298. The Human Superpower That’s Making Life Harder

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Joel: Hey, Joel Miller here today you are going to hear a voice that does not belong to Marissa Hyatt. Marissa has unfortunately injured herself. She dislocated her shoulder and she’s outta commission for a little while. She’ll be back. But in the meantime, I have brought on my colleague Hannah Williamson, and I’m excited to share her mind and voice with you on this episode.

[00:00:25] I hope you enjoy it.

[00:00:28] Hannah: We are wired to read other people’s minds, or at least to think we can, but we’re not always accurate. And when we start living into the stories we make up, it can seriously undermine our productivity. So today. What’s actually happening and what can you do about it?

[00:00:51] Welcome to Focus on this. This is the most productive podcast on the internet. I’m Hannah Williamson.

[00:00:56] Joel: And I’m Joel Miller.

[00:00:58] Hannah: This is where we remind you of something you already know. It is not about getting more things done, it’s about getting the right things done,

[00:01:06] Joel: both at work and in life. And today we’re talking about your very faulty superpower.

[00:01:14] Mind reading.

[00:01:16] Hannah: It’s actually kind of mind boggling, this phenomenon where we can kinda almost sort of. Read each other’s minds, like there’s

[00:01:26] Joel: very, nearly, very nearly,

[00:01:28] Hannah: yeah, it’s rooted in our brains. It’s rooted in something called mirror neurons that are structures that let us simulate in ourselves other people’s experiences.

[00:01:39] So in the 1990s actually, scientists discovered that certain neurons in a monkey’s brain fired not only when that monkey performed an action, but also when it watched someone else perform that same action. Monkey kind of imagining itself doing the thing. It’s seeing this other monkey doing and these mirror neurons you see monkey do, monkey see, monkey do

[00:02:03] Joel: or monkey see?

[00:02:04] Monkey imagine, which is what’s actually happening.

[00:02:07] Hannah: But in the imagining, there’s the empathy happening, right? Like it makes sense when you think about your lived experiences of like the way that you wince when someone else gets hurt. Like for instance, when I imagine Marissa’s dislocated shoulder and I just twitch a little bit, right?

[00:02:22] Or the way that. When you walk into a room full of anxious people, you might have been fine 20 seconds ago, but the minute you walk into that room of anxious people, all of a sudden you start feeling it too, right? Like there is this level in which we can feel what other people are feeling. And it’s very easy to jump from thinking that we feel what other people are feeling into thinking that we are thinking what other people are thinking, that we can actually read their minds.

[00:02:51] Joel: Researchers call this theory of mind and it’s pretty fascinating if you think about it. ’cause we actually do it all day long and we couldn’t function if we didn’t do it. I have to be able to make some guesses at what you’re thinking and feeling in order to respond or to act proactively or helpfully in a social setting.

[00:03:10] Not only to protect myself, but also to help you or anything like that. And marketing, for instance, is nothing but a great big exercise in theory of mind.

[00:03:20] Hannah: Yep.

[00:03:21] Joel: A novel is nothing more than a great big experiment in theory of mind

[00:03:25] Hannah: deciding what kinds of things to create like in the work you and I do.

[00:03:28] Right. If like, if you are going to create something. You have to be doing it based on the guesses that you have about what other people are wanting or needing.

[00:03:36] Joel: Right? Right, exactly. So we take and build. These models of other people’s intentions and emotions and expectations, and we use that in order to do the work that we have to do.

[00:03:48] And that can be very productive. It can also be not so productive.

[00:03:53] Hannah: Yeah.

[00:03:54] Joel: So empathy, connection, collaboration, they all depend on this near mind reading

[00:04:00] Hannah: to your point. Because we are not perfect at it, it can cause some serious problems. Because sometimes what we don’t realize is that we’re making assumptions or maybe to put it differently, like we’re creating these stories about what’s happening inside other people.

[00:04:15] Right? And then we act on them. And because we’re not as good at mind reading as we think that we are. It can create some serious problems. So that’s what we wanna get into today.

[00:04:25] Joel: I think there are probably really two main buckets of the kinds of problems that we experience. We’ll tackle ’em both. But the first is that I can read your mind and then that you can read my mind.

[00:04:40] Like when we assume that you can read someone else’s mind. Yeah. And when you assume that other people can read your mind, that’s where we get into trouble. So let’s take the first one. First I can read your mind.

