Seeing what is (and isn’t) there…

I was in reflective mood this morning, so I went for a stroll.  The birds were singing gloriously and the squirrels were chittering angry at me for crashing their party.  I looked up at the clouds and I have truly never seen such 3D images.  They seemed to be an advancing armada of space craft, at least to me.  There is a long history of people looking skywards and seeing patterns, pictures and portents in both the clouds and the stars.

Then it occurred to me that we do much the same thing with other people’s actions and words.  We see, or think we see something and we interpret it, often in a self-referential way, so that the story pivots about us and how it impacts us.  As a race, and as a species, we have got quite good at interpreting signs and nuance, but an awful lot of the time we are just plain wrong.  We see a person grimace when they look our way and think they don’t like us or are angry but don’t know that they have a back problem. 

We can’t stop making these interpretations, it is part of our nature to do so, and to scan our environment for threats, but how often has someone close to you said something like “I know you are cross with me”, when you are neither cross nor even thinking about them?  If we can’t stop drawing conclusions from incomplete data the least we need to do is to check our assumptions, in an open, non-accusatory way, by saying something like “How are you feeling?” or “What are you thinking?”, simple open questions.  This can help avoid an awful lot of hurt and needless upset, and in business, can prevent wasted energy and poor decisions.

“All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.”  George Eliot

“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”   Friedrich Nietzsche

Tags: Communication, interpretations, mind-reading

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 at 10:45 and is filed under Communication, Hints, Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.