The corruption of absolutes

Hi Francois, how are you doing today?

Hey Frank, I feel good, thanks.  After our last chat I thought about being stuck… and flow.

Do you want to share?

Yes, sure.  Can we chat about love and fear some other time, though?

Alright, as long as we get to it.  What about being stuck struck you?

Well, I noticed how someone talked to and about another person. “You are a big-picture thinker; you think like this…”  And to someone else he said: “You are detailed oriented.”  That made me wonder: Is that really so?

Good point.  To me it looks like he states his opinions as truths.  Does it bother you?

Well, yes!  I mean the information he so liberally sprouts may be inaccurate and downright offensive.  What if he is so convincing to others, stating his opinion forcefully and not allowing any other opinion to stand next to it?  And what if that opinion about someone is negative? “John does not know what he is doing.  Jack is impudent.  Sally is lazy.  Suzy is a hard worker, but not very smart.”  You know, in business and education I’ve seen it so often that people base their judgment of an individual on what an ‘opinion leader’ said – a gossip or someone as opinionated as the example we are talking about. 

Hmm.  I see what you are getting at.  From what I heard this person assigns his opinions on the identity level, and they may not be accurate or acceptable.

There’s more. 

Tell me.

He also has the knack to ‘read’ intentions into actions.   I sometimes stand astonished about how far those deductions of his are from what I actually intended or wanted.  I ask myself: Do my actions and what I said and my body language really give the impression that I had that intention?  It overlaps with the identity thing.  He sometimes says: “I can see you are depressed/unhappy/etc,” and what I or the other targets of his conclusions were experiencing or expressing at that moment is very far removed from what he saw.

Phew!  You know, people are entitled to their opinions…

Sure, and they are responsible for them too.  It is a problem when those opinions are inaccurate and are bandied about as the truth, and when they do damage.  We’ve chatted about this – I am responsible for what I say; you are responsible for how you understand it… What I say may be bullshit and others may eat it as the truth because it is dished up in a compelling manner. 

You want to know what I think?

Please.

You know the Meta model… this person perhaps does not know it or don’t care to apply it.  So he does not know the irrationality of a ‘mind read’ or ‘complex equivalence’ or ‘cause and effect’ or the ‘expert’.

That does not matter.  Isn’t it common sense that every other person experiences life from a different angle? I can never assume that anything that is true for me is true for them. To me not acknowledging someone else’s map of the world is the ultimate form of disrespect. As I am the centre of my universe, so everyone else is.

Francois, are you going to change the way he talks?

No.

Are you going to change the way he thinks?

No.

Are you going to change the way people that listen to him understand him?

No.

Are you going to change what he believes about the world, you and other people?

I’d love to, but no.  If he had been open to a conversation about this, I would have broached the subject gently.  I concluded that he hates any challenges to his way of doing, seeing and what he believes about others.

Perhaps most people are not comfortable with having their reality and beliefs questioned… So what can you change so that you cope better with his ‘truisms’?

Well, I can ignore their aura of truth and take them as opinions.  I would love to ask the question like: “how do you know?” or “what did you see that tells you that?”  As I said, I think these would be seen as a challenge and not as an attempt to get high quality information…

Sure. Pick your battles carefully.  There are two wonderful tools you can use in most (other) situations.  E-Prime helps you to keep your language personal and experiential and to interpret other people’s language as such.  So instead of saying, “The food is good,” you can say “I like the taste of this!”  And if someone else says, “This is good”, you can ask an unobtrusive question like, “What do you like about that?”  The last question is an example of Clean Language.  You don’t contaminate the other person’s experience by saying something like, “Yes, it is quite special” while to them it is perhaps ordinary, but still enjoyable...

I can see how things may be ordinary and still be good… Yes, this will help. Thanks.

Yep, it will help you to get unstuck.  There is one more thing to remember to create more flow.  What do you think of this: “His fear gripped him. That lead to aggression, and in the end his guilt was unbearable.”

Interesting.  How do I really know it was fear, aggression and guilt?  Where did they start and how did they grow to become what seems to be entities?  Hey, they aren’t things!

Right, they aren’t things they are processes.  When we deal with them like concrete entities that is what they become.  We get stuck inside this thing called fear – a nominalisation.  Flow, on the other hand, means that we view the process as something with a start and an end, inputs and outputs, relationships, causes and effects, various intensities, opening and closing of loops, strategies, and some form of resolution.

Wow. 

Yes.  How do you do fear? And joy, peace and love? 

Do you have time and red wine?

What for?

To discuss each of those and set the world to rights.

Ah.  Now, tell me what do you think – how do people learn absolutes and how do they learn flow?

Interesting question.  This is a guess and an opinion.  Perhaps conditioning contributes more to the ‘if this then that – and only that’ types of responses and perhaps experiential and exploratory learning contributes more to the ‘and what then?’ types of responses.  Having an open mind suddenly has new meaning for me!

Sure.  From what you said it looks like learning and living with an open mind has certain results and learning with a restricted or restrictive mind may also get results.  Someone can achieve excellence with conditioning - perfecting a technique or mastering a sequence of movements, tasks or activities, for example.  Another person may also explore and create new ways of doing the same things (or other things).  I can't say that they are mutually exclusive.  Perhaps they form a continuum, and perhaps different people have different preferences - perfection/creativity...

Yes, conditioning and creativity may even achieve the same results, but for me there is a qualitative difference.  The process of learning and living with an open mind, with wanton curiosity and respect for the reality of other people just seems to be so much more enriching. 

Sure, and you may have a preference for novelty and variety...

There is another difference for me.  When I focus on getting the most out of someone else’s experience, my ego is out of the way.  Forging opinions into truths, for me, seems very egotistical.  Sure, mastery and perfection are admirable...  but not acknowledging that there may be other ways - good ways - of doing things, seeing and thinking... to me that looks like being blinkered by arrogance.

What looks like egoism and arrogance may be something different, it may be habit, and it may be fear... 

Yes, it may be that too.

So next time we chat about love and fear, right?

Yes, let’s do that