We were discussing a difficult meeting with a good friend of mine who is a big fan of harmony. We were talking about the meeting and I said, “It’s just this never ending exercise to help people see the absolute truth of the situations.”
And, so, she asked me…
“So, how do YOU know what the absolute truth is?”
BAM!!!
Just like that!
If I only could answer that question clearly, 99% of my desire to convey harmony would be answered. It was a great question. It’s really THE KEY question…
IF you can SEE the truth,
IF you can UNDERSTAND the real truth,
Then you can craft a good plan.
I mumbled a few words, and was a little stumped. The truth is, I can tell you, and I can tell her, HOW you see & understand the truth, but it’s like telling someone how to hit a golf ball…
Keep your head down,
Rotate at the hips,
Swing through the swing, not AT the ball…
And finish with your belly facing the fairway!
BAM! You are a golfer ;-)
I know HOW I am supposed to hit a golf ball,
It’s THE ACTUAL HITTING the golf ball straight that is the problem ;-)
Similarly with harmony, I will tell you HOW you see the truth, and then it’s a lifetime of hooks and slices… and you will only get better at it if you play with it A LOT!!! In fact, to be a good golfer and to be good at achieving harmony, you have to be dedicated to it ALL THE TIME!
So, how do you see / understand the truth? The single most important question and skill in achieving harmony?
First, you must understand that you will NEVER see the whole truth, you will always ONLY see some of it. That is why it is ALWAYS important to continue to ask questions, even if you think you know the answer, the more you look, the more you ask around a situation, the MORE of the truth that you will see.
The trick is to see ENOUGH of it that you can navigate in the right direction, and what makes you the leader is to see MORE of it than the rest of the people around you.
So,
HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH IS
Realize that you will never get to the full and complete truth, so you must always keep questioning AND you should never speak of it as absolute… it’s almost always asymptotic.
1. You need to SUSPEND YOUR OPINION. The first step to finding out the truth, is that you have to suspend your opinion. Shelve it! Your own voice inside your head is ALL POWERFUL and if you give it a seat at the table, you won’t really hear anyone else. You must engage in conversations and discussions and questioning TRULY OPEN to seeing the situation for the first time. Even if only momentary. It’s not normal for human beings to suspend their opinion, but it is possible. It is a discipline. Most people can’t because they don’t see where their opinion stops and the truth starts. But, you must engage in every conversation READY TO BELIEVE all alternatives.
2. You need to ASK PEOPLE, QUESTION PEOPLE that represent as many “perspectives of the truth” as possible – AND LISTEN INTENTLY. Ask people what they think happened, what they are struggling with, what they think is right, what they dealt with, what they knew, what they didn’t know, WHATEVER is pertinent to understanding the situation. Ask them questions that you think are marginally relevant, and some that aren’t relevant at all… Knowing what a person values is data that is relevant to their perspective on other things. Ask lots of questions – to really understand their VIEW on the matter, NOT to convince them of yours (because you don’t have one remember – you suspended yours).
3. SEPARATE THEIR FACTS FROM THEIR INTERPRETATION! This is key! If you ask various people about situations, they will present facts and interpretations, and through both they will convey values. SEPARATE THEM.
Once you have this, the truth starts to appear in front of you, much like a 3D printer ;-)
The FACTS BUILD THE TRUTH!
IMPORTANT NOTE: I always assume people are telling me the truth. I don’t look for “who is lying”. Occassionally, people lie. And, when they lie, I try to fire them quickly, but I find that this is the case about once every 1,000 times. I absolutely believe that people are 99.99% of the time trying really hard to do the right thing. This not only helps me find the truth, but it builds inherent trust in the conversation. People know when you trust them, and they trust you back. If they feel like you are “questioning them” to see if they are telling the truth, then they are defensive and guarded and the truth is harder to find, because they start to be selective about what truths they tell you. When they trust you – they tell you all of the truth they saw or understood. Period.
The facts build the truth!
So, now you are 25% of the way there!
WHAT??? 25%...
See, IRONICALLY, understanding the truth is the EASY part! I mean it.
The hard part is GETTING OTHERS / THE GROUP to all see the same truth!
Maybe its more than 25%, but when it comes to leadership, its much less about knowing the right answer, its much more about being able to make others embrace the right answer and come to that same conclusion on their own.
But, lets stay on knowing the absolute truth… on this conversation.
So often, I hear, “that person just doesn’t care”. INTERPRETATION…
But, then in talking to others I find out that, that same individual stayed up late at night and was calling people on the weekend trying to get help on how to execute.
THAT PERSON CARES!!!! When people don’t care, they don’t work on weekends and proactively reach out for help!
So often, I hear, “I told him/her/them what they needed to know”. FACT (BUT IRRELEVANT or MILDLY RELEVANT). We think that because we said something, it is heard, understood and applied correctly. If we are leaders, we should not be concerned about what we communicated, but what was UNDERSTOOD. SO while it may be fact that we said what we needed to say, THE FOLLOW UP QUESTION THAT WE NEED TO ASK TO UNDERSTAND THE TRUTH OF THAT SITUATION is talk to the people we were talking to, and see what they understood!
The reason that getting to the absolute truth is SO challenging is that we are all walking around with our filters that make us interpret things in our own way, AND THEN we each get to live our own lives with our own stressors and challenges and values…
THE TRUTHS ARE COMPLEX… And, so if we want to be respectful of each other, we must respect the TRUTH that impacts all of us… Whether someone’s child is sick or not, whether someone is feeling well or not, whether someone is scared for their job or not, whether someone is insecure or not, whether someone is new or not, whether someone is engaged or not… Everything influences the truth…
SO in order to make it as SIMPLE as we can make it…
MINIMIZE INTERPRETATION & BUILD IT FROM THE FACTS…
Usually I can uncover the truth of a situation in MINUTES, and this is often after people have been working on an issue for MONTHS!
What I find is that there are two perspectives of the truth being battled, and often they are not true or partially true.
ONE SIDE is battling from the stand point of “the process is clear and people need to work harder.”
THE OTHER SIDE is battle from “the tools don’t work and we need to fix them.”
The conversations keep coming back to those two perspectives. Nobody suspends their believes. Nobody separates fact from interpretation and a project is two months late. It happens on different examples ALL THE TIME.
You step in and suspend your opinion and ask questions. Most often the process is partly clear and partly not. The tools work for part of the application and not for the other part. So, you use the tool for the part that works and you create a solution for the part that didn’t and you finish, and then you go fix the tool.
TA DA!!!
IN GOLF…
Keep your head down,
Swing from the hips.
Follow through.
IN HARMONY,
Suspend your opinion,
Ask a ton of questions to various people,
And separate facts from interpretation.
And, if you practice both of those for a lifetime…
You will live a life of harmony and play scratch golf ;-)
It ain’t easy… but it’s the best game in town…
And, there is nothing like enjoying a nice absolute on the rocks on the 19th hole with great friends and sharing the successes of life and business and family…
Swing’em straight and never stop questioning!
Yours in harmony,
Nestor