[00:04:53] Hannah: Yeah. I’ve never been guilty of this one. Uh, the first thing that comes to mind, the everything now problem.

[00:05:00] So like when a leader, let’s say when your boss hands you five things, and so you assume that you want all five of those things now that they’re all an equal priority. So maybe you scramble, you overcommit, you deliver, but you’re really stressed. Quality of the work is maybe lower than it could have otherwise been.

[00:05:18] Meanwhile, your boss really only needed you to do one thing this week, and the rest could have waited, but you never asked. They never said, so we both kind of just filled in the silence with our own story at a cost that didn’t have to paid.

[00:05:33] Joel: This, of course, never happens. I should just go ahead and mention for the sake of the listener that Hannah is my direct report.

[00:05:40] So I am Hannah’s boss and this. Happens to us or happened, I would like to say past tense a lot. Last year actually, and Hannah came to me and told me, Hey, this is going on, and I was like, I had no idea that was going on. So we had fallen right into this very trap. Even though in some sense we ought to know better.

[00:06:07] I think all of us probably ought to know better, but we just don’t. There’s like a. An inertia to work that kind of allows these patterns to just take over without our even being aware of them.

[00:06:18] Hannah: Well, and, and two, wanting to trace, like it comes from a really good impulse of like wanting to be a team player, wanting to deliver, wanting to do good work.

[00:06:26] And so it’s like, well, if all these things need to get done, I guess they just need to get done. But again, failing to take that beat to slow down and get that clarity

[00:06:35] Joel: Yeah,

[00:06:36] Hannah: creates that needless stress.

[00:06:38] Joel: Another version of the, I can read your mind. Problem shows up as in I am in trouble. A colleague gets quiet, someone ccs your boss on an email.

[00:06:48] Someone hasn’t responded to your message. And then you feel that ambiguity, that silence. Yeah. With anxiety.

[00:06:55] Hannah: Yeah. I think this is particularly, um, bound to happen if there have been relationships where in the past. Someone hasn’t spoken up when they had a problem like that, like there has been a necessary confrontation that hasn’t happened then it’s so much easier to fall into this of just like.

[00:07:12] Almost being on eggshells looking for like, am I okay? Are we okay? Is something happening? But noticing that the thing that you need to be taking responsibility for is the fact that you are creating a story. You are letting your anxiety define how you’re seeing the situation. So you might have this moment, you decide like, I’m in trouble, and you spin your emotional wheels trying to fix a problem that literally isn’t a problem.

[00:07:37] Instead of using that energy productively. Right. So that, again, if we’re thinking about the way this impacts our productivity, well you’re wasting that emotional energy that you could be using for something that was actually valuable.

[00:07:51] Joel: This is another version of the You don’t like my work problem.

[00:07:54] Hannah: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:55] Joel: Where you share an idea in a meeting and no one really responds. Your boss doesn’t comment on that new project that you just launched. Maybe you try something new and it doesn’t gain immediate traction, and you assume that others don’t like your input, don’t like your work. Yeah. And then you internalize that as failure.

[00:08:13] Meanwhile, nobody’s thinking about you as much as you’re thinking about you, and that’s not even on the table.

[00:08:18] Hannah: Yeah. I think what it really comes down to here is that we need to be slowing down and being willing to put voice to the stories in our heads. Partly just by asking just the power of a question.

[00:08:32] It’s very important to leverage. Yeah. So this ability to, instead of assuming to be able to ask, so you might, you know, ask something like, Hey, of the priorities you’ve tasked me with. What matters most right now? Or is there anything you’re not saying that might be helpful for us to address together? Or are you unsatisfied with my performance?

[00:08:54] Wait,

[00:08:55] Joel: just ask the question 0.1.

[00:08:56] Hannah: Yeah, which, which is, it’s a simple thing, but it’s not always an easy thing, right? It does take this measure of vulnerability. It takes some humility to be able to like call out the fact that you might be needing some clarity or some reassurance. Or encouragement or whatever that is, but it’s so essential because rather than getting stuck in these stories that hurt us on the back end, we’re able to actually get the clarity that we need in order to move forward.

[00:09:23] Joel: I think about it this way, a lot of times, like you have this amazing tool that sits inside of this bowl of bone known as your skull, and that brain is a really powerful engine for creating all kinds of stories. Mm-hmm. And if you are spinning all these stories and yet they don’t correlate with reality, if they don’t match what’s really happening, they’re not helpful, they’re unproductive.

