Well, that’s embarrassing

Image by Fauxels, from Pexels

Well, that’s embarrassing

Here’s a little interactive exercise we use in some of our communication workshops to illustrate how what people hear isn’t always what is said. 

Watch this video that has audio from a soccer match, and ask yourself what you hear:

Now watch this one. What do you hear?

The audio was the same, but you probably didn’t hear the same thing!

Our brains do the best they can to observe and interpret, but can you be sure of what you heard? We are bombarded with literally millions, perhaps billions of signals every moment, yet our limited senses and brains can only take in and interpret a very small fraction of all those signals. We simply can’t know everything, even though we often think we do.

When we are “triggered” by something someone else says, it’s not because of what happened outside of us, but because of the story we told ourselves in that imperceivably fast second between observation and interpretation. 

Said another way, you don’t observe reality, you observe your reality.