Mike Lehr's Blog

One aspect of sensitivity that I find challenging to explain to sensitive people is their natural intimidation of other people.

As we saw in Part II about the unconscious, emotions are churning outside of our unawareness. This includes emotions related to our defense mechanisms that are frequently triggered when we meet people very different from us. However, on the surface we will often just rationalize these feelings as, “I don’t like that person because . . .”

Emotions, especially intense emotions, trigger defense mechanisms because they are very unpredictable. These emotions are the source of strong passions that move us to tackle situations when the odds are against us.

Since sensitive people often have many emotions, especially intense ones, flowing through them, it can be intimidating or, at minimum, frustrating to work with them. It’s intimidating because they are likely aware of something that we aren’t. It’s frustrating because simple man-made creations like logic, numbers, rationale and reasons can’t alter the innate nature of emotions.

For sensitive people, this means working covertly with the rest of us. Sharing some of their emotions with us can be awkward, humiliating and even dangerous because often they can’t be quantified, reasoned, proven or even verbalized. Since we aren’t aware of the emotions running through all of us on an unconscious level like they are, sensitive people will find working with us similar to a sighted person working with blind folks. How do they explain what they see to us? Moreover, once we even sense they can see things we can’t, our defense mechanism kicks in.

Thus, sensitive people need to be aware of their intimidating nature and of the fact that they are talking to very blind people from a situational awareness perspective.

Other posts in this series:

• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt I): Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt II): The Unconscious
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt IV): Talent
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage

In Tobey Deys’ comment about my post regarding the implications of people’s unawareness to television viewing, she asked for my thoughts on the productivity of multi-tasking and to some degree channel surfing.

Generally, there are many studies reference the decline of productivity from these tasks. We frequently hear about cell phones and driving for example. However, there are five contrarian considerations:

1. Situational awareness varies by person
2. Situation might require it
3. Over focus produces narrow-mindedness
4. Synchronicity could occur
5. Enjoyment could result

First, the negative effects of multi-tasking and channel surfing will vary by person. Two people can focus on the same task and retain a different degree of awareness with respect to their surroundings. Thus, varying levels of situational awareness can make multi-tasking and channel surfing less costly for some.

Second, the situation might demand multi-tasking. Rather than focus on one task at a time, productivity might increase if we coordinate the performance all tasks such as running errands.

Third, over focus can prevent us from seeing other opportunities for increasing productivity. Here, multi-tasking and channel surfing can retard the effects of anchoring in which we become too wedded to an approach.

Fourth, these activities allow synchronicity to play out by allowing us to “stumble” upon people, information or other resources that might benefit us later rather than now.

Finally, we might find so much enjoyment in multi-tasking and channel surfing that we become more productive because our attitude improves.

In the end, these activities are a personal decision. People are too different to apply findings without modifications. Of course, there is also the point that sometimes having fun is more important than being productive.

If you research leadership, you’ll find virtually all leadership models promoting the concept as something approaching divinity. What we don’t address is the dark side of leadership: the herd mentality it can create in many of us.

For instance, in the February 7, 2011 of The New Yorker, John Seabrook writes in “Crush Point” about a study designed by Iain Couzin of Princeton University and led by Jens Krause at Leeds University. It found that a group of 200 randomly walking people, injected by a few purposeful walkers, ended up following the latter even though they had no idea where these purposeful walkers were going. In a previous post, we also saw people believing leaders over facts.

As a result, leadership will encourage a state of mind in which some, and likely many, followers neither think nor introspect; they just follow. This will occur whether leadership is good or bad. Even a good leader can’t ensure all followers will develop their thinking and questioning skills so they can evaluate what’s best for them. They will need leaders to make decisions for them.

This also explains why confidence can be the tool of the incompetent. It encourages those, who can’t or don’t want to think for themselves, to follow someone with a purpose, no matter what that purpose might be. It plays subtly into the idea that “going somewhere is better than going nowhere.” Thus, people can achieve a purposeful life by following someone, anyone.

In reality, leadership is subjective. As a result, especially if we don’t learn to think for ourselves, we could easily follow leaders who are good for others but not good for the rest us.

Think about it. If not, ask a leader to do it for you.

Managing your Twitter account is like using smart bombs. No matter how smart the technology, you can never guarantee a good target unless a human evaluates it. In other words, you have to read tweets to determine who the good tweeters are; you can’t rely upon Twitter or the various Twitter-related applications to do it for you.

Consider that recently, I retweeted this tweet by Justin Harrison:

Cleaning up my twitter clutter for more effective and meaningful communication…been doing that a lot lately

To which I received this from Dr. Mitchell Friedman:

would love to hear your definition of Twitter clutter, and how you clean it up

So, let’s explore this.

