This Is Why You Are Not Understood (Hint: It is not entirely your fault)

“Am I just not communicating clearly, or are you not understanding?”

“How can I be more clear?”

Have you ever asked these questions??Communication is finicky. Two people can sit in the same conversation and leave with entirely different understandings of what was said. We can share moments with loved ones and come back 6 months later only to discover that we have completely different memories of the same event.?As individuals, being told we are not understood or that we are not communicating clearly can be bewildering.?How can we feel like we have conveyed a message clearly and even get acknowledgment from the other person(s) that they understand, only to come back at a later time to find out that what we were saying and what the other person heard was completely different?

This phenomenon can be frustrating, but understanding why two or more people can remember the same event differently gives us a powerful insight into how we may improve our communication and team chemistry as a whole.?

"We are literally leading against human nature; just the mere fact that we are in a position of authority can set off the alarm bells in a colleague’s subconscious mind and block any message we are trying to communicate."?        

First, we must understand at a basic level what is happening when we are “making a memory.”?Before communication even starts and eye contact is even made, everybody’s subconscious mind has already begun to create an internal emotional environment, in their body, based on the subconscious mapping of the external environment.?Things that seem as irrelevant as the furniture in the room, the lighting, the temperature, the colors, the windows and what is outside of the windows, the texture of the carpet; ?all of this is already having an emotional impact on us even though we are completely unaware of how these stimuli may be effecting us.?All of this happens in milliseconds and has a very real impact on our perception, learning and behavior.?Then we add ?more to the mental scene in our mind; the gender of those in the room with us, our relationship to them, the position in which people are sitting, body postures, eye color, hair color, eventually we observe facial gestures and start assessing what choices they might have already made today based on the above observations…. All of this again, before a conversation has even started.?This is all happening in milliseconds prior to walking into the room and after we have entered it.?Our conscious mind might be completely fixated on the fact that we skipped breakfast or that we heard an interesting news story, but rest assured our subconscious mind is alert to the moment and taking note of millions of bits of information in our environment that are informing our body and conscious mind about the most relevant threats and/or potential rewards.?

Now the conversation begins. ?With the subconscious mind of each participant of the conversation already primed and ready to correlate every word spoken to their underlying emotional state based on stimulus they are not even consciously aware of, a message attempts to get delivered.?With these various emotional states present in the room, (“emotional state” is a huge spectrum with thousands of emotions capable of being felt) each person's mental recording of the conversation will then be turned into a memory that they will have. These memories will then be associated with various potential brain regions that are associated with the emotions that were present before, during and after the conversation. Again, these emotional associations are made with consideration to all of the subconscious associations with all of the stimulus we have already mentioned.?This is where the disconnect may begin to occur: the range of possible brain regions associated with this memory of the conversation will color the experience a certain way so that, at a biological level, we determine whether that experience, if repeated, is likely to lead to pain or pleasure.?Hence why we remember things differently from one another:?our emotional state that is being primed pre-event, during the event, and post event determines how an episodic memory is recalled when we remember it because of the brain regions associated with that emotional state.?The general picture and canvas of the memory may be ?roughly the same as our peers, but we likely painted it with entirely different colors and mediums. ?

"When I trust you and you trust me, our subconscious minds are free to feel safe and we can begin to collaborate in a way that not only produces much better results and outcomes, but more importantly, feels good to the both of us."        

I could have entered the meeting disgusted about a news story I saw prior, while the team leader could have entered the meeting after getting scolded by his boss, meanwhile another team member could have just gotten the amazing news that she is going to become an auntie for the first time.?Combine that with all of the stimulus present in the moment itself that our subconscious is picking up on and drawing mind-boggling amounts of connections to, it is amazing we ever walk away from a moment with the same memory as another person.

