The Evolution of You

A few weeks ago I saw a video on the evolution of watches by Rolex. I can’t seem to find the link, but basically it talked about how the watch had evolved over time to ad features that met the needs of the people who wore them.

So imagine you have this very basic watch. Goes on your wrist and tells time, that’s it. Ok water falls on the watch and it stops working. Ooops!

Ok now imagine that you tell Rolex and they’re like “So what, you trying to say our watches suck? Forget you.” Hmmm you’re confused, because you were only trying to let them know that it broke because of water. WTH!

Or alternatively instead of telling Rolex, you just start complaining to your friends about Rolex watches and how crappy they are. You get mad everytime you wear it and think to yourself, “I can’t believe they did this to me!”… On the other side, Rolex HAS NO IDEA that you’re watch broke because of water. Why? Because you haven’t told them! WTH!

If you haven’t noticed already, this is how many of us live our lives. We either take feedback horribly or complain instead of telling the person the feedback. Trust me, I know what this is like. It’s been my life for many years. Why did none of my business ideas work? Because everytime someone gave me ‘feedback’ I perceived it as a threat the idea. Even my personal character, anytime anyone tried to tell me something to improve on I’d take it as an insult. So because I acted this way, I created a world where there was no such thing as feedback. So what did I do when I felt someone wronged me? Complained about them behind their back. I didn’t give feedback either, because I wasn’t opening to getting it.

Why do we live so tightly hanging onto the past? It’s like a business refusing to evolve over time. It doesn’t work. Change and evolution are necessary. It’s how the world progresses. Who we are is not defined by our past, it’s what we persistently create for the future.

Now for anything to evolve and change, feedback is absolutely necessary. Imagine a plane that did not receive feedback from it’s environment about what pressure it’s at. Planes would never know what altitude they’re at (altitude is gauged off pressure) and they’d be crashing all over the place.

When it comes to human feedback the biggest flaw is not that it’s not given, it’s that we often don’t know how to give it. We use emotional communication instead of empowering communication. The difference? One works, the other usually doesn’t. Nobody wants to be yelled at or felt like they’re ‘wrong’. However, we do it so often because our ego’s train us to use emotional communication (As you prob. know well by now, mine is “I’m right, your wrong!”).

I’m not going to write about empowering communication much here because I’m putting it into an e-book. I will post when I am ready to launch it!