Sacrificing Feedback
The scientist Candice Pert, who discovered the opiate receptor in the brain, once wrote that rapid feedback creates health in the human body. Through her research she had a unique insight into how the complex signaling going on in the body relies on the efficient functioning of negative and positive feedback loops (a fancy way of saying when one thing goes up another thing goes down - or - when one thing goes up, another thing goes up.)
She felt when the body-wide feedback systems supplied information quickly and accurately, many systems in the body ran better.
But it’s not only inside the body where there is an advantage to quick and accurate feedback, the same is true in communication and collaboration between people.
Yet, as with inner physiological processes, you can’t see feedback. And it isn’t immediately apparent why it’s helpful. Add to that the natural human tendency to avoid uncertainty, potential conflict and feeling awkward, and you can start to see why human beings often wind up sacrificing feedback in their interactions.
Unfortunately, the result is that people can wind up with poorer results, poorer quality relationships and missed opportunities.
For the most part we’re not talking about feedback like the kind you get at an annual review at your job, although that too is a form of feedback.
Rather we’re talking about (in a situation involving 2 people):
1) the supply of information from one person that
2) is not available to the other person - often because
3) it's happening in the other person’s mind or body.
“I’m hungry.” “I’m tired” “I don’t like movies about dinosaurs.” “I can’t speak Mandarin.” “I just stepped off a boat 5 minutes ago.” “My wife just died in the hospital.” “I feel scared.”
These are all examples of things people can’t observe from the outside except when certain cues, contexts or situations make it obvious.
Here’s an example:
Once after a long 12 hour car trip I stopped into a yoga studio to take a vinyasa yoga class (a style of yoga where poses tend to “flow” together, and where a series of athletic movements, called a Sun Salutation, often are used as a warm up).
The teacher’s theme for the class focused on being slow and gentle in movement. While moving slowly is a great idea for many movement situations, such as:
- learning the form of a movement
- modifying for injury and
- noticing subtleties of sensation
what I needed after so much time sitting still was to move around, increase my heart rate and work out the mental and physical knots through vigorous movement.
The teacher could not have known or observed this by simply looking at me when I walked in the door.
There was nothing wrong with what the teacher was saying, and maybe even a lot of things were right, but it wasn’t coordinated with my situation and needs at that moment.
While this is a simple example, this fundamental dynamic, where two people may be in different places, and unaware of what the other person is needing, trying to accomplish, or important details about the other’s situation, repeats itself every day and goes far beyond yoga classes.
It can be applied not only to many technical domains, but also to any time you're experiencing a different kind of energy and personality that may not be in harmony with where you're at.
Yoga teaching is often done in a lecture-style format. One person talks and the group listens. There are distinct advantages to this. And real disadvantages as well.
But for the purposes of this article, yoga teaching just serves as an example of one way people talk to other people. It could as easily be a college lecture, or a graduation ceremony, or a product release event for a company, where one person, or people, address others. And it also applies to any conversation you ever have with another human being.
Imagine teaching a yoga class, or college lecture, and one of the people in front of you has just come from the doctor’s office and learned they have a serious illness.
What if the person you’re talking to is dealing with physical pain? Or just went through a big emotional argument or breakup?
In these situations we can intuitively understand that a person’s inner state could impact not only how they are listening, but what they need and desire in the moment.
But this applies to all of the things that are going on inside of people, all of the time, whenever you're talking to them.
It will affect:
- how they can take in information
- whether they take it in,
- whether they find it helpful, and
- if it seems relevant.
And these factors change moment-to-moment.
What if the person simply didn’t hear your last sentence and is now confused? But you don’t realize that.
Like the yoga class with the lecture format, if you don’t have a mechanism to check, you don't know where the person is at.
Many systems have a built-in mechanism to check where another person is at.
In ballroom dance partners can use pressure while holding hands to signal each other about intentions for direction of movement. If that fails people can use their words.
In the practice of craniosacral therapy practitioners can use the sensations coming from the client into their hands, their observation of peoples’ breathing and expressions, as well as direct questions, to track what clients are experiencing moment to moment.
The practice of Internal Family Systems Therapy has a method for asking people about the intensity level of their emotions and whether it is comfortable or uncomfortable.
NASA’s system of talking to astronauts and going through a checklist of components before a launch is another way of checking what is taking place in real time.
But most people when they talk do not check what is happening with the other person, and where they are at in a given conversation.
As well, most people conceal what is going on inside themselves, and often don’t offer that information.
People, on a regular basis, sacrifice feedback
The specifics in the moment matter even more in situations where you're a: doctor, a psychologist, a veterinarian, a car mechanic, a web designer.
You get a less good result and you lose options when only one voice is heard.
I have a friend who likes to do things very quickly.
They're very capable and they like to execute tasks quickly and efficiently.
What they don't understand is that when they're working with other people, other people can't make changes as quickly as they can make it in their own head. Even just the time it takes to say the words and for the other person to to understand those words and process them takes at least a little bit of time.
We forget that thought and real time communication move at different speeds.
When somebody's moving (i.e. in a yoga class) we can't instruct them with a complexity and a language robust enough to actually mirror how the body moves. The body calls on so many systems and so much complexity in the firing and the activation of muscles that it can't be consciously controlled. And it happens too fast for us to track if we’re really in the movement.
So if we're really asking people to perform at a high level in any kind of sport or movement practice, if we really want to set them free, we're going to have to let them go to a place that's non-verbal because the closer they can get to the signals, which are happening faster than we can talk and explain them, the better they're going to be able to perform.
So, on the one hand, we don't want to be holding people back and dragging them down. But, on the other hand, we want to recognize that, as with my friend, while we can perform quickly inside ourselves, when we involve other people in the process, we have to slow down enough so that we can move as a unit.
The alternative is that you sacrifice coordination when you move at a rate that only you can move at, and which nobody else who's not a mind reader can in order to stay in sync with you.
If we constantly go through life sacrificing feedback, never really knowing where people, people are at, never really inquiring, we lose out on a lot.