LEARN
Something Worth SharingMind The Gap As humans, we have an essential need to make sense of information and situations. This is how we learn and develop. It is also how we survive. We may no longer need to out-run big hairy creatures and escape to our caves, but we still have the same inbuilt protocols, just in case! We are designed to fill in the gaps of missing information so we can make quick decisions and take action. If we sense fear in our group, we immediately respond to it as a possible reason to be afraid ourselves. We guess where information is lacking - in a split second and often, not consciously. Let me give you another example of how this works; have you ever had a telephone call with a friend or relative that seems unusually dismissive? Once off the call, have you then filled in the gaps of why they were short with you with something like: “why are they upset with me?” or “what did I do wrong?”. It more than likely was more to do with something about their day - but that’s not what we guess. This is increasingly common with social media, emails and instant messaging - where lots of context and information can be missing, so we end up filling it in wrongly. When there is a lack of information, we instantly resort to a gap-filling situation - but rarely with positive ‘hearts and flowers’. Remember, it is a survival technique and so it’s a worst-case gap-filling that we jump to. To get past this we need to: have awareness that we’re filling in a gap with worst-case guesses pause remember that most of the time it’s about the other person, not us ask them for actual information to replace your guessing remember this is normal so be kind - to yourself and others
Of course knowing this can help us mind the gap, but it can also help us fill in information for others so that they avoid the gap!
|