This is not to demonize our human nature, but to present an opportunity for leaders.?Our subconscious emotional patterns serve us greatly. ?We just need to control the flow of information that our subconscious is using to draw conclusions. These conclusions show up in our conscious experience in ways we likely didn't intend for. Furthermore, they may be contradictory to our desires. ?Antonio Damasio, professor of Neuroscience at USC, writes, “As a result of powerful learning mechanisms such as conditioning, emotions of all shades eventually help connect homeostatic regulation and survival ‘values’ to numerous events and objects in our autobiographical experience.”?In other words, conditioning over time (repeated exposure to a stimulus such as interacting with another human, seeing a certain food when hungry or even just visually observing an object like a desk or a chair…etc.) leads to our subconscious mind assigning survival “values” to virtually everything in our environment. The problem arises for most people when they are conditioned at random, which is most of us.?We experience what we experience and our subconscious mind is free to draw whatever conclusions it pleases within the context of helping us survive.?Unfortunately, the subconscious mind tends to lean towards overprotection which prevents us from noticing opportunity patterns and/or behaving in a way that minimizes risk of external stimuli.?(Interestingly, our subconscious doesn’t do as good of a job of minimizing internal risk i.e. addiction, but that is a whole other article.

"It is amazing we ever walk away from a moment with the same memory as another person."        

We can begin to condition ourselves intentionally when we structure our time in a way that introduces our subconscious mind to a specific stimulus and then consciously controlling the experience and, more importantly, the thoughts about the experience itself. Doing this so that our thoughts about the experience are in alignment with the outcomes we want is a powerful subconscious conditioning exercise.?For instance, deliberate cold exposure (or DCE for short) when done safely and in a controlled environment can be used to train the subconscious mind when it comes to the experience of discomfort. We can train our subconscious to see discomfort as an opportunity that leads to reward.?There are many other intentional practices that target the subconscious mind and can condition it to behave in flow with our desires, not counter to them.?

?As leaders, it would benefit us greatly to keep these emotional mechanisms in mind while interacting with our team.?We are literally leading against human nature; just the mere fact that we are in a position of authority can set off the alarm bells in a colleague’s subconscious mind and block any message we are trying to communicate.?On the other hand, we have to be able to check ourselves and remove any subconscious blocks that might muddle our message when communicating to our team. ?One common example of this is prioritizing income, job stability, profits or status over the well-being of another person, which is a byproduct of associating money with survival in our subconscious mind.?These blocks don’t remove themselves. So what are some practical steps we can take with our team to begin to disarm the subconscious mind and allow communication and ideas to flow freely between one another??

Jim Collins, Author of Good to Great, outlines 4 best practice in cultivating an open culture:

1.????Lead with questions, not answers.?This activates the pre-frontal cortex of your team and brings more of their awareness to the present moment, which is inherently safer than the past or the future.

2.????Engage in dialogue or debate, not coercion.?In a truly safe environment in which every person values the well-being of the other person, people don’t want to be anything other than authentic and honest because they know it will encourage the authenticity and honesty of others in the room.?We must feel safe enough to be humble enough to know our solution may not be the best one and that collaboration with others in the room will lead to the best solution.

3.????Conduct autopsies without blame.?If you “know” the cause, you will surely find it (even if you are wrong.) Being open-minded and feeling safe enough to not know the answer allows for the truth to come to the surface; everybody can learn from the truth and should be excited for the benefits that come with unearthing the truth, regardless of how uncomfortably the truth may be.

4.????Build “red flag” mechanisms. ?Start by being absolutely willing to be wrong and nurture a belief in yourself that new information and lessons are to be celebrated because they move you closer to your goal.?Then, empower your team to share information with you real time about what is working and what is not.?A “red flag” is an opportunity to correct or hone-in-on the correct course of action.

Much of this may feel hard to put your finger on as we extrapolate on the inner workings of the mind, especially within the context of work.?Thankfully, more and more research is being done to quantify such “soft skills” as Trust, Safety and Empathy.?Stephen M.R. Covey has done a great deal of work in this area of quantifying the impact of trust in a work culture.?He writes, “A company can have an excellent strategy and a strong ability to execute, but the net result can be either torpedoed by a low-trust tax or multiplied by a high-trust dividend.”?As we just discussed, the function of “trust” has as much to do with understanding neuroscience as simply tuning into your own inner sense of what you can trust, and what you can’t.?

The more we normalize conversations about what we are feeling at any given point in time, the greater the likelihood that we will break down the invisible walls our subconscious mind has built around us out of fear of what might happen in the future.?When I trust you and you trust me, our subconscious minds are free to feel safe and we can begin to collaborate in a way that not only produces much better results and outcomes, but more importantly, feels good to the both of us.