Twitter clutter is the group of tweets you endure from followers just so you can increase your following. You follow them so they are encouraged to do likewise. Both benefit because your followers increase. Twitter creates this condition because size matters and because it has no good way of quantifying tweet quality, only tweet quantity.

How do you clean it up? Well, I use my lists. Everyone whom I follow goes on a list based upon tweet quality. I define good tweeters as people who are:

• Causing me to stop and ponder
• Making my life better
• Promoting me or my ideas
• Possessing personalities I want to see flourish
• Being good friends
• Puzzling because I don’t why I like them

Yes, some sites measure clout, but heck Satan has a lot of clout. How do they determine whether it’s good clout, bad clout, confusing clout, disruptive clout, nonsensical clout or any type of clout?

In the end, only a human can clean up Twitter clutter; qualitative assessment is a job for a human.

Previously, I listed some unconscious biases we have in decision-making. What I witness is that people just don’t believe that known wrong information has any affect on them.

For example, research in “Before You Make That Big Decision” by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony* which appeared in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review showed that dice rolls “suggesting” sentencing decisions to judges did in fact influence their final decision even though they knew these decisions were made by dice.

Cognitively and psychologically, we call this “planting of a seed” in our minds as anchoring. We experience its negative side when someone is locked on a thought based on incorrect information that we tried to expose for them. As with the judges, this erroneous information assumes a frame of reference for their decision on a subconscious level.

As the writers indicate, anchoring’s real danger is “that people always believe they can disregard them” because the information is incorrect. They don’t believe it. However, it affects them in the same way that intuition affects our thought processes. However, since people don’t realize it, they will shop for rationales to attribute elsewhere this influence on their decisions.

Anchoring also affects our views of people and contributes to the unconscious pigeonholing of people. This can tremendously affect our ability to assess and develop talent. This is why the gossip and unfounded opinions of others will still influence us even though we “ignore” them to form our own opinion.

We need to raise our awareness concerning the influence this has on others, and more importantly to us. We can’t believe we are immune; we need to make conscious adjustments or else we will fall prey to the influence of known wrong information too.

*Olivier Sibony is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

This post is similar to my previous post about changing the message by how people feel about the messenger. In the case of food, you can alter the taste of it by altering how people feel about the food.

One way is to alter how you describe the food. Apparently, PepsiCo is conducting extensive research here.* For instance, they are running “fMRI studies to test the hypothesis that calling a product ‘healthy’ may lower taste expectations in the brain.” They also use cameras to record these tests because “what people say about the way something tastes is a lot of times not what they really are thinking.” This latter point reinforces an earlier post that people often are not aware of what influences them.

For instance, in addition to the way we describe food, we can indirectly alter food’s taste by changing the:

• Presentation of the food: how it’s delivered and how it looks on the plate
• Ambiance of the eating environment, whether it’s clean or dirty for instance
• People with whom the eater is dining such as good friends or co-workers
• Food’s price; people will tend to feel expensive food tastes better
• Silverware, plates and other utensils with which to serve and eat the food
• Packaging of the food; beverages are a prime example of the importance of this

Even though cooking professionals and restaurateurs are emphatic about these, very few people would agree. They would refer to objective factors such as length of cooking time, seasoning, sauces, saltiness, etc. As PepsiCo discovered people don’t do a good job of attributing what really influences them.

From a problem-solving perspective, knowing these indirect ways of influencing people opens the door to a vast range of potential solutions for simple, everyday problems.

*John Seabrook, “Snacks For A Fat Planet,” The New Yorker, p. 65, May 16, 2011 [Note: Link does not provide complete access to this article because of subscription restrictions.]

Although sensitive people often don’t see their sensitivity as a gift, it is. They are more in tune with their world and those around them. However, because what they feel is often only operating on a subconscious level with the rest of us, they often hold a minority view. Thus, expressing this gift as a talent is challenging.

Sensitive people are often the best ones to ask about the overall emotional state of their organizations. In fact, I have often asked them this question:

Do you find that when you walk into a strange organization you can feel what the morale is like fairly quickly?

Usually this occurs for them within the first fifteen to sixty minutes. We could be talking about a company of fifty or a corporation of thousands. In fact, many of them could walk into a room filled with people and assess what’s going without ever talking to anyone. Moreover, their assessment would be more accurate than an average person who had talked to everyone.

While this might seem fantastic, it’s very real when you consider there are already trained professionals who can assess the potential success of married couples and sales people through observation only, no audio. Moreover there are researchers exploring the predictive aspect of subtle facial movements that only our unconscious captures. Such research is also being applied to people and technology in the recognition of security threats at airports.

