Posts Tagged ‘Contamination’

Reduce Your IQ*

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*Idiocy Quotient

I wrote last time about the Tower of Babel. I’m a bit of a word geek (ironic, I know!) and couldn’t help getting all interested and excited about the word “Babel.” Most normal people probably don’t get excited over etymology (I even spelled “etymology” correctly without spellcheck, which I think takes me way past geek and squarely into “nerd”), so I’ll skip all the in-between and get to the point. We still use this ancient word, slightly modified, today: babble.

Babble is irrelevant, useless, confusing gibberish—words that don’t actually communicate anything.

Ever caught yourself doing this? Most likely it’s when you are under stress and not breathing well. You struggle for words and the prattle that comes out of your mouth doesn’t even make sense to YOU…! You know you sound like Continue reading: “Reduce Your IQ*”

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It doesn’t matter what YOU think

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A few weeks ago I was assisting a legal team during a trial. The day before opening statements we received a brand new piece of discovery which made the opposing side look very bad. As we walked into the courtroom the following morning the paralegal took me aside and said, “Peter* is planning on nailing the opposing counsel during his opening statement with the news we got yesterday. He’s really going to let them have it. What do you think?”

I said, “It doesn’t matter what I think, it matters what the jury thinks.”

We’re often so involved in what we’re going to say (content) and how we’re going to say it (delivery) that we forget the most important part of communication: how people will receive it (reception).

It makes sense, really. You can plan your content and practice your delivery, but you can’t know how people are going to receive your message until you’re in the act of delivering it. Not to mention most of us don’t know how to gauge how our message is being received, or what we can do differently if it isn’t being received well. We tend to think, “I’ll do the best I can, and then deal with people’s reactions afterwards.”

There’s a better way. Two ways, actually.

1) Increase your awareness, and

2) adapt your approach.

Nonverbal intelligence allows you to do both. If I know what to look for, I can watch carefully as I deliver my message and gauge the response. If I’m not getting the response I was hoping for, I can change what I’m doing.

For example, if Peter began his opening statement with the inflammatory information and the members of the jury pulled their heads back, shoulders up, and sat rigidly upright (a sign that people have stopped breathing), he could take that information as a sign that his listeners were not open to his “nail the opposing side” message. He could then drop his eyes and hands, walk to a new spot (while breathing) and continue with a softer approach.

The point is, it isn’t enough to know your content and deliver it well. You must always have an “eye” on your listener if you want to be successful.

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.

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The Giant Spider

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This past weekend I attended a dinner party along with several deaf guests. In addition to speech-reading, they signed; so I dug up from the recesses of my brain some American Sign Language I learned back in high school. One of the women asked about my siblings. As I signed my reply, I remembered the importance of using location in ASL. When I spoke of myself, of course, I pointed to myself. But my sister and brother weren’t present. I “set up” locations that would stand for them: I pointed to a specific spot on my left to represent my sister and a spot on my right to represent my brother. From then on, I simply pointed to “the spot” and everyone knew who I was talking about.

Even if you don’t sign, you know that location holds memory. One morning, over a decade ago, I reached into the back of my lower kitchen cupboard and pulled out a pie pan, only to discover an ENORMOUS spider running around inside of it. (It was “THIS BIG.”) Even now, after years and years of spider-free pie pan fetching, I anxiously hold my breath every time I get it, remembering that once it contained a terrifying arachnid.

Effectively using location helps us communicate more clearly and consistently. Nonverbally, we can help people remember what we want them to remember and help them compartmentalize (forget) negative news or interactions.

For example, last week as I rehearsed parts of the Nonverbal Classroom Management workshop for Sari, she would sometimes call out, “You’re telling a story! Move to your story spot!” By delivering content in a different physical location from where I gave illustrations, participants knew to tune-in to the subject matter when I stood in the “teaching” spot and to access the right side of their brains when I moved to the “story” spot. They were able to switch mental gears and remember more when I was systematic in my use of location.

We can do this on a daily basis in our offices, courtrooms, classrooms, or wherever we are. To make a strong point, detach negative information from productive work space, change subjects, or “mark off” any part of our message, we can move or shift location to create a separation.

The pie pan in the back of my lower cupboard will forever be associated in my mind with that giant spider. If I can find a place in an upper cupboard to store the dish, I will likely forget the whole incident.

Off to rearrange my kitchen cupboards…

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Why I fired my doctor and how she could have avoided it

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I recently had an x-ray on my back. When I sat down with my doctor to hear the results, she said the x-ray had incidentally shown that I had vascular calcification on my carotid artery. This meant I could have a stroke at any minute. She looked me straight in the eye and said, “this is serious.” And then she walked out the door.

As it was a Friday, I had to wait until Monday to get the ultrasound done on my neck to see how blocked the artery was. I don’t exaggerate when I say that was one of the longest weekends of my life. I had the ultrasound and found she had misread the x-ray. I was relieved, yet furious. I have since found a new doctor.

I don’t blame her for misreading my x-ray. What I do blame her for is how she communicated the information. With that in mind, here are my top three tips for medical professionals:

Communicate both your position and your person. We patients are pretty darn vulnerable sitting in a waiting room, usually without the benefit of our clothes. We need to feel that you care about us personally, but we also want to believe you know what you’re doing. You need to communicate both empathy and expertise. To communicate your person (empathy), use eye contact, curl the voice up at the ends of statements, smile, and use more relaxed body language. To communicate your position (expertise), straighten your posture, curl the voice down, and focus your eyes on the matter at hand.

