It’s Not Giving Up, It’s Adding On: Why Understanding Our Filters is Valuable in Every Interaction We Have

It is all too common. What do we typically focus on when an interaction doesn’t go well? Our own intent. Which comes from where? Our Filters—the automatic mechanisms designed to take in and process exponentially more biased and neutral information than we are consciously aware of.

We can even go as far as blaming the other individual for the impact of our actions.

They didn’t behave the way they were supposed to.

They’re just too sensitive.

They took it the wrong way.

Until we can see the full power of our Filters, we have a very limited ability to accept accountability for the negative impact of our actions because we keep listening to the messages from our Filters, telling us that what we did was good and came from positive intent. We therefore make the false assumption that our positive intent can only lead to an equally positive impact.

Shifting the Focus?

To hold the Filters of others as equally valid, we need to first consider the possibility that our intent wasn’t met with an equally positive impact and then shift our focus of positive intent from us and our behavior to them and theirs.

Acknowledging that our Filters make decisions for us allows us to consider other possibilities—both in how we could see and experience the situation and how others might be seeing and experiencing it. Here’s an example.

My Spaghetti?

One evening, amidst the chaos of making dinner, starting the bath and bedtime routine with my kids, and simultaneously checking their homework, my mother-in-law’s meds (she was living with us at the time), and my work emails, my husband Miguel exaggeratedly mouthed to me from across the room, “We have to talk.”

As he pulled me aside, Miguel whispered, “Mom really doesn’t like your spaghetti. She doesn’t want you to make it anymore.”

My response?

“Until she can come to me and tell me to my face that she doesn’t like my spaghetti, then the problem doesn’t exist!”

It’s not that I was particularly attached to my spaghetti. Like everyone else in my family, I too, suffered through my jar-dumping, box-opening style of cooking that I relied on at the time. I just couldn’t believe she was going to my husband to complain. From the view through my Filters, she didn’t really want to resolve the issue. If she did, she would have come directly to me and talked to me about the problem.

In actuality, when she communicated indirectly through Miguel, she did so because she respected me too much to tell me to my face. For her, direct communication was disrespectful. We were both responding based on our Group Filters.

The behavior I expected from my mother-in-law, Esmeralda, was face-to-face, direct communication. My descriptors of her and her behavior of indirect communication were that she was disrespectful, gossipy, and rude. But when I assume positive intent on her part, none of my Filter descriptions of her can be accurate.?

I need to take the Filter descriptions of my own behavior—respectful communication, productive communication, effective communication—and assume she had those same positive Filter descriptions attached to her very different behavior. She saw the indirect communication as respectful and productive.

Not Giving Up, But Adding On

Conscious awareness of our Filters allows us to acknowledge them, hold them in check, and shift them when necessary. Instead of skipping over the conscious thought, I visualize it as going back and forth between the explanations and evaluations that our Filters send to our conscious mind to check and challenge them over and over again.

There is often resistance to taking accountability for our own Filters and, thus, our own behaviors driven by those Filters, resistance to shifting our Filters and, thus, our behaviors. It can feel as if we’re giving up our own values or giving in to the other person’s preferences. The reality is it’s not giving up but adding on, adding new perceptions and, thus, new behaviors.

Keep in mind that the alternative is to continue to be controlled by our Filters, falling into Filter fights with our behaviors completely misinterpreted as coming from negative intent, an alternative I don’t think any of us want.