Why Don’t People See the Obvious?

It can be extraordinarily frustrating when people fail to see the obvious. Why can’t they perceive what’s right in front of them? Why can’t they see what’s real and true?

Photo by Anne Kearney

When people don’t see what’s so obvious to you, it’s tempting to think that they are actively and selectively closing their eyes to reality or are, in fact, seeing the obvious but pretending not to. Sometimes these things are true. There are people who have psychological disorders that give them a particularly warped view of the world and of themselves. There are others who intentionally distort the truth or just make things up in an attempt to wield more power, influence people, or simply to make money.

But outside of these extremes there is a more pervasive reason for failing to see what’s obvious – the obvious exists not in the world but in the brain. Our perceptions are not direct imprints. They are models that our brains build to represent things in the world. The complexities of how our brains take in and process information means that my “obvious” and your “obvious” may be completely different.

Do You See What I See?

I recently went hiking with my husband and daughter in Spain’s Picos de Europa. On the second day, after a nearly 1000-meter elevation gain, we were rewarded with a stunning view, including a large craggy rock formation typical of the region’s landscape. My daughter pointed and said, “Look at that, it’s a sheep head!” just as I was about to say, “Look at that, it’s an elephant!”

My husband also saw a sheep. I couldn’t see it until after careful explanation about ear and mouth placement. Even then, I had to really focus to keep it in my mind and the moment I relaxed, the elephant took over – after all, it was so much more obvious.

A craggy rock formation, a sheep, an elephant … what do you see? (Photos by Anne Kearney)

We didn’t continue on our hike until I had seen the sheep and I had made sure the others could see the elephant. In retrospect, it seemed oddly vital to us that everyone else could see what we saw. Why was this so important?

Being effective in the world depends on having a useful understanding of how it works. We not only want a coherent world view, but we want that world view to be shared – particularly by people in our tribe. This shared perspective validates our own view and also provides common and predictable ground upon which to interact with others.

But the experience in the mountains is a reminder that our world view – and in fact all perception – is a cognitive construction.

The Legoland of Perception

Our world view is a collection of models and stories, usually somewhat grounded in reality, that we continually build and refine. Although perception feels like we are directly experiencing what is objectively true about the world, our brains are actually collecting sensations, filtering them through a cognitive sieve created from past experience and expectation, and then constructing a model from a conceptual Lego set that includes the incoming sensations but also the collection of our experiences, knowledge, beliefs, emotions, and values.

In fact, the set of things that even have a chance of making it to our perceptual processing system is only a small fraction of what is out in the world. We pay attention to what we’re interested in, what we’ve learned is important, what the people we trust tell us is important, and what we expect to see. Our brains have learned to ignore much of the rest. It may be that my husband and daughter were primed to see something like a sheep in the rock formation because we had seen several herds of Cantabrian chamois (a type of mountain goat) on the hike up. I can’t even hazard a guess for why my brain constructed an elephant instead.

When it comes to perceiving things that are more abstract than animals – the causes of and solutions to a problem at work, for example – the number of cognitive interpretations increases manyfold. The perception of these more abstract concepts takes place much higher up the cognitive processing chain than visual perception. The greater number of processing stages means that there are more opportunities for variability in the way that the brain combines elements to arrive at a unified understanding – an understanding that despite all this processing can feel obvious after the fact.

Construction, Misalignment, and Fracture

Most of our brain’s processing happens beneath the surface so that we’re often unaware of the hard work that goes into building perception and understanding. Our perception can feel so effortless and obvious that we are thrown for a loop when another seemingly sane person sees things differently.

When it comes to rock formations, the ramifications of these differences are trivial. But when it comes to perceptions that carry more weight in terms of how we view the world, these differences can cause friendships, families, and cultures to fracture. They can also provide a leverage point for those who would further divide people through fear and hate.

What’s the solution for dealing with problems of the obvious? Strategies for sharing one’s understanding and for consensus building are important. But these strategies are most effective when we first acknowledge that people’s perceptions may legitimately differ. Everyone is blinded, to some extent, by their own sense of the obvious.

The Elephant In the Room

The next time you are interacting with others and asking yourself how they could possibly be missing the elephant in the room (or in the rocks), consider the following: Perhaps they are seeing a sheep instead.

Before you try to make people see what you see or dismiss them altogether, think about what you can do to set aside your own biases and preconceptions and try to see what others see.

How can you work to un-see your own obvious? What can you do to help other people un-see?

Taking the time to set aside the obvious and explore the rocks together may, in the long run, be the most productive way to build common ground.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She has a B.A. in Cognitive Science from Stanford University, and a M.S. in Resource Policy and Behavior and Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Using SEE as a Building Block for a Culture of Belonging

Here at HandsOn NWNC, we’ve been on an equity journey since our early founding in the fall of 2007. Just a few years later, we launched our first specifically equity-focused program, Women’s Emerging Leaders, whose cohorts over the past decade have included women of color at relatively high percentages. But since 2019—before COVID, before the killing of George Floyd—we started being more explicit and intentional about not only where we are on our own organizational equity journey, but about what we could do to help others along on theirs as well. When I first learned about the SEE framework, it struck me as being the next logical step on that equity journey for HandsOn: how could this framework help us create a “culture of belonging” within our own organization?

