Imagine you walk into the office and one of your colleagues, who have their back to you, totally ignores you when you say ‘good morning’.
How would you react?
- Do nothing but think how rude your colleague is?
- Say good morning again in a loud and sarcastic voice?
- Think to yourself, you must have done something wrong for your colleague to ignore you and spend the whole day wondering what you have done?
- Be curious to why they haven’t responded?
It would great if everyone chose number 4. However, many times in the workplace, we react from an emotional, a past experience or a belief perspective or from a one sided viewpoint. And many times this reaction can cause conflict, confusion and damage relationships.
I love the quote by Victor E Franklin that says:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom
When I coach my clients, we always explore strategies to expand that space so the executive thinking part of brain has time to switch on rather than the emotional firecracker driving what comes next.
According to Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg (2009) perception is the conscious reception, selection, processing and interpretation of information by our brain via all senses. We struggle to make sense of things we cannot see or understand so what do we do? we create our own reality or truth.
Now imagine the same colleague is now facing you and you notice they have their earphones in and they appear to be on a phone call. You now have a different perspective. Not wanting to disturb a phone call, you choose to smile instead, walk to your office and converse at a later time.
Your reality of the event changes instantly once you have more or different information. Perspective is a powerful thing. Looking at only one perspective though can damage relationships, destroy careers or cause us to make rash decisions.
It is similar to operating from a context of a ‘single story’, which is told from a one sided viewpoint. A story where you only share recalled or selected content, and your experience with the event. This prevents us from sharing a more complex, nuanced view of an event, incident or situation.
Besides avoiding conflict or misunderstanding, when else can a fresh perspective be helpful?
In business, in leadership, in relationships, facilitating a meeting, training, presenting, moderating, in fact in all areas of your life. And yes anyone can learn to develop better perspective skills.
9 Tips to develop better perceptive skills.
- Expand the space between stimulus and reaction
- Adopt a more curious mind
- Seek to understand – look deeper or ask questions
- Be prepared to park your own biases and beliefs
- Be more aware of what’s going on around you
- Practice empathy
- Be more collaborative
- Develop deep listening skills
- Develop high-level communication skills
It’s not a skill you can learn overnight, it takes commitment and practice.
The reward though is less conflict, personal and professional growth, deeper self awareness and thriving relationships.
