Some food for thought.
Im in the midst of a twelve week program on increasing my productivity taught through one of the professional organizations that Im a member of. This program is just fantastic and I wanted to share one of the recent lessons.
Peter Ouspensky wrote a book called The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution. At the beginning of the book, he says that one of the "biggest challenges we face is convincing ourselves that what we are about to learn is new." If you dont think that something is new when you hear it, you typically use the muscle in your brain called I get it - the "I Get it" reflex.
Joe Stumpf, the gentleman putting on the Power Producivity program for real estate agents and lenders, said that he was recently on a plane coming home, and the man sitting next to him asked, "So, what do you do?" Its a common polite conversation that we have all been in before, when we dont really know what else to say.
Joe responded, "I teach real estate and mortgage consultants how to build a referral business." He said that the man immediately retorted, "oh yeah, yeah I know about working referrals, I do that too." Joe said he thought to himself, "Wow, there is nothing that I could possibly say right now that would open him to the possibility that he may not actually get it and that there could be much more to it than, yeah I get it, I've heard that before."
That got me to thinking that like most people, I probably fall into that trap more than I should. In conversing with people I dont know or in observing their initial behavior, the tendency is to quickly form a perception, to 'get it.' The truth is that once I do that, I assume that I understand who they are, what they are doing or where the conversation might be headed.
So Im going to be more conscious of my "I Get it" reflex. Im going to stay present and invested in what Im doing and choose to stay open to a much bigger possibility that maybe there is more for me to "Get."
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