The team at HandsOn Northwest North Carolina.

After all, creating an environment for effectiveness means creating a place where everyone can be their best selves, and bring their full, lived experience to their work. The core SEE aspects of meaningful action (which is baked into our mission), as well as model-building (e.g., can all of our team members see themselves in our work?) and being capable (e.g., do we value the skills and lived experiences of all? Do we help individuals to embrace this lived experience in their work?) seemed to flow directly towards this idea of “belonging.”

Since starting to work with SEE in mid-2021, we have been thinking about how we could apply these concepts to our own culture of belonging. As we geared up to onboard both new board and staff members in late 2021 and early 2022, this became a pressing question for us. Before SEE, we tended to focus way more on the technical skills and knowledge we thought people would need to be “effective” in their respective roles on our team, rather than focusing on the model building and recognition of pre-existing capability that people were bringing with them to HandsOn. In essence, we weren’t starting where they were at, or considering that everyone’s existing mental models might already provide a framework for us to build upon, as opposed to overwhelming them with information.

Over the past decade, we’ve been successful at building a board that is primarily composed of leaders of color, and have done so in a relatively organic fashion. Our board members have said time and time again that our ability to create a diverse, dynamic, and engaged board is because of how much our individual members enjoy being on this board, how much they appreciate their time with us—in a word, it’s because each member feels like they belong on our board. So, how do we translate this knowledge of what makes our board successful, both collectively and individually, to how we bring on new board members, and how could SEE help us with that? Rather than overwhelming our newbies with tons of details—ten years’ worth of financials? A strategic plan no one has looked at since COVID?—we chose to focus on making sure they felt they belonged at HandsOn. What would that look like for them? How could we communicate that to them?

We started, first, with our current board members, by redesigning our every-other-year board self-assessment. We asked three simple but more reflective questions designed to ensure that all of our board members felt capable in their role going forward. One of the responses to that assessment included an idea to prepare a simple overview of the top things that we think the board needs to keep in mind as we dive into 2022–-a tool that would be helpful to both new and current members. Such a tool would allow all board members to see themselves in our work—to help them figure out where they belonged in our organization, and how they could apply their own skills, talents, and lived experiences to those challenges and opportunities. This piece became a two-part Canva image, so it was visually-based and not overly word-y (unlike this blog post!). It served as the basis for our board’s annual “strategic thinking/planning” session in February, which is the first full board meeting of the year for our new members. This piece, and the substantive discussion which flowed from it, would never have been created without our work to marry SEE to our “culture of belonging” goal.

In addition, we also used SEE to scrap our traditional paper-and-too-many-facts board orientation and replaced it with a 45-minute conversation. We focused the discussion on the question of “What does the experience of serving on our board feel like?” We felt if we focused more on the model-building goal of board orientation—the belonging aspect–then the being capable and meaningful action pieces would follow. We did provide access to all of the same boring background material electronically, but rather than being focused on this, we delved into how we build relationships on the board, how new members can get their questions answered, current issues/context likely to inform that February board meeting, how our board meetings flow, etc. This led to all four new members attending a special January board meeting, allowing for full participation at the February board meeting.

We also used the same kind of key questions in redesigning the onboarding of a new staff member—“What does it mean to be a member of our team? How can you contribute to our success?”—and we worked intentionally to create in-person touch points so that we could foster appropriate model building activities for them. With our team still entirely remote—due to both COVID and pre-existing office space issues—being able to successfully onboard a new staff member virtually, clearly worked better when intentionally applying SEE principles than the process we had used earlier in the year to onboard a team member. Of course, supporting this new staff member is an ongoing process, but we feel that we’ve given them the essentials of what they need to feel capable, and bring their best self to their work—because they hopefully feel they belong on our team.

When organizations ask us about what they can do to build equitable environments within their own structure, we now feel as though we can confidently share our own experiences using SEE as a tool to help create what can often be an elusive culture of belonging for both board and staff members. We’ve learned that focusing on making sure people feel confident in what they can bring to the team, understand the model in which we operate, and have the opportunity to directly impact our mission and services (basically, the three key SEE concepts), helps people feel like they belong. And that has made all the difference!

Amy Lytle is the Executive Director of HandsOn Northwest North Carolina, a member of our Points of Light Affiliate grantee cohort. HandsOn NWNC works with more than 500 different nonprofits in a six county area, providing a wide variety of training, technical assistance, leadership and professional development opportunities that help nonprofits become more effective and efficient in their work.

Helping Yourself

Helping yourself, staff, volunteers, and colleagues have more resiliency during this time might be the most important thing you can do. In a single day as I am pinballing between Zoom meetings (national, state, and local), I am hearing people that are overwhelmed and exhausted. This year, I have the privilege of joining reDirect’s Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) Learning Circle to explore how we can build supportive environments for our staff, colleagues, and ourselves, to