Get Your Filters Out of the Way!

Get Your Filters Out of the Way!

Why do so many smart women who are confident and capable when dealing with their children, or in their work roles, find themselves struggling to communicate in many interpersonal relationships? Whether it’s a significant other, the co-worker whoirritates us, the mom we meet at the bus stop every morning who pushes our buttons or dealing with our own families, we often find ourselves frustrated and defeated in communications.

What goes on? Why is something seemingly simple relating to others often such a challenge for us? Why do we freeze up with some people, say thewrong thing over and over to another, and sometimes walk away feeling misunderstood with another?

In one wordfilters. We’ve all developed filters on the world that come about as a result of:

• our life experiences,
• our behavioral styles,
• what matters to us and what we value
• and many other factors

We think we enter into situations with other people with an open mind and with a feeling ofI’m a person who understands, and then we walk away feeling exactly the same as we always do. We get into a cycle that we can’t seem to break. The definition of Insanity applies here:Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result!

What happens is that we aren’t going into situations with a fresh look, expecting anew experience and with no preconceived ideas. We can’t. Our filters sit firmly in front of each one of our everyday experiences and they block us from being able to truly see other people clearly.

If you have a hard time believing this, think about a time where someone you know disliked someone or considered them to bedifficult. Then you met that person, interacted with them in some other capacity and found them to be quite agreeable and easy to deal with. How can this be? If the person is fundamentally the same, even with different sides of self and different approaches at times, how can they be likable to one person and difficult to another? The answer is that we see what we expect to see. We often can’t get out of our own way to see things asnew.

For today:

• Practice going into communications with others as if you don’t know what to expect.
• Watch your own expectations and preconceived ideas.
• Don’t judge what you see just observe it.
• Spend the day as aninterested observer open to others.

  You might find you learn something about others and about yourself that you wouldn’t otherwise know!

By Beverly Flaxington, author ofUnderstanding Other People: The 5 Secrets to Human Behavior available at www.understandingotherpeople.com and on Amazon.com.