designs came when I understood what was important to the client about the piece they brought in. When I listened for where they placed the value, I was able to see it through their eyes and include design elements that were unexpected but cohesive with both the visual work and the narrative behind it.
Baked into the YOU.logy concept are two implicit assumptions, both of which I might add, are not particularly supported in our culture CURRENTLY. First, there is ALWAYS something we are not seeing or do not yet understand about the person or the situation. Secondly, all beings want to feel their value and sense of belonging. Which means connection is possible when we seek to find what cannot yet be known.
Be honest. When you enter a social interaction what are you looking for? Most of us enter our social exchanges preoccupied with our own needs and viewpoints. At a base level, most of us want our needs to be met and our viewpoints accepted. At a deeper level, I believe most of us are looking for moments when we feel heard, understood, and valued? BUT are we looking to provide the same understanding for the person we are interacting with? OR are we looking for errors, faults, lapses, differences, and social wrongdoing? Are we conducting a social audit or engaging in a search for connection?
YOU.logy challenges us to enter our social interactions as if we were looking for the very things we may include in a traditional eulogy. In other words, we are looking to truly know the person; to see their true goodness and to recognize the ways they contribute to the world.
One of the fundamental skills in YOU.logy is something I call CONVERSATIONAL PROSPECTING and I liken it to the hobby of metal detecting.
Metal detecting promotes a remarkably healthy relationship with uncertainty and illustrates that people can CHOOSE to be intrigued and motivated by its promise of possibility.
When someone goes metal detecting, they may choose a location that holds potential, (like a downtown parkway near parking meters) but they do not know if they will locate anything of value. Even if they are alerted to something yet unseen, they do not know if their effort in digging will lead to a successful find. Nor do they know if what they locate will be of value. As such, they head out with tools calibrated to emit different sounds to help them sense what cannot be seen and to identify the material content of the object. To be successful, a detectorist must tune into both their environment and their tools to make their search as optimal as possible.
When you think about it, the internal landscape of people carries far more promise of finding hidden treasure, but most of us enter our social interactions distracted, defended, and fault finding. Why is that?
I believe the answer to that is incredibly complex and multi-layered. But I think the number one reason it happens is because we enter our social exchanges with an almost exclusively self-interested position. Often, we arrive with a predetermined set of beliefs and expectations we are not even fully conscious of. And just like the corporate audit, we enter people’s lives with a check list of idealized conditions that should be occurring and when we do not see signs of their presence, we “find fault” or “wrongdoing.”
To be clear, having standards for how we wish to be treated is not the problem. Assuming people know them is problematic. Assuming your lived experience and understanding should be matched by your social partner is a bit thorny. I would even assert assuming your social partner is as invested in your situation as you are is fraught with trouble. In truth, most of us are myopic and think we sit at the epicenter of each of our interactions. But do we hold ourselves to a similarly high standard of attunement and interest in the other person’s needs and perspective?
Let me operationalize this for a minute. If we go to a chiropractic appointment because we are experiencing back pain, we have entered a social interaction that is serving a functional need. Having the expectation that the doctor will listen to the conditions that led to the injury and will offer their experience and knowledge to treat it is appropriate. BUT do we recognize that this is a person that has a full and active life outside of their chiropractic skill. It may be a specific need that made their skillset necessary and their profession that makes their skillset available to us; but beyond that portion of the interaction, are we showing any interest in who they are, how their day is going, or why they do what they do?
Most of us will fall into the safe and pre-scripted social courtesy questions and NOT really listen to their answers. So, start with the easy social courtesy questions AND listen. Then get creative, think about it from the context of how would I get the kind of information I would share about them in a traditional eulogy? Asking what they did on the weekend might give you access to an interest in golf or a child’s involvement in baseball. But then ask a question about those facts that might give you more information about their internal climate. “How long have you been playing golf?” “Who first introduced you to it?” “What do you enjoy about it?” I promise you…stories will follow, and you will make connections.
When you get good at it, you may even find people saying, “Good question, I’m going to have to think about that.” That is when you are giving them the gift of new self-awareness and discovering their own hidden treasures.
So, what is it that YOU.logy is challenging us to look for? In a word, Understanding. We all want to feel understood. That is our common ground. That is our starting point. If we seek to understand and the recipient is seeking to be understood, there is always a meeting point. ALWAYS!
We are also on the hunt for something valuable. Ask yourself this, if you went out metal detecting and committed your time to find something unique and of value, would you be particularly thrilled to find a bottle cap? Of course not. It is an everyday item with which you are quite familiar. There is nothing rare or admirable about its discovery. Insisting on interactions that only reflect your own ideas back to you is remarkably similar. There is not a lot of value in it. So, yes, we are looking for ways we see life differently. We are looking to better understand the differences discovered between us.
Can you imagine what it would feel like to have someone spending their conversational time searching for the attributes that make you unique and valuable to the world? Would you not enjoy it if someone showed that kind of playful interest in what is hidden within you? And would you not want to offer the same experience to someone else? It may very well be contagious.
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.”
Vaclav Havel
I know, I can feel a few cynical eye rolls in the making. And yes, I have been accused of being a bit Pollyanna in my world view. But I cannot stop it, my childlike fascination repeatedly leads me to the same faithful belief that people are generous, creative, and kind. And if they have lost sight of it within themselves, maybe we can help them rediscover it.
Please share your reactions.