Don McMinn

We all have mental tapes that play over and over in our minds. If they are positive narratives, there’s no major downside other than they’re unnecessarily using up our brain-energy. (Here’s a post I wrote titled An untrained mind–don’t think the same thing twice.) If our mental tapes have a negative or painful storyline they will eventually adversely affect our mind, emotions, and behavior. 

In this post I want to focus on the downsides of verbalizing those redundant stories. It’s one thing to clutter our own minds with these anecdotes.  It’s another thing to clutter our conversations with them. 

Analyze your conversations and notice if you tend to tell the same thing over and again. If so, perhaps you should tidy up your speech; delete the old stories and identify some new ones. Here are some areas to explore.

Pain from the past

I have an acquaintance who continually tells the same story of her struggle to escape from an ultra-fundamentalist family of origin. The first time I heard the story, it was interesting (though it took too long to tell). The second time, not so much. I started overhearing her tell the story in other conversations. Even when she met someone for the first time she would find a way to work the story into the conversation. It seems to have defined her life, and with each telling, the story becomes more deeply engrained in her persona. For those who have heard the story before, the retelling is tedious.

Current challenges

One of the delights and benefits of close relationships is being able to share our joys and struggles with each other. I like the phrase “A sorrow shared with a friend is halved; a joy shared is doubled.” But sometimes we belabor our sharing. 

For instance, it’s not necessary to share the minute details of your medical issues; I certainly want to know what’s going on, but I don’t need to know the dosage of each medication. I truly enjoy hearing about your grandchildren (as I enjoy telling you about mine), but not too much. The trip you took years ago sounds fabulous; can we talk about something else?  

Truncate your stories

Reader’s Digest is an American general-interest family magazine, founded in 1922 and published ten times a year. Until 2009 it was the best-selling consumer magazine in America. It’s known for its concise writing style; all articles are short and to the point. We’ve even developed the phrase “give me the Readers’s Digest version” to indicate when we prefer a brief synopsis.  

In summary, let’s rethink which personal stories should be in our oft-recited repertoire, and when we do share them, let’s make the “Reader’s Digest version” our default setting.  Here’s a post I wrote on succinct communication.

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On a recent flight from Seattle to Dallas, the four-hour flight morphed into nine hours sitting on the plane. Thunderstorms in Dallas caused the problem. We circled the airport for hours, flew to Austin to refuel, and finally landed in DFW.

In all my years of flying (I’m a million-miler+ on American) I’ve never heard a pilot do so well at continually informing the passengers during a flight gone bad. About every 20 minutes he gave us a detailed update on what was happening and why. He was empathetic, calm, detailed, and courteous. 

I couldn’t help but compare this experience to another flight I was on years ago. We were stuck on the tarmac for three hours but never received an update from the pilot. Tempers flared, rightly so.

Leaders, keep your constituency informed. Not just during emergency situations but all the time. Maintain an informed organization. In her worth-the-read book titled Powerful, Patty McCord (former chief talent officer at Netflix) says:

• • If your people aren’t informed by you, there’s a good chance they’ll be misinformed by others. 
  • Ensure that communications flows both ways. 
  • The job of communication is never done. It’s not an annual or quarterly, or even monthly or weekly function. A steady stream of communication is the lifeblood of competitive advantage. 

In my organization, we send a weekly email to everyone involved. It briefly recounts what happened the previous week (with lots of praise for individual contributions), mentions upcoming events, and updates progress on projects. It’s a simple tool that helps maintain an informed organization.  

Good and thorough communication is so difficult that the chances of a leader over-communicating are slim—but try anyway.

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I’m continually befuddled and frustrated by one-sided conversations. 

• I recently sat next to a person on a three-hour flight. I asked him about his career and family and he responded in detail. He never asked about mine.
• Mary and I had dinner with another couple. We initiated conversation about their world; they never asked about ours.

It seems to me that the focus of casual conversations should normally be evenly divided among participants. If there are four people present, each one should have about 25% of the focus. Granted, if I had dinner with a famous person whom I admire, I might want the conversation to revolve around her; but otherwise, conversations should be distributed.  

If you’re the victim of a lopsided conversation, take the initiative to direct the conversation. For instance, when in the midst of a one-sided-leaning conversation, sometimes I’ll pursue balance by answering the same questions I’ve asked. If I ask someone “tell me about your children,” I’ll then volunteer information about mine, even if it’s not requested. But it’s sad that I must do this.  

If you’re the perpetuator of lopsided conversations, think about what’s driving the inequality and address the fundamental problem; it’s probably one of the “self” words: self-centeredness, self-reverence, selfishness. The solution to this social and relational faux pas is found is Philippians 2: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” We should focus on others instead of ourselves.

We may be so self-absorbed that we truly aren’t interested in others, and that’s why we talk about ourselves exclusively. In which case we must discipline ourselves to behave right (ask about others) so that eventually our behavior will help us think right, that is, we’ll truly want to be interested in other people’s lives and want to prefer them. Every person has a story worth telling that we can benefit from hearing.

Let’s balance our conversations.

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This post will be good news to everyone, except narcissists. 

Good news: When you’re in public, people don’t notice you as much as you think they do. 

We often think people are observing us when they’re not. We worry about the clothes we wear because we think people notice; they don’t. We’re overly self-conscious about how we act; no need to be. 

Social scientists call this the “spotlight effect.” It’s our tendency to think we’re being noticed more than we really are. 

Dozens of studies in social psychology have supported this phenomenon. In one test, psychologists asked some college students to wear bright yellow Barry Manilow t-shirts to a large introduction to psychology class. After the class, they asked the students who wore the tacky t-shirt to estimate how many of their classmates noticed them. Then the researchers asked the students in the classroom how many had noticed their classmates wearing the t-shirts. Few students had noticed those wearing the t-shirts; those who wore the t-shirts greatly overestimated the number of people who had noticed.

So what explains the “spotlight effect”? Scientists conclude it is the result of egocentrism. We all are the center of our own universes so it’s hard to develop an accurate evaluation of how much we are noticed. The “spotlight effect” manifests from the innate tendency to forget that although one is the center of one’s own world, one is not the center of everyone else’s. This tendency is especially prominent when one does something atypical. 

The spotlight effect does not necessarily imply that we are arrogant or value ourselves more than others, but that our perception of the world is primarily from our own perspective and even what we think other people think of us is self-imposed. 

Don’t confuse being self-aware with being self-conscious. The former is good and necessary for emotional health and proper social interactions. But the term self-conscious usually describes someone who is ill at ease or uncomfortable with himself/herself as an object of the observation of others. Symptoms of being self-conscious include: getting angry or hostile when embarrassed; avoiding social experiences; blaming others for one’s mistakes; blaming yourself for other people’s mistakes; low self-esteem; and feeling agitated, anxious, depressed, or nervous based on what you think other people think of you. 

There’s no simple solution to our struggle with being self-conscious; it’s a complicated issue. If you struggle inordinately, visit with a trained counselor.  

This post simply offers insight that might bring some relief: people are not noticing you as much as you think they are.

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[callout]You should be committed to lifelong learning. Otherwise, you’ll become quickly outdated and out of sync. This article, from the October 13 edition of the New York Times, underscores the point. It’s titled 60 Years of Higher Education – Really?[/callout]