[00:09:51] And the only way for that to really get. Correlated with reality is to take the fuzzy stuff in your head and externalize it in such a way that it can be evaluated. Like does this map to reality or not?

[00:10:05] Hannah: Yeah. There’s someone in my life who sometimes, like if I say something that’s clearly an assumption or it like has it has some stuff baked into it, she’ll say like, oh, do you wanna like check out that story?

[00:10:14] Do you wanna like check, like validate the like, whether that’s true or not. And I think that’s such a helpful check is to say, Hey. Because we have these stories. Having these stories in and of themselves isn’t bad, but you do need that moment when you check out, are they true? Are they valid? Should we move forward?

[00:10:31] Acting as though they’re factual.

[00:10:32] Joel: Right. Mary Carr, the memoirist had someone in her life that would, whenever she would externalize something, he would say, what’s your source for that?

[00:10:40] Hannah: Hmm.

[00:10:41] Joel: If you can’t put a footnote on it and source it back to something real, it might not be real.

[00:10:46] Hannah: Yeah. Or maybe you discovered that.

[00:10:48] The source is a faulty source. Totally. Like I, I actually don’t trust that source that did, that was really said to me. But maybe I don’t trust that person’s perspective.

[00:10:57] Joel: Ultimately here, yes, you can nearly read somebody’s mind, but you can’t actually read the mind that’s operating because their synapses are in their head and your synapses are in your head, and unless there’s communication, something is gonna go awry at some point.

[00:11:15] Hannah: So that’s that need to then check it out to ask. But there’s also this whole other set of problems, which is that sometimes I assume that you can read my mind and I think I wanna kick this to you to start us off.

[00:11:30] Joel: Well, this shows up. For people in all sorts of ways, but when I assume that you can read my mind, that opens us up to a problem sometimes called the curse of knowledge, which is that when we think that we know something or when we do know something, it’s really easy to assume everybody else knows that thing too.

[00:11:50] Yeah, and leaders fall prey to this all the time in businesses, organizations because we’re privy to certain types of information and we just assume that our team knows it. Often they don’t like where would they have encountered it? You know, they weren’t necessarily sitting in the executive team meeting.

[00:12:08] They weren’t necessarily sitting in that planning meeting. They weren’t necessarily sitting in any of those meetings. They weren’t seeing the emails, they weren’t in those Slack channels. Whatever it is, like they don’t know. They can’t read your mind. So when you assume that people can read your mind, it opens you up to a bunch of problems.

[00:12:24] One of them. Is maybe the most obvious, the delegation problem. This is when you hand something off to somebody and you assume that that other person understands what you want, you assume that they understand how you want it done. You assume that they understand what success looks like. You assume how much authority, or you assume that they understand how much authority you’ve given to them in that situation.

[00:12:47] But if you have failed to communicate those individual things. That whole project could go completely bonkers because you made the assumption that that person could read your mind.

[00:12:58] Hannah: That whole phrase of if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. I think frequently what that is actually unearthing, it’s a mind reading problem, right?

[00:13:07] Mm-hmm. It’s, you are assuming that the fault is on the other person’s capability in some, in some way, you’re assuming that like they’re not capable of giving the results that you want, when really you’ve been expecting them to read your mind and then have gotten upset that they couldn’t and therefore failed to deliver what you hoped that they would deliver.

[00:13:28] Right? There’s this invitation to. Instead of assuming that someone else knows what you’re wanting to take responsibility for, making that really, really clear.

[00:13:39] Joel: Yeah.

[00:13:39] Hannah: You know, there’s also this whole problem of that I think particularly if you were an individual contributor is really easy to fall into.

[00:13:48] But I mean, perhaps at the executive level too, you can tell me, but I think there’s this problem of when you can feel that this is too much like, you know. I’m tapped, I’m at capacity. I’m totally overwhelmed. I have too many things happening, and you kind of assume that the people around you know that you assume that the people around you can see how much you’re doing, and so the moment that your boss or your colleague asks you to do one more thing.

[00:14:17] And then it, it feels like it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, right? It might feel like you’re headed towards burnout. You’re headed towards resentment, and it’s because you’ve just, again, instead of having that self-advocacy moment of being able to communicate, Hey, this is hard, I’m, I’m having a hard time.

