Evaluation and Communication

For a month’s worth of posts, I (Scott) am critiquing my own past blog posts. I’m viewing this as an experiment in being willing to admit when I’m wrong, change my mind, and to do so publicly.

The difficulty (or one of the difficulties) in honest self-reflection following a fight comes in creating the distance we need between our attempts at discernment and the underlying unpleasant experience.  In other words, our feelings tend to cloud our judgment.  We need to create space between the emotional trigger and the beginning of our process of deciphering the meaning of the event or fight.  

The problem is, we intuitively and instantaneously seek the meaning of our interactions, often before they’re even finished.  What did he (or she) mean by this phrase?  Or by this look?  He (or she) is so angry, and this has never happened before, does that mean this relationship is over?  

In other words, we begin the analysis in the height of the moment when we’re least equipped to draw conclusions about the true meaning of the moment.  What I mean is, we draw plenty of conclusions about what that moment means, but very few of them are true or accurate.  

How do we draw accurate conclusions about what has taken place during a fight?  

More tomorrow.

2021 Scott reflects:

I can’t even being to describe what a big soap box I could get on about “evaluation” and the role it plays in communication. 

One of my counseling professors drove me crazy. Any time I would bring up a scenario where I would ask, “What do you think is going on with this person?” He would completely ignore it- and, instead, begin a conversation about what might a person who is doing that thing I’ve described need.

In other words, the lesson I got out of this was something like: You’re not going to figure people out, people often can’t figure themselves out, but we can often see what people want or need from the world by how they act in the world. For me, that removes the judgment from the situation. I don’t focus on evaluating what the other person is doing- I focus on what their actions might indicate about their needs. 

I believe this is helpful in life in general. I don’t think we’re good at evaluating, though people are often very sure that they know why everyone does everything they’re doing. 

Let’s try to move away from that. We don’t need to understand people- we probably never will. But, instead, ask: are they leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that helps us see what they need from us?