Hello again and happy Thursday!
We’re hoping you had a chance to listen to the conversation we offered last week for your listening pleasure, and thought we’d highlight some of the (we think!) key takeaways from the broadcast. Alex Cullimore, Cristina Amigoni and I examined, in depth, the concepts of meaningful conversation and connection, the fears involved in making us shy away from communicating intentionally, and the tools we have currently at our disposal that facilitate our avoidance - and there are a TON of them! In 2021, we find ourselves in a world, loaded with technology created to help us to facilitate communication more easily and more fluidly, at least conceptually. However we find that the platforms, apps, emails, texting, social media et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, in addition to being convenient and relatively quick and easy, have also had the (we’re sure!) unintended consequence of helping us avoid the, sometimes terrifying, prospect of actually having conversations and allowing us to avoid the very same. Throughout the podcast, I also found myself coming back again and again to the idea of the expectation of perfection.
Perfection, (defined by Dictionary.com as a quality, trait, or feature of the highest degree of excellence), is an impossible standard to strive for, (vastly overstating the obvious, but just sayin’). Perfection is the opposite of the human experience and our authentic selves. Human beings are messy and imperfect, but these are also the traits that make humanity beautiful. This crusade towards perfection is yet another reason we see a breakdown in communication between the five generations and amongst ourselves in the workplace and humans in general. Why is the quest for perfection a piece of this dysfunction? How can we overcome a trend that has slowly been bred by technology into our habits as human beings? We invite you to read on…...
Certainly we have “easier,” alternatives to real, person-to-person conversation. We submit that these, sometimes challenging and scary interactions, are how we discover the nuance, the experience, the opinions, the texture, the feel and the tone of another person - another human. You don’t get this from Google (all due respect). Taking the time to practice the essential skills of conversational interaction: language, vocabulary, social cues, understanding and feeling comfortable with the ebb and flow of conversation, practicing (and maybe making mistakes!), as we’ve pounded into you all, is how we get good at something - NOT perfect, mind you! For sure, the fear of the dreadful “not knowing” is absolutely pervasive: What to do? How to respond to an potentially uncomfortable question? What if I don’t have an answer? What if the other person laughs at something I don’t find funny? What if I find something funny and the other person isn’t laughing? What if the other person becomes upset? What THEN? What if I don’t have an answer to a question? What if the other person starts a discussion on something I know nothing about? EEEEK!! At the risk of sounding like your mother: practice with no expectation of perfection.
The temptation to eschew this practice is everywhere: why pick up the phone when I can email or text behind the comfort of a screen? Why go ask someone a question when I can Google the answer? Why call the doctor when I can WebMD the symptoms and self diagnose (careful with that one!). We worry that these “tools” have actually created vehicles to prevent meaningful conversation from happening and are helping to stoke the fear that keeps us from communicating intentionally, practicing our words, and maintaining relationships over time.
2021 brings with it the added ubiquity of constant advertisement and social media onslaught. Social influencers and thought leaders are able to present themselves as “perfect” online: fit, beautiful, conversant, smart, well-informed, and well-dressed. This is the internet lie - a costume donned by these folks to seek external validation and verification or self affirmation for the lives that they lead or whatever it is they’re pitching, instead of actually (gasp!) speaking with their followers. In truth, this “perfection” is only achieved with a photo filter, post-processing and editing, or carefully crafted poses in front of dreamy destinations paid for by affiliate marketing - in short, a standard impossible for the rest of us to achieve. However, with the push of a button or a flick of the wrist or by using a variety of Internet engines, we can instantly come across as physically perfect, grammatically correct, other humans - seemingly flawless or living a dream life (if you don’t take a peek behind the curtain of course). Thanks to tools like Google or Siri, you can ask anything and, in seconds, have an answer presented in a clean, black, helvetica font on a bright screen or a mechanized “voice.” Oh but this lacks nuance, no? Yes, Google can give you the textbook answer, but it provides no color, no perspective, no viewpoint, and no exchange of information informed by experience. This is not to say that Google isn’t a wonderful tool, that WebMD isn’t helpful in self-diagnosing (again, be very careful with that one), or that the Internet as a whole is not an incredible thing that puts millennia of human knowledge in an easily accessible place. But, with great power comes great responsibility - and this capability has been chipping away at our ability to ask questions and engage with others to understand an issue in question from a more rounded perspective.
So how can we overcome this reliance on technology and quest for perfection? Of course, we are all always striving to be better, but there is a difference between working to improve and working toward an impossible standard that will only leave us depressed as we can’t achieve it. The short answer, pounding again, is practice. What if, the next time we’re tempted to send an email or a text, we consider if the communication would be a richer experience by having a phone call or an in-person meeting? What if we consider the possibility that a dialogue might ensue and we might learn a little more than simply the scope of the written correspondence? What if we actually call the doctor instead of self-diagnosing (can you tell this one makes us very nervous?)? What if we relinquish the notion of perfection in lieu of the notion of good? Practice asking questions, practice having hard conversations, practice using intention (thinking about what we want to say, how we want to say it and who we’re saying it to) in communicating, and practice being genuinely curious about people and perspectives that are different from our own. It’s hard, imperfect but not impossible, we promise.
Until next time……..