Today, the entire company gathered from around the globe for the first time in its history of being a global company. People from every continent, and dozens of countries brought together and the one roof for a day of activities and workshops, designed to help people connect. A little while ago, I finished facilitating my final official session for the week, which was a speed networking event. It was a bit of fun to host forty or so colleagues and send them through groups talking in groups of three, with 5 minutes on the clock in total. I know it doesn't sound like a very interesting event - but participants were really surprised at how great it was.

Prior to this, there was presentation from a Finnish neurologist and speaker on resilience - which was hit and miss with the audience, but mostly miss. Even during the talk, there were messages from a few people in a private chat asking- "what the hell is he talking about?" as he was presenting in a way that simplified the conversation to be more entertaining, stripping away a lot of the data to back it up. This is not a great approach for a room in IT perhaps.

However, I actually think that the main reason a lot of people didn't really "get it", was because they didn't have the experience to connect with what was being said, in two ways. Firstly, they didn't have the technical experience and background to infer meaning. And secondly, a lot of the younger people likely don't have the life experience to comprehend what was actually being said, especially about Connecting with oneself, and connecting with others. However, talking with a few other people afterward who did have the background experience to make inferences and connect it to their own lives, they really enjoyed the talk, and found it useful.

As I have spoken about it before and will gloss over it now, I get a strong sense that younger people these days are far less resilient than they believe themselves to be. They also have utilized many ways to ignore their social needs, and avoid having to deal with an emptiness that is there, but they aren't willing to recognize. I think it will catch up with them though, and perhaps when it does, a talk like this might come to mind.

The people I work with are generally very intelligent, but that doesn't mean that they understand everything presented to them. And, while simplification is brilliant, simplification also requires specialized knowledge.

If you can't say it simply enough, you don't understand it well enough.
_ perhaps Einsten

E = mc²

You all know it and may even be able to label the letters. But without searching, how many of us can actually explain this very simple equation? Take your time. This is essentially what people were presented with today, except the conversation was around attachment, resilience, and connection. They didn't even hear the term "relationship", so that made it even harder for them to translate into something they could understand, let alone apply to their world. And while for me the illustrative analogies used were very clear, most people heard the description, but saw nothing. For them, it may as well have been said in an unfamiliar language, where they hear the sounds, but do not understand and can't connect it to anything familiar to their own lives.

There was theory, but no relativity.

Life is complex, as is our understanding of it. There may only be one reality, but our view and translation of that reality exist in layers. No one else sees what we see, no one else knows what we know, no one has our experience, and everyone is unique. Something many subscribe to - how different we are.

Yet, we are also mostly the same.

Which is why when someone says about losing our own identity, killing our darlings, our attachments to who we are and what we think is correct - there is pushback. People believe they know themselves well, though very, very few have even the slightest inkling of their own truth. This is because who we believe ourselves to be is driven by our experiences and imperfect view of what we experience, making incorrect inference from incomplete information that we aren't seeing objectively.

And people don't want to let go.

I think a lot of people who had this particular presentation go over their head, or past their curiosity, because they are attached to what they know, closed off to what they don't yet understand. But, I also think that a lot of them are actually avoiding exploring this kind of ideas, because they are afraid of what they will find. We all have some view of ourselves that we hold, but it doesn't feel good to discover that what we have believed, is not actually the truth, and diving into self-reflection will dig into the foundation of who we are. It peels away the layers, digs into the soil of us, and perhaps finds gold. Maybe what people fear though, is under all of those layers, there is nothing in them that is special.

They are just like everyone else.

For some reading this, it will just be another useless ramble. For others, they will get more out of it, and maybe use it as a tool for reflection. Which is it?

One's trash, is another's gold.

Only the curious generally dig deep enough.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]