Janet describes a presentation where she noticed her manager checking his watch, assumed he was bored, and skipped slides. When she asked what was going on, he said he was just checking lunch availability. The story shows why naming your observations and assumptions, without accusation, prevents misunderstandings.
Chapters
I was giving a presentation to a manager years ago about the findings that I came up with after a number of interviews. I'm going through the slides, the presentation, and I notice that he looks at his watch. I'm also aware of my own psychological luggage. So my little thought bubbles think, oh, he's bored. I'm going too slowly is kind of the negative. And so what I do is I skip a couple of slides and I go, I'll just jump over these and go to this part. And he said, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? I want to see those. But I knew enough part of my Conscious Conversations piece to get to really authentic relationships. I said to him in a totally non accusatory way, I told him the data that I saw. And I said, I saw you look at the watch. And when I saw that, I assumed that I was going too slowly for you. I tell you that in the pieces because that's an important part of authentic communication. But I was wrong because he said to me, you see those bagels over there on the countertop in this office? They always fed their employees. So yes, he says, I was looking at the watch to see what time it was. And if it's close to lunch, I don't have to eat the bagel, but I can wait a little bit. He said, it had nothing to do with my presentation, it only had to do with that. But if I didn't share my assumptions about what I saw and how I interpreted that, we would have lost. He would have know Janet, she just jumped ahead and went too fast and was out of control. And so I caught myself in the moment. And so I just thought I'd share that about observations and how you can use that to stay connected in relationships.
