I came across this video a few weeks ago. I think the link was emailed to me by a friend.
Before you read any further, please watch it now and test yourself on the “awareness test”.
Once you’re read the rest of this blog, doing the test is pointless, and without experiencing the test yourself, I think you may find it hard to get what I’m trying to say.
So… how did you do?
Did you pass? Or, did you fail miserably like me? I failed to see it the first time and couldn’t see anything else the second time and wondered how I could possibly have missed it the first place.
I have already spoken in previous blogs about the nature of assumption (82 days to go!!), and how the wide range of different responses to my ALife4Sale website has absolutely amazed me.
When I designed this website, I spent many hours writing and re-writing it’s contents to try to express and show my life as best I could. But no matter what I put in there, the way it will be interpreted by others is up to them, and is completely beyond my control. When we communicate with people, we tend to assume that they will understand what we say and more to the point, why we said it and the way we said it too.
But often communication goes beyond words, and what is said is strongly influenced by our own experiences and views of the world, and so is what we see or hear. And as a listener, what we hear also greatly depends on how much we (consciously or otherwise) block what we don’t want to hear.
If you’re like me, you concentrated on counting the passes of the white team when watching the video because it was what your expectation of the video was about. But this is not all that you saw. Your eyes saw it, but your brain didn’t process it. Same video both times, completely different interpretation of it the second time around.
For me, it raises a very important question: when a relationship ends, can you really talk about a bolt from the blue or should you be more honest and admit that maybe the warning signs were there all along, like moonwalking bears, but you just didn’t see them, or saw them and chose to ignore them totally until they were too obvious to be missed?
Was I listening to the white team all along, when all she really talked about was the dancing bear?
