I Wear My Sunglasses At Night
DATELINE: BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
Today’s article focus (and video – remember to click through each week if you prefer my dulcet tones) is about the Filters through which we all unconsciously view and understand the world – and how much of an impact they have on whether we see business opportunities, or delete them.
The past two weeks of economic news are great examples of that! Since I began drafting my “Ignore the News” article last week, the NASDAQ is up 6%, the S&P500 is up 4%, the ASX200 is up 3%, and Bitcoin is up 12%.
How did your Filters play out over that two week period? Did you immediately begin to fear the sky was falling? Was your response excitement to “buy when there’s blood in the streets”? Are you still just confused about a yen-carry, and happy that news has been replaced by Olympic Breakdancing?
There’s no right or wrong with your Filters. However, self-awareness about how you uniquely see the world is a powerful character trait. As you will learn below, my personal choice is to have Filters which:
- Make me Happy, and
- Help me Forecast my Future.
When I’m unhappy or my present reality flummoxes me by surprise, those are cues to do some more self-work. Are you seeing all the opportunities in front of you?
Blackboard Fridays Episode 75: What Filters Are You Wearing Today?
For this week’s episode of Blackboard Fridays, I’m wearing sunglasses.
In fact, I wear sunglasses for every episode of Blackboard Fridays.
And indeed, for every interaction I have with the world and so do you – because by sunglasses I’m talking about the Filters through which we perceive the world around us.
Part of the challenge of being a human in relationship with others is that we all wear different pairs of sunglasses, we all have different filters through which we perceive the world.
No Two People View the World the Same
Indeed no two people view the world the same. This creates enormous confusion and frustration and stress in relationships and in business. Just because something is really apparent to you, does not mean it’s really apparent to somebody else. What you say can be heard completely differently and what somebody else says to you, might be interpreted by you as something they completely didn’t mean.
Let’s unpack the 4 layers of filters to at the very least help you to identify which pairs of sunglasses you have on and maybe every now and then, take them off or adjust to see the world maybe in a slightly different way
Overview of the 4 Primary Filters
Across our multiple senses, humans are bombarded by information. Far too much data for us to consciously monitor and process. Thankfully, our brains have developed a range of coping mechanisms to help us, coping tools that filter in (and out) the information we don’t need.
These filters act in several ways, most notably Deleting information we don’t need, Distorting other data to make us more comfortable, Nominalising information so it’s easier to understand, and Generalising knowledge so we don’t have to remember as much.
If you want a great example of this, my daughter (and now you!) plays a game called “Pink Car for Nanny” where she points out every pink car we see. Prior to this game, the colour of cars around me (indeed, unless driving nearby, the actual presence of cars around me!) was irrelevant to me – and my brain simply Deleted that information. But now you better believe I spot a LOT more pink cars than I ever saw before – they were always there, but my brain has reloaded one of its Filters.
By bringing this to your attention, don’t be surprised if you spend the next week or two noticing a lot more pink cars as well.
How Conscious are Our Filters?
As you can observe in the visual above, our four primary Filters range from Most Conscious to Least Conscious. Let me explain the four filters with a simple business example: Money.
The Most Conscious Filter we have is our Experiences, both current and recent.
How does the Experience Filter impact our financial situation?
Take someone who has had an experience in business that “making money is hard”. You’ve been in business for 5 years, 8 years, and you’ve never really got into that relaxed stage where revenue, profit, cash is simple and straightforward. Your experience of business is that you have to work hard to make money, and so you see evidence in the world to support that experience – it’s OK that business is hard, look at everyone else who is experiencing the same thing!
As a strategic business coach, I’ve seen many business owners whose filters also delete any evidence that it can be easier to make money. You’re not looking for a pink car, so you don’t see the opportunity or changes that abound.
The next layer out, at a deeper and less conscious level, is your Beliefs. So maybe at this point, you’ve actually built a Belief in yourself that money is hard to get. It’s not just that you delete any opportunities to create more revenue, but now even when presented with clear evidence of a solution your Filters kick in and your mind convinces itself that “making money is hard, so therefore this easy solution must be fake”.