Still, since many of the rest of us usually don’t get these feelings, it’s easy to talk sensitive people out of their minority, often solitary, views. That’s why for many sensitive people with whom I have worked, many of their worst decisions have come as a result of others changing their minds rather than following what they know is correct.

Other posts in this series:

• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt I): Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt II): The Unconscious
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. V): Intimidation
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage

The May 21, 2011 edition of The Economist had two articles casting a cloud over the skill inherent in successful stock market investing. Why is this important to intuition? It’s because we tend to have an emotional bias that overweighs outcomes in the evaluation of skill.

In fact, the article, “Poker-faced”, cites Steve Levitt and Thomas Miles of the University of Chicago as having found more skill present in poker than in stock investing. Simply stated they found that historically good poker players tend to do better than those without a history of success do. However, such a correlation didn’t exist with stock investing, and thus, they concluded there is “little evidence of skill” in stock investing. Thus, we could claim that poker is more like investing and the stock market is more like gambling.

The other article, “The Missing Link”, reinforces this unpredictability of the stock market by surveying several studies saying there is no correlation that a good economy translates into rising stock prices. Yet, in spite of these articles, we often see investment professionals tout their historical performance to attract additional clients.

Nevertheless, we know that top poker players don’t always finish on top; it’s not unusual for them to go home early. Moreover, poker is more self-contained, more controllable than the stock market. Everyone plays with the same, small, finite deck of cards and, depending upon the tournament, the same amount of money. By comparison, the stock market is anarchy.

We like to believe there is a direct link between outcomes and skills as opposed to having outcomes linked to a myriad of forces beyond our control. The belief gives us security in an uncertain world.  Yet, it will encourage us to see more skill in stock investing than in poker.

Intuitive approaches, ones that influence people on an emotional, often unconscious level create additional options for almost any problem, especially if they involve people. Too often though, we look at problems objectively: we solve problems rather than alter how people feel about them.

Customer service is fertile ground for intuitive approaches. In the May 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Ryan W. Buell and Michael I. Norton write in “Think Customers Hate Waiting? Not So Fast…” that customers will endure waiting “even when what’s shown is merely the appearance of effort.” Examined this way, customer service is theater, even entertainment. People pay to see comedians. Why wouldn’t they feel better about the same old service if it was suddenly more enjoyable?

Once, a quality service group, who had already heard many speakers on the topic, asked for a different approach from me. So, I taught them how to improve customer service without changing one process for doing so.

Here’s the key: don’t assume you improve customer service by providing better service. This doesn’t matter if customers don’t know or don’t feel that you are servicing better. So, communicate better that you are providing better service and influence better how customers feel about the service.

Previously, we saw that changing people’s feelings for you would change how they interpret your message even if you don’t change anything about the message. This principle holds true for customer service: change how they feel about you and you will change how they feel about the service even though you don’t change one thing about the service. We saw the same with management-employee relations.

By thinking of ways to influence people’s feelings about problems, we create more problem-solving options. Customer service is ideal for seeing how effective this can be.

A question emailed to me asked for elaboration on this quote of mine:

The difference between wisdom and intelligence is that you cannot be wise unless you have sensitivity for the human condition.

The primary difference between intelligence and wisdom that my quote highlights is an emotional one. For instance, who would you consult on relationships, on love; an intelligent person or a wise one?

Stated more pragmatically, we often hear psychopaths described as intelligent but not wise. If they were, would they go around harming people? Thus, we can more easily picture an insensitive, intelligent person than an insensitive, wise one.

Examine our intelligence tests. They have little to do with relational issues among people. Do any of them ask about love, happiness, sadness, hatred? They deal more with concrete concepts such as shapes, numbers and words. Intelligence and sensitivity are segregated.

Yes, the concept emotional intelligence exists; however, its basis is a mental one not an emotional one; it’s intelligence about emotions. It refers to empathy as an “understanding” not a feeling; it’s a mental task. We can see the mental aspect in advanced computers because we’ve begun to program robots to be emotionally intelligent based upon certain observable clues. Emotional intelligence tries to teach people the same thing. Yet, we refer to these robots as “artificial intelligence” not “artificial wisdom.” Again, the segregation of intelligence and sensitivity.

I define empathy as feeling what others feel. Mothers often feel what their children feel. Analogously, the difference between understanding and feeling is the same as the one between seeing a picture of a place and actually being there. Thus, we see wisdom as emotionally very different from intelligence, and that difference has a huge sensitive, empathic component.

Wisdom and sensitivity are not segregated.