After a week of souring temperatures for the UK it is a welcome relief to have had a breeze through the night and a comfortable temperature so far today. To some degree maybe I shouldn’t complain to much as I do have the pleasure of working in a nicely air conditioned office, but it still doesn’t stop the evenings, my time, being a time filled with sloth like movement, humid stickiness and brain fog.
For those of you here for the travel and motorcycling side of my blog you might as well step away for this one, probably little of this post will interest you. Apologies I know I still owe you a couple of post lock down routes and promise I will get to them.
So if I am not talking about bike then what am I talking about, in short pondering, reflecting, ruminating, thinking over, deliberating… It’s something I estimate I spend at least 2 hours a day doing and it can be a valuable skill, however over played rapidly becomes over thinking a state I often find my self in. Once there it can be a terribly disruptive state that leads to a stuck thought loop or when severe a positive feedback loop. For me pondering isn’t a skill I have been taught it is something I have always done, ever since I reached my teens the active level of my inner voice and consciousness has been high. I have since then refined my control of it and tried to optimise but it is still very much a work in progress.
There are days when I know I will likely have a conversation with a certain person or on a certain subject, if it is something difficult or that I am anxious about then I start the conversation before getting there. Despite generally coming across, as passionate, confident and an extrovert I am often anxious or uneasy, I have just got good at covering it up. The preparation for a conversation that I think will likely be difficult is often dry running through various outcomes or directions that conversation could take, if I am anxious about it at the start of the day I normally start this analysis of the possible outcomes in the shower, followed by getting dressed and then as I continue my normal routine. And it is the routine that allow that thought process to be the active part of my brain whilst other tasks are subconsciously completed. Often the my thought process in the dry runs turns to the more aggressive and aggravated responses I could give, I think about it as getting them out now before they are left to linger and come out in the real conversation but like any one I am far from perfect at tailoring my language at times.
Other times when I didn’t predict a difficult conversation and it hit me unprepared, these are the day where the analysis is after the fact. At times this ties up my ability to move forward or past conflict or difficulty for longer than I would like. Being stuck re-analysing my language choice and the other persons reaction and body language if I can see it in these remote times. If I care about the impact of that conversation enough this can ripple on for days, creating actions and planning changes in my behaviour with that person or scenario for next time trying to account for the emotion that might be behind all parties in the conversation and the factors that are driving there perspectives.
The difficulty with it is knowing when to think and ponder my situation or a possible up and coming situation and when to let it go, accept that despite my intention and best efforts you can never keep everyone happy and I will continue to make mistakes. Knowing when this past couple of years has been harder than ever, my writing style, directness, dyslexia mean that I don’t always come across best in writing. I am much more comfortable with verbal communication, with reading direct body language and tonal feedback. And whilst video meetings enable some of that it is still different for me, there is still something that is disconnected in my inbuilt communications adjustment. The resultant this year is that in isolation my brain has been filling in more of the opinions and angles than ever, instead of asking it has run with its internal status / decision / predicted viewpoint for people and that has been often to my detriment.
However the key thing with all of the above is to keep looking forward and establish direction and desires, my ability to ponder when timed correctly and with the correct data fed in is incredible powerful. I just need to learn to use it better, to enable the outcome of it to be more positive and productive.
I remember reading somewhere that we think that releasing anger reduces the risk of violence or that angered behaviour but that actually the opposite is true and that if you are angry or have pent up aggression actively remaining calm and trying avoid anger over time reduces feeling of anger in those situations and increases peaceful behaviour. Given that this is true for behaviour, it is likely true for thought, maybe I need to think more often of positive possibilities in conversations and situations.
Some people like to work in active shorts steps starting and then correcting, often doing things that could be easily avoided over and over. Others like to think for significant time before acting, planning and exploring before deciding. I think I fall the majority of the time in the latter camp, after all I have to think about how I am going to tidy up my room or the garage before I even start and sometimes that can take months. Neither approach is necessarily wrong it depends on the task or scenario at hand, for instance long thinking before acting is the complete opposite of advanced riding IPSGA is a continue feedback based system that can be restarted at any point.
I wonder if there is an IPSGA equivalent for difficult conversations?
Where was I going with all this, I don’t know, I guess I think that more people would benefit from actively pondering, as long as it is not left to be a solo activity where the only opinion or voice that you are pondering is your own.
LazyModernTraveler 