[Side Note: This Belief is one of the hardest obstacles for a coach to overcome with their sales and marketing. Because there are a LOT of bad business coaches in my unregulated industry, so it’s a healthy and common practice for curious business owners to shift from the Experience that ‘those coaches are unproven’ into the Belief that ‘all coaches are bogus’.]
The Two Least Conscious Filters
Deeper still are your Values, those things that you hold very, very dear. I’m fond of observing that “if you really want to know what a person Values, watch their behaviour” because this decision-making filter runs deep.
Say you value “Health” but rack up Uber Eats bills while never using your gym membership? Say you value “Friendship” but consistently cancel plans to solo watch Netflix? Have an honest reflection of your values (and as an overweight introvert I bring no judgement, though I’m also a tightarse so I never use food delivery services).
For a lot of people around our example of “money”, they actually have a Value that “money is not important”, that perhaps, “money is the root of all evil”.
Have you ever met someone who at a deep level believes that people with money are all crooks and that people without money are noble? They’ve actually started to view the world through the Value of poverty, and at a deep unconscious level their Filters are impacting all aspects of their lives. I spend far too much time on reddit, and it’s both sad and scary how many people hold their bad financial situation as a virtue while completing refusing to see any solutions to improve their situation – because more money would make them a bad person.
(No, using Uber Eats makes you a bad person.)
Finally, at the deepest layer, the Least Conscious Filter that we all apply to what’s known as the Fundamental Operating Context or the FOC.
Your FOC is the core operating system that was built into you between the ages of 0-7. This is some of the most deep-seated aspects for how you see the world, and a lot of it comes from our parents.
It is indeed true that your parents “FOC” you up.
They set the pattern for which everything else builds upon. If you as a small child live with parents who told you that “money was the root of all evil” (a Biblical misquote, by the way), who told you that “money was hard to come by”, who told you that “money was bad” or that “you’ll never be worth anything” then at a fundamental level you may be operating through the filter that you’ll never be financially successful.
How Our Filters Impact our Daily Life and Business
Combine these Filters, and it can mean that out there in the world there may be an amazing opportunity that presents itself with dollar signs written all over it. But for you to perceive it, it needs to go through all of your Filters.
- It needs to go through that Fundamental Operating Context that “I’ll never be successful.”
- It needs to go through those Values that “Money is for crooks.”
- It needs to go through the Beliefs that “Earning money is hard.”
- And it needs to go through your Experience that in this business, “Money just doesn’t show up”.
So by the time it actually reaches you, instead of having all of these big dollar signs on it, it’s got little ones or maybe it’s an empty wallet, or it just looks like hard work, or criminal activity.
Now, somebody similar to you, in your situation but with a different experience, a different set of filters can see exactly the same opportunity and interpret it wildly differently. There’s no right or wrong when it comes to Filters – my key criteria is “Do they make you happy” and “Do they help you plan for the Future”?
Just because someone else sees big dollar signs, doesn’t mean the world is actually putting out big dollar signs to them – their Filters may be skewed the other way. They may be correct or incorrect but that is how they are seeing the world.
Filters in Conversation and Business Relationships
Now create this situation in conversation. This could be you and a business partner reviewing an opportunity together – through your filters it doesn’t look like it’s worth the hard work, while through their filters it’s a complete no-brainer we should jump at it.
And so you have a back and forth conversation. You get frustrated. You can’t understand what the other person is saying, because invariably we talk just about what we see and we don’t talk about our filters. We don’t talk about our experiences, our beliefs, our values. We don’t do the work on our own self to unpack that Fundamental Operating Context and maybe make some changes to the operating system through which we see the world.
If we don’t do that, if we just talk through our filters in stead of talking about our filters, then we will create ongoing frustration, ongoing misalignment and ultimately, we can create a world that validates what we believe, that tells us we were right but doesn’t make us happy doesn’t allow us to actually seize the opportunities that are out there.
What filters are you running in your world?
With love,
Jacob Aldridge
International Business Advisor
WhatsApp +61 427 151 181
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