I saw some thing the other day which reminded me of an old joke. Travelling to work, I passed the local chip shop called ‘MR CHIP but something was different this time. The C had fallen off (or been removed by local youngsters) and it now read ‘MR HIP’.
I’m used to searching for meaning as a part of my work and so I found I was struck by the difference a small change can make. Removal of the C had changed the message ‘MR HIP’ was now sending out into the community!
It made me smile and I knew I was travelling too far down the road of analysis. Even Freud said ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!’
At this point, my neural connections took me too an old joke which went:
‘My wife died’
‘Sorry to hear that. What did she die of?’
The big C
‘Yes, that’s a devastating disease.’
No, you’ve got it wrong. She was standing under the chip shop sign and the big C fell off and broke her neck!
A bit like the two Ronnie’s four candles sketch, the laugh lies in the misinterpretation, the assumptions we make. Like predictive text, our computing brains hear half a story and skip to the end or come to a conclusion even if it is the incorrect conclusion
We human beings are hard wired to do that.
It takes milliseconds to make up our minds about a person when we first see them. We try very hard to ‘box them up’ and place them into an area which says ‘friend’ or ‘foe’, ‘my tribe’ or ‘another tribe’. In the days of the caveman, that ability could, of course, be a life saver and can be today if you are confronted by an individual with whom you feel unsafe.
And yet, if we make assumptions or label people, we create a one dimensional interpretation of that person.
Stereotyping is lazy. Whilst acknowledging our predisposition to put people in handy boxes, we need to challenge our assumptions. Once we’ve made an assumption and created the label, again, due to our wiring, we then look for the evidence that we are right and ignore the things which conflict with our assumptions. That is until we are confronted with reality or evidence to the contrary (like the chip shop joke).
A paradigm shift occurs when the map you have in your head is challenged by new incoming information which forces you to reassess and shuffles up all the paper work in your head.
Like the story Steve Covey recounts in his book The Seven Habits of highly Effective People;
He was sitting on a subway train full of commuters, some reading newspapers, some dozing quietly, when a man got on the train with four unruly children who proceeded to run up and down the carriage annoying the occupants. The man was seated next to Covey who felt compelled to say something.
He leaned across and spoke quietly ‘you should do something about your children’. The man seemed startled, like waking from a dream and replied;
‘Yes, you’re right. I should do something about my children. But we came from the hospital where their mother died this morning ……..and I don’t know what to do about my children.’
Sometimes, something is said or done, or we read something which changes our perception, challenges our assumptions and reshuffles all the paperwork in our head.
When we makes assumptions about people or events and jump to conclusions, we miss much of the story or deny ourselves the opportunity to see the three dimensional person
Our internal maps send us messages designed to help us navigate the world in which we find ourselves and are made of all our previous experiences bur as Robert Dilts explained ‘the map is not the territory’.
Staying open to new incoming information which may conflict with our assumptions allows us to stay flexible and accept that just because we think something is true, does not mean it is true.
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