You Cannot Not Communicate

It was Anand v/s Riya at the chess competition in the office canteen. It was funny when Riya observed the crowd cheer them. She saw from the corner of her eye that her boss gave some special attention to Anand while he had his turn to play. 

The boss Seetaram was so involved in signalling Anand the next winning moves that he dint even realise that Riya was also a part of his team. Was Seetaram biased? Well in this scenario anyone would think that he was. However, if we go to see from a non-biased third person perspective, that was just a quick judgement we just passed about Seetaram's personality. 

An NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) presupposition states 'You cannot not communicate'. We are always communicating via verbal medium or through our body language. Even our silence speaks volumes about our feelings and mood.  

Here too, Seetaram was communicating through his body language and gestures. It was assumed in Riya's head that she was been treated unfairly. Although it was just a game of chess in the office canteen, Riya kept thinking of it long after that event, through the day. She went ahead to quote that incident to her society friends as an unfair practice against women. 

Are we doing the right thing by having a perception and passing a judgement about someone's behaviour based on their actions without clarifying. There is a saying that actions speak louder than words. Yes we make perceptions in our mind and that helps us form schemas to manage ourselves and manoeuvere our ways.  

But not in all cases is the perception in our heads the same as the reality. Another NLP presupposition states that map is not the territory.

Take the case of Riya once again. She has an experience with Seetaram due to which she held strong perceptions on the unfair treatment and bias women face at work. After few years, Riya changed her job, now she held her views towards her new boss Raj. Riya never asked for feedback and always assumed she was disliked by Raj. She felt that Raj would treat her as less in front of the male colleagues. This was affecting Riya's performance, due to which Raj started providing her constructive feedback. However, Riya never actively seeked any feedback form Raj and did not even bother to work in the direction of the feedback. 

What do you think happened eventually? Obviously anger and hurt just breeds further negativity. We will continue seeing this the coming blog.