Reactive Relativity – From the desk of Adam Thomas

Change is hard

If there is a theme on this blog, more than self-awareness, execution, and direction – it’s that different is difficult.

No need to spice it up, it’s a mound of trouble as is.

We, though, spice it up. Without much of a prompt, we attach labels like good and bad around the work and relationships that we have.

It doesn’t matter that we are mostly wrong, we just do.

The world isn’t either sunshine or rain. It is often a mixture of both, along with wind for good measure.

To get out of the metaphor for a moment – shit’s complicated. When we react, we oversimplify and engage without consideration.

Those labels just make the world harder to see, and often, are just rationalizations for our reaction.

Different is difficult. It requires a lot of “extra” just to make something happen. You have to get over yourself and your reaction to take a bigger view.

Reacting takes us away from the ability to see more.

And if you want to change (the world and yourself), seeing is a requirement.

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Our narrative is always running…

As much as I ponder, write, or read about cognitive bias, I find myself falling into it again and again.

We are suckers for our brain “tricks.”

They come with consequences.

Think about:

How often we decide what something means to our entire lives at the moment?

The decisions we make based on those snap judgments?

How those decisions affect those around us?

It creates a snowball effect that can quickly leave a feeling of complete overwhelm. All for a situation that may or may not exist how we think of it.

We crave for a narrative so much that we’ll make it even at our peril. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

This month, I want to focus on the narrative bias, and how it plays with our sense of relativity and how we react.

I’ll wrap it inside of this question – “What is good or bad, anyway?”

I call it “Reactive Relativity” and it is our theme for November.

This month’s theme ties into “self-awareness.”

At the end of last year, I wrote a newsletter highlighting the “three tenets of leadership.” Each month, I take a topic related to one of the three tenets and write about my ideas and experience around the topic.

Reread candidate

Freedom from the Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti – This was the first text I’ve ever picked up that made me question my perception. It is amazing how much, in the name of a narrative, that we add and subtract from events to create the “reality” that we perceive. I’ll let this book help me reset my expectations and give a fresh influx of questions as I try to understand my bias.