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This is FiveMinuteFriday, Perception versus Emotion.
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Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast everybody. Super excited to have you back here on the show. In today’s episode, I’d like to share something that I learned this week that was really cool. And I want to caveat this by saying I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist. I’m exploring this space and I found this tip very useful. I’d love to share it with you.
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Some psychologists say that the reason there’s conflict in interpersonal relationships is because we take things personally. We take a lot of things personally, and this is true for both just interpersonal relationships with your friends, colleagues, family members, people that may be business partners, people you track with, but especially it’s true in intimate relationships because it’s very hard not to take something personally, when it’s addressed at you or maybe at your habits, at your behaviors, at your opinions and things like that. And today’s tip is something that I’m exploring, hopefully will help me and maybe help you to take things less personally, and actually do the contrary, connect with people, even in times of these difficult conversations, these difficult discussions.
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So how do we not take things personally? How can we not take things as personally? Well, first let’s imagine a situation. Somebody is speaking with you and they’re addressing some kind of behavior that you have or a trait that you have, and that they don’t like it, that it triggers them, that they have a problem with it. Of course, you’re going to take it personally. Of course, you disagree with that. Why is that? Well, because we are different. We as humans come from all different walks of lives and backgrounds and upbringings and parenting and childhoods and whatever else has been affecting the way we’ve developed. It would be really boring and frankly, impossible to find somebody who’s exactly like you. It’d be boring because basically you’d know exactly how they think and how they operate. And that’s what adds spice to life, the fact that we are different.
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But it comes with a price and the price is that sometimes we disagree on things and you might have one perception of a certain phenomenon and they might have a different perception. So let’s take a hypothetical example. For instance, your significant other comes to you and says, “I feel angry. I feel frustrated. It feels like you don’t care about me. You don’t care about this relationship.” Maybe, “You don’t care about our kids,” if you have kids. So they are expressing their perception and we can get triggered. And basically what happens is it’s really hard to agree with that, right? If you’re a good person, if you’re in this for good reasons, you know you care, right? All these accusations are empty. To you, they seem so empty. And they’re misgrounded, they don’t have foundation.
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And so of course, you’re going to defend yourself. Of course, you’re going to say, “Well, no, I do care. I do this and that. And I work really hard or I do the dishes all the time, or buy you small gifts and I bring you flowers,” and so on. The problem is that there’s a difference of perception. For instance, in this case, people might be putting different meanings into the word care, for you, it might be to care about somebody is to buy them flowers and do the dishes and work really hard so that together you can save up for a vacation. Whereas for the other person, caring might be speaking words of affirmation, holding their hand, spending time together, reading a book together, going for walks together. There might be differences. There are probably differences in how you perceive these things.
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And so what we normally get into is we start fighting about the perception like, “My perception is this,” and we don’t say the word perception, but we kind of stand our ground and defend ourselves because our perception is different and we have this clash of perceptions. So both people put different meanings into what it means to care in this case. And that causes more and more conflict, it causes people to fall further apart, to then have more conflict later on. And that causes this vicious cycle.
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The way to combat that, the way not to take something like that personally, is to focus on emotion rather than perception. So for instance, when somebody comes to you like your significant other, and they say that, “I feel like you don’t care.” How can you connect with them in that moment in time when they’re clearly very accusatory towards you? Well, the way to connect with them is to rather than think about what is their perception, how they’re wrong and correct their perception, think about the emotions that they’re having because of that perception. What emotions is that causing? Perhaps fear, they’re afraid that you will leave or that this will carry on for the rest of their life. You’ll just care less and less. Frustration, that they want to be connected with you, but they’re not. Their feeling is you don’t care. Then some sadness, that they’re really sad that the person that they’re in a relationship with doesn’t care about them.
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Now, imagine… in part accepting their perception, there’s no need to… You can accept that they have this perception, but without aligning yourself to their perception, without taking that perception, making your perception. Just imagine for a second, if you believed all those things, if you believed regardless of what the circumstance are, what if you believed that the person you’re with doesn’t care about you. You would probably feel the same fear. You would probably feel the same frustration, the same sadness, a whole plethora of emotions.
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And so the way to connect is to understand, not their perception, it’s okay to understand that it’s okay to even accept that it exists, but the way to connect is not about taking that perception, making your own, because then you’ll hate yourself. You’ll resent yourself after a while for constantly having to change your ways. And just constantly having to bend over backwards to always accommodate what the other person has in mind. There has to be a discussion about that. There has to be a discussion about these perceptions and what that means in the relationship and things like that. That’s a whole separate story.
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But in the moment in time, when somebody’s saying something like that to you, the way to connect with them is by thinking about the emotions, trying to feel what they will feel. And this is what empathy is all about. Something that I’ve been exploring. I’m not good at empathy at all, but something that I want to get good at, something I want to discover for myself and understand even better and use in my life more. As I believe what empathy is all about, connecting with the other person on an emotional level and understand like, if you were to believe the things that they believed, if you had the same situation in your life, how would you feel?
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And instantly, instead of having your guard up and being ready for a fight, you will likely feel very different. You will likely feel connected to the other person. You’ll likely feel that even though they’re attacking you, even though they’re saying these things about you, but if you put that aside and just think about how they feel, try to feel the way they would feel, the way you would feel if you believed all those same things in your relationship about your significant other. If you are able to do that, then all of a sudden you will feel much closer to them. You won’t feel like they’re the enemy. You’ll feel just compassion towards them and want to give them a hug, want to tell them some nice things, reassure them, re-encourage. Not to justify your position, but reassure them that everything’s okay, that there’s nothing really to worry about, that you understand how they feel, that you want them to feel better. And instantly instead of a conflict situation, you’ll have more of a connected situation.
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And if you can create those situations in your life, then from there, it’ll be much easier and much more productive to talk about the actual underlying issues, the differences in perception, and understanding what their point of view is explaining your point of view, explaining your position on the topic that you’re discussing. All those conversations become much easier. And you use this opportunity to actually connect with a person in a situation where you normally would have a fight.
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The example doesn’t have to be intimate relationships. It can be in any kind of interpersonal relationships when you have a difference of perception. The main point here is to catch yourself when you’re feeling a difference of perception, when you’re noticing that there’s a difference in perception, rather than by default, going into this argument, understanding is this what you want right now? Sometimes you might want it. Sometimes, maybe it’s a debate class, or maybe you’re debating something fun with your friends. And then yes, you want to compare different perceptions and you want to battle and comment. It can be fun. It can be productive. I think Aristotle said, “Truth is born in argument.” Yes, sometimes you want, but sometimes we don’t always often want it.
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Our minds are designed to always default to that, but sometimes use your heart and pause yourself. Understand there’s a difference in perceptions. Is it worth fighting about it right now? Or is it more important to understand the emotions, the feeling the other person has because of this and connecting with them now, because you care about this person, because you care about this relationship and you want to be compassionate with them. You want to help them in this difficult time and connect better. And then afterwards resolve these, of course the underlying issues, but that can come later.
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So there you go. That’s in a nutshell perception versus emotion. Try it out, see how you go this weekend. Maybe you will have a situation where you can stop yourself and rather than debating perceptions, focus on the underlying emotions and connecting, being empathetic with the other person that you’re speaking with. I hope you enjoyed this quick episode. And I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