Don’t look at the patient when delivering bad news. Ever hear the phrase, “don’t shoot the messenger?” Oftentimes it isn’t what we say that causes us to be “shot” it’s how we say it. Eye contact is the number one way to attach information to yourself. To separate yourself from the message, look at something else. In my case, the x-ray would have been helpful. This is true for those who work in medical offices as well. When discussing a bill with a patient, look at the bill. Where we look is where the responsibility lies. It wasn’t my doctor’s fault that there was a shadow on my x-ray. So look at the x-ray. This doesn’t mean we never look at people. It just means we’re systematic about when we look and when we look at something else.

Separate the problem from the solution. After looking at the x-ray together, she could have looked at me to discuss solutions. For example, -looking at the x-ray- “if you’ll notice this shadowy area here, that’s what we’re concerned about. It appears as though you may have some vascular calcification on your carotid artery.” Looking at me she might say, -”Now, the way we’ll find out for sure is to have an ultrasound done on your neck.” Turning back to the x-ray- “If it does turn out that there is calcifcation,”- turning back to me, “here are our options.” Then she could go on to list them. By using eye contact in a systematic way, she associates the problem with the x-ray, and the solution with her. Looking at the x-ray = problem. Looking at me = solution.

I know she meant well, even if she didn’t get her message across. Which just shows how difficult it is to communicate what we really mean sometimes. Increasing our nonverbal intelligence will assist us in clarifying the intent of our message, especially when that message is negative.

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Are you guilty of contamination?

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This past summer my husband and I took a trip to Finland. My parents are Finnish immigrants, and I am first generation Finnish-American. We had a lovely three weeks, and when we returned I unpacked, stood in the doorway of my home office and contemplated going back to work. At that moment I heard the voice. It could have been mine, the universe, or maybe my dog, but it said,  ”You can’t work here anymore.”

Now perhaps you think I just didn’t want to go back to work, and that’s probably a teensy bit true, but in actuality, I didn’t want to work there. From home. And I never did again.

Luckily I found an office within a week, or FORTE would have ceased to exist.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with working from home, and if I had to choose either/or, I’d go with hate. Yes, it’s convenient, but not so much when you have a husband who is home in the mornings-I can’t tell you how many times I had to sit down and say, “Honey, I work here, so please stop walking into my office to chat”-  and it’s really difficult to walk by a sink of dirty dishes and not drop what you’re doing to wash them. Not to mention the call of the afternoon nap, Days of Our Lives, and don’t even get me started on the constant snacking.

Working from home was beginning to take its toll. I either worked so much that I was writing copy for the website until 11 p.m., or I was so overwhelmed that I sat all day and did nothing. The latter wouldn’t be a problem on occasion, but it was difficult to relax and recharge when my work was always staring me back in the face.

I began to get anxious every morning, dreading going into my office to work. My home began to feel like a prison. It wasn’t until after my three week vacation that clarity hit: I was guilty of contamination.

Contamination is really easy to do. We’re constantly spilling one aspect of our life into another, instead of keeping them separate. My theory is we don’t take contamination seriously, thinking that efficiency is more important than sanity. This is why we bring our work into the bedroom, or our laptops into bed and then we wonder why we can’t turn our brains off and relax.

It’s easy to contaminate because location holds memory. Have you ever sat in your living room -perhaps watching TV- and then got up to grab something from another room, only to forget half-way there what it is you were after? What do you have to do? You have to go back. Walking back to the living room jogs your memory.

To illustrate this idea, let me borrow an example from the classroom. We caution teachers to avoid disciplining from the same spot in which they teach, because it makes it much more difficult for students to go back to learning. They can’t erase the memory of the discipline or the upcoming consequence from their minds. Instead we ask teachers to stop teaching, move to a different location, discipline from there, and then return back to the teaching spot. Students are more able to shake off the discipline because it was done in a different location.

We’ve observed in hundreds of classrooms and found that teachers only have to walk to the “discipline” spot twice before students understand what’s happening. The third time the teacher walks to the predetermined location, students are already shushing each other because they know that they’re about to get into trouble. The teacher has never indicated what the spot means, she or he has just been systematic about moving there every time the class needs discipline. This spot becomes so powerfully associated in the minds of the students, that we have to caution teachers to not do anything else from that spot.

Which just shows that we have to be careful -in all aspects of our lives- to decontaminate. In other words, we need to get systematic about where we do certain tasks, and be careful about what types of visual reminders are present. For teachers, lawyers, and managers, that means moving to a new location for the delivery of negative information. For me it meant moving my office out of my home. For those working from home who neither have the desire nor means to work somewhere else, it may mean containing work to one room and not spilling paperwork onto the kitchen table or working on the laptop in the living room. For those who work outside of the home, it might mean putting the briefcase into the closet when you walk in the door, and agreeing to stop checking email at night and on weekends.

Decontaminating my work environment has had a tremendous effect on my work and home life. I’m able to concentrate when I’m at work, and relax when I’m at home. My productivity has doubled. Look around and see if you’re inadvertently contaminating your home or workspace. Be vigilant about protecting your space and you’ll find it’s easier to concentrate, relax, and find balance.

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