“This meeting is going to go badly.”
Ever been in this situation? It's not the first time you've been here, the same meeting with the same people has gone badly before, so it stands to reason, yes?
You know their position (it's wrong); they know yours (but won't see it), and never the twain shall meet.
You prepare your arguments, take a deep breath and grit your teeth…
“Cover me – I'm going in!”
😮💨🚪⚔️
But wait. Let's remember how minds work, for a moment.
It could help.
1. Minds are very selective
On a macro level, in every moment, our senses are awash with more data than the mind-body can possibly handle. This vibrating mass of light-energy that we call life I suspect would melt our poor little brains, if we caught sight of its full majesty.
As Alan Watts once said:
“The ordinary everyday consciousness that we have leaves out more than it takes in.”
And for good reason! What we perceive is a teeny-tiny slice of that data, that's contextual to us, to survive as a species – what's called our ‘umwelt’.
And then, at a micro-level, we'll have our selective focus: the teeniest-tiniest bit of that teeny-tiny slice of ‘reality’ we're experiencing.
When we're really focused on one thing—again, necessarily—it's to the exclusion of all else. (We watched a short video to demonstrate this, the other week.)
What does this mean for your meeting?
It means that there's a lot more going on than you're aware of! (And that's not a reflection on you, it's just basic principle.)
2. Minds find what they're looking for
Another trait we've evolved, as a means of survival, is really good pattern-matching.
It's plausible that what started out as natural selection for humans who could spot the movement of predators on the savanna, has today evolved into our selection biases: we find what we're expecting to see (and miss what we're not).
I played a terribly naughty trick on my mum once, not setting out to prove this per se, but leveraging the fact, for my own amusement (🔗 ‘Expectations and reality’), and magicians do a similar thing with misdirection.
So minds will go out of their way to prove themselves right, as will become immediately apparent when you spend anything longer than 0.05 seconds on social media.
What does this mean for your meeting?
Put these two together, and you can start to see why that whole this-meeting-is-going-to-go-badly mentality might not be in your best interests.
😬
#justsayin’
Not just positive thinking
A common rejoinder for a mind at this point would be to brush this off as unrealistic, magical thinking:
“So you're saying I should just think happy thoughts in the meeting, and it'll turn out fine?! Get in the sea with you, and your woo-woo, Croft!”
Simmer down at the back, there.
I mean, if we keep in mind point #2, then to go in there with a whole load of positive expectations on your pattern-matching mind's radar might not be such a bad idea after all, but I totally get your point.
At the end of the day, positive thinking is no different from negative thinking, because it's all just thinking. And trying to believe that something good is going to happen, when you've so much evidence to the contrary, is probably a bit of a non-starter.
But the magic really happens in these situations, when we're present.
Open.
Back when I was making a new career for myself in the weird and wacky world of ‘Health Informatics’ (a made-up mix of anything to do with health data management), I was occasionally sent to speculative, networky-type meetings by my boss.
When my introvert tendencies were in the ascendence, I disliked these intensely and saw them as a waste of time—a distraction from the ‘real work’ I was engaged in—and I definitely used to go into them with the old this-meeting-is-going-to-go-badly mentality fully activated.
And they usually did, thereby reinforcing my beliefs that they were a waste of time. 🤷🏻♂️
Eventually, I stopped doing that, for my own sanity, as much as anything else. But rather than try to put a positive spin on it all (which was just as much of a non-starter to a cynical Giles), I chose the middle way – the one most closely aligned with reality.
I accepted that I didn't know what was going to happen, and did my best to go in to those meetings with as few expectations as possible.
Present. Open.
And when I'd got a bit of evidence for myself that this wasn't such a bad experience after all, I upgraded that to the mildest of expectations that something unexpected, unusual or exciting might happen in one of these meetings.
And you know what?
It usually did!
Minds are powerful like that.
I'm not saying that this is the cure to all of your work woes.
And I'm not saying that you should (🚩) do anything as a result of reading this.
I'm just pointing to the principles behind how we experience the world (and the workplace; and others) so that you can work with the mind in these situations, not be pulled hither and thither by it, blindly.
Think less. Live more.
💟
Giles
Mentioned above
Giles P Croft
A work relationship with a total stranger is still a relationship.
Giles P Croft
Naughty Giles 🐒