The Dilemma of Logical Thinking Around Resistance

Time and time again I felt I’m in the wrong place. And my mind would just keep telling me: “Are these people really this stupid!”

What I explain or wish to convey is straight forward, but yet, for reasons beyond my understanding, my messages are just not going through.

No matter how hard I try to use graphs, examples and simplifications. There is just this brick wall that prevents this voice from reaching the brains of the other person.

Conversations become difficult, if not impossible. Experience is ignored. Tension arises despite all good will, intentions and even common goals.

I spent a lot of time working on myself. I did lots of readings, took courses and workshops to improve my communication skills, negotiation skills, presentation skills, team building… I even resolved in studying human behavior and social psychology. Yet nothing seemed to work.

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Being a systems thinker, I decided to pause the efforts of trying to feed my ideas to others and to look deeper into what is going on in order to integrate these experiences and lessons learned in order to come up with a model that is more capable of communicating and of reaching goals of advancement.

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The dilemma of resistance becomes clearer when we look at the sequence of perception for any topic that is given to us. We usually go into the following sequence, where our Database (education, learned lessons of life, ideas, values, personality traits,…) plays a role in giving meaning to ideas and data we are exposed to and based on the meaning, emotions arise to decide if we will accept the ideas or resist them.

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The IQ zone resistance:

In this zone, a scientific and systematic approach can be used in the manner that I attempted to describe in my previous article “Optimized Systems Thinking Guideline”

This approach is very successful in presenting ideas, debating, presenting evidence and arguments that support a particular train of thought, until common grounds are reached.

This approach however, when attempted alone, despite its clarify and efficacy, is not sufficient to deliver results.

The reason for the failure is NOT that people are STUPID, but it’s simply because emotions triggered by our presentations and emotional responses of the people we talk to are not addressed.

To put it in simple terms:

“We rarely talk to people’s intellect. Most of the time, we are talking to their emotions!”.

In following articles, I will attempt to divide these emotions into their constituents and present possible dynamics to work around these emotions to reach desired objectives.