Matt Abrahams

He said, I'm not being wrong enough.

I gave no rubric, no requirements.

I said, tell me more.

He said, well, I was going to call the chair a cat, but a cat has four legs and a chair has four legs.

I'm not being wrong enough.

Sometimes a cat sits on a chair.

I'm not being wrong enough.

We are all on this continuum he's on, judging and evaluating.

He's clearly several standard deviations away from most of us, but we all carry around this judgment in our head.

And what it does is it locks us internally and not allows us to be external.

So you're absolutely right.

And when I'm focused on judging what I'm saying,

I'm using precious cognitive bandwidth that I could be spending on making sure you clearly understand my message.

This is why memorizing what you're trying to say works against you because that precious cognitive bandwidth, trying to get it right, gets in the way of actually doing it.

So we need to train ourselves to understand that the magic of communication happens in the moment and not what's happening in your head before.

And you know who's really good at it?

That's a green light.

Exactly.

Children are fantastic at this because they don't have the inhibitions that we do.

But anything that gets you to disrupt the judgment and evaluation that you do can be really helpful.