Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life

by Amy E. Herman

Urgent concerns scream for our attention, but they usually offer only short-term solutions. Important things contribute value in the long run.

“Urgent tasks put us in a reactive mode, one marked by a defensive, negative,

When we focus on important activities we operate in a responsive mode, which helps us remain calm, rational, and open to new opportunities.” Almost everyone today

Whether we’re aware of how we advertise our priorities or not, we are advertising them.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

We can spend all the time in the world gathering and analyzing data, but if we don’t articulate it correctly, no one else, including ourselves, will ever benefit from it. And yet every day around the world lack of communication and miscommunication cause problems that could have

been avoided, including lost evidence, lost opportunities, lost loves, even lost lives.

Precision in objective description is just as important to accountants, journalists, teachers, architects, engineers, chemists, analysts, stockbrokers, human resource managers, researchers, archivists,

assistants, even delivery people.

A damning online post can not only hurt an employee, it can also bring derision and damage to an entire company—just ask (or Google) Qantas, McDonald’s, Vodafone, Kenneth Cole, or Chrysler.

For this reason, it’s more important than ever to be able to communicate effectively in any form because whatever we write or say in public will also end up replayed, ridiculed, or rewarded in cyberspace.

Similarly, even though they can come to us spontaneously and seemingly without thought, we should view our words as the artist views paint: as a tool that must be carefully pondered and selected before use.

Subjective words can be used, albeit still carefully,

in

social settings, while objective should be used for...

When Charlevoix completed an in-class assessment of the student and recorded objective information about his performance, behavior, and actions, the committee determined that the child had a personality conflict with his teacher but that he didn’t need special services.

“Your class made me so much

more aware,” she told me later, “of the power of the language we use and how easily we can create an inaccurate impre...

It can be especially easy to slip into the subjective when we’re critiquing, correcting, or upset with the person we’re communicating with, but in doing so we run the risk of alienating the

very person we’re meant to help. For instance, consider the word

Likewise, when we communicate, we need to make sure we aren’t obscuring our message with “too much” by talking too much, using too many words, or including unnecessary information.

People will be more forgiving and patient

with us when we own up to our errors and correct them as soon as we discover them.

Don’t let the paint dry or the dust settle on a communication mistake. Instead, make it ...

repeat it in their own words.

When we reach a barrier of understanding, a simple name change can be all that’s required to overcome

As long as it’s an accurate synonym and doesn’t change the meaning, think Shakespeare: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

A good way to quickly sort through the difference? Say what you see, not what you think.

You may not like something, you may have a personal aversion to it, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore it.

When we are emotionally overwhelmed and can’t seem to think straight, we can always fall back on the same investigative model we’ve learned to use to gather facts: who, what, where, and when. Instead of letting their emotions dictate their response, the student’s parents could have asked: “Who was involved in our daughter’s activities?” “What exactly did the incident entail?” “Where did this happen?” and “When did it occur?”

Letting the insult go unanswered does not make you a lesser person. It makes you the opposite. If the emotional upheaval keeps

But what I learned from concentrating on the objective and leaving the subjective by the wayside is that facts give confidence. Facts are the truth.

We now know that when something we see is not in sync with our expectations, we can subconsciously make it align, either by missing important details or making assumptions that fill them in or simplify them.

A bias can be that which we avoid and that to which we’re drawn.

cautious because our preferences can turn into prejudices.

The woman’s experiences informed her decision to confront me. The same thing happens to all of us, whether we realize it or not.

Our brain fills in the information gaps to form our biases by grabbing similar data from things we’ve already experienced—for better or worse.

Once we’ve recognized the biases in ourselves, we can then look at them and determine if they can be used productively

to gather more factual information.

To do this, ask yourself: Are my prejudices or my way of viewing things limiting how I listen to and communicate with others? Are my biases helpful or harmful to me and my success? If you find that they are detrimental, divorce y...

extricate yourself from the...

Our biases are not verified facts. They are feelings and experiences that make us want to believe something, but they aren’t enough to create a conclusion. Instead, use them as a starting point to look further.

We need to be open to the same input from others, both to learn their perspective and to help balance ours.

The human brain is malleable. We can change our perceptions, make new neural connections, and train it to think differently.

The gray area is dangerous because it lends itself to sensationalism and emotionalism.

The longer we live and the higher we move up in our careers, the more often we’ll find ourselves having to negotiate this nebulous place, to make tough calls in perplexing situations.

In any situation, but especially in one that’s gray, we need to focus on what we do know and let go of what we don’t. The nurse I met was stuck on the unknown “why.”

Instead of standing around waiting for answers to the why, focus on and objectively deal with what you can see: the who, what, where, and when.

But rather than letting the unknown paralyze them or obsessing over what they didn’t know, the company set its priorities on taking care of what it could, and as a result produced a corporate miracle. Johnson & Johnson completely recovered

The phenomenon of incomplete tasks dominating our thoughts is called “the Zeigarnik effect.”