[00:14:33] You’re, you’re just assuming that other people can see and notice and understand the, your, your limits, your capacity.

[00:14:40] Joel: Yeah. This is the flip side of the everything now problem, basically. Mm-hmm. And definitely I think leaders fall into this, like, let’s say your boss, in my case it would be Megan, right?

[00:14:50] Mm-hmm. She’s got a priority on her plate, and she assigns me something that she wants done and I get. You working on a thing, I get some other people working on a thing. We’re all working on this thing. Meanwhile, there may be another project that actually cannot be done given the bandwidth, and I’m assuming since you told me that thing, that I’m gonna just be able to punt those things.

[00:15:15] Hannah: Yep.

[00:15:15] Joel: So I’m assuming that Megan can read my mind in that moment, and she knows the impact that she’s imposing where she doesn’t. Yeah, because I haven’t communicated it. I’m just assuming that she knows. And so. She may actually decide, well, that thing that I wanted you to do, if I had known that, I wouldn’t have had you do that first.

[00:15:34] I would’ve had you do something else. Yeah, I would’ve had you stay on that other project you’re working on.

[00:15:38] Hannah: Yeah.

[00:15:38] Joel: So in a delegation scenario, when you assume you can read my mind. You naturally fall into the, this is too much problem. Also because they’re related to each other. Nobody can read your mind, and therefore nobody really knows how much you have on your plate, and unless you communicate it, you’re gonna end up in a situation that’s just ripe for problems.

[00:16:11] Hannah: Well, and that actually makes me think of this next one, which is this, you’re driving me crazy problem because all of what, like what we’re describing is crazy making. It’s mad at me. Right, right. For for people on both sides. For you and for Megan, for you and for me. And so having these moments where you’re able to name.

[00:16:28] Hey, this dynamic that’s happening is causing me friction, right? And there are other versions of this problem. You might imagine someone doing that thing that you hate, like you really hate it, and you assume that they know your preferences, that they know the things that you love and the things that you can’t stand, and they keep doing that thing.

[00:16:47] So it must be intentional, right? Right. Or at least like thoughtless and inconsiderate, like they, or, or maybe they’re actually trying to get under your skin when in reality they have no clue that it’s driving you up a wall, right? They don’t know what your preferences are unless you slow down to communicate them.

[00:17:08] Right.

[00:17:09] Joel: Marissa not being with us has a version of this that she would probably be tickled with my telling. She has what’s called misophonia. Yes. And certain sounds drive her nuts. And one of those is like people chewing gum.

[00:17:22] Hannah: Yep.

[00:17:23] Joel: And I like chewing gum from time to time, and I don’t think about the fact that I’m smacking or making noise, but she knows.

[00:17:32] And that’s a, you’re driving me crazy sort of thing. She also knows. Because we’ve known each other a long time. I’m not intentionally driving her crazy, but she has to say, Hey, you’re doing that thing.

[00:17:44] Hannah: Yeah.

[00:17:45] Joel: But it would be easy to just default into the, he’s doing that thing and he knows that it drives me nuts.

[00:17:49] Yeah. Because I do know, but in that moment I’m thoughtless and I didn’t know or I forgot.

[00:17:53] Hannah: Yeah.

[00:17:54] Joel: And so it’s really helpful to just remember that. All of this goes back to the fact that your synapses are in your head and their synapses are in their heads, and the only way to get anywhere is to start externalizing the things that are bothering us so that the other person can actually address it.

[00:18:12] Hannah: It’s an exercise in making what is invisible. Visible, right? We take the things that we we’re not actually paying attention to, we don’t actually know about, and we bring attention to them, and there’s lots of ways that this can look. We actually have a few tools here at Full Focus that we use. The first one that comes to mind is the vision Caster, right for delegation,

[00:18:32] Joel: perfect

[00:18:32] Hannah: for

[00:18:33] Joel: delegation.

[00:18:33] Hannah: Walking people through this process of, it’s not enough to just ask for the thing that you want done, right? You need to say you want it done. Explain why. Define success. Grant a certain level of authority. There’s all these kind of extra steps that when you walk through, you take out this propensity to expect someone else to read your mind.

[00:18:54] ’cause you’ve communicated, you put it in black and white. Exactly. And you know, sometimes it can be as simple as a conversation, right? It’s as simple as. In a one-on-one meeting communicating, Hey, like, I feel like I’m operating at 110% and I’m needing something to change. I’m needing something to slow down.

[00:19:09] Can we reprioritize? Can you help me understand where the best of my attention should be going? Sometimes it’s as simple as. A conversation like that.

[00:19:19] Joel: Yep. Another tool that we have, which we’ll share in the show notes, is called the How to Work with Me Worksheet, and you can get it at full focus.co/how to win.

[00:19:30] This is a really great. Worksheet that basically gives people the recipe for how to work well with you. Mm-hmm. It talks about like what your expectations look like, how you work in such a way that they get to interact with you in a way that works for both of you. And it takes a little time, takes a little patience, takes a little effort, but it pays dividends when you can be clear on these things and not leave it up to mind reading.

[00:19:55] Hannah: I’m so struck by how the. Undercurrent of this episode is basically about communication, right? Mm-hmm. It really comes down to the more that we are able to say what we are wanting, needing feeling to communicate what our expectations are, the better we’re, we’re able to collaborate and, and work together.

[00:20:15] And this is really important because if, again, if I’m thinking about focus on this as our job being helping you live more productively, mind reading. Seems like initially it feels efficient because it’s, yeah, it’s some steps. It like, lets you get right into things. Um, and it can sometimes even save you like an awkward conversation that maybe you don’t wanna have.

[00:20:40] But it’s actually the most expensive habit in any organization. Because everybody is working hard in response to a reality that to your point, only exists inside your head. And so it creates all of this extra work, all of this extra stress that didn’t actually have to be there.

[00:21:01] Joel: Yeah, the artful part, the hard part is mind reading is efficient, like it actually does work a lot, and the more you know people, the better you can kind of work with.

[00:21:13] Those assumptions in a way that’s productive and helpful. But if something is gonna go wrong, it’s often gonna go wrong right here. And so you need to be aware that this is where like when problems are happening, this is probably a great place to go check.

[00:21:28] Hannah: Yep.

[00:21:28] Joel: Because. Diagnostically, there’s a really good chance that this is what’s tripping you up.

[00:21:33] Hannah: And it comes down to context too. Like even what makes mind reading work whenever you’ve been working with someone for a long time is actually, ’cause you’ve already had lots of the conversations in the past. Sure. Better than providing the context like for you and Marissa and the gum chewing thing.

[00:21:50] Right. At one point you guys had to have a conversation. She was like, Joel, I hate that. And that then created,

[00:21:56] Joel: she, she threw something at me.

[00:21:59] Hannah: What was it? What’d she throw at you?

[00:22:00] Joel: She didn’t actually throw something at me. Was she wanted to, I could read her mind and I knew she wanted to.

[00:22:07] Hannah: Yeah. But like you had to have that conversation at some point, which then kind of lays the foundation for future interactions where you both have that context.

[00:22:16] Exactly. So, so there is this, even in these places where there is. Some opportunity for maybe more effective mind reading. It’s because at some point you stopped trying to mind reading, you started having conversations

[00:22:30] Joel: and on like the day-to-day workflow kind of stuff, that’s where the how to work with me worksheet is so helpful.

[00:22:36] Hannah: Hmm.

[00:22:36] Joel: So again, full focus.co/how to win. That is like a way of just getting that stuff out in a way that’s external and can be referenced and just like learned by somebody, and then pretty soon it just becomes part of the operating system in the relationship.

[00:22:51] Hannah: If I’m thinking about this episode as a whole, the thing I’m taking away is.

[00:22:55] We really need to check out the stories that live in our heads. They might be partially right, but they might also be wrong in ways that matter and in ways that are significant. So rather than always relying on this amazing but faulty superpower of mind reading, we need to slow down and have real conversations with people.

[00:23:19] Joel: And that my friends, is the episode. Thanks for joining us for Focus On This.

[00:23:24] Hannah: This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so please share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe at wherever you listen or at focus on this podcast.com.

[00:23:34] Joel: And the reason we say that explicitly is because we don’t wanna assume that you actually know that that’s where you go find this thing.

[00:23:41] Hannah: We’re trying to save you some mind reading.

[00:23:43] Joel: Yeah, exactly. We’ll be back here next week where we’re gonna talk about the best, the best question to ask yourself in pretty much any situation. It’s, it’s that important.

[00:23:56] Hannah: Okay. Until then,

[00:23:58] Joel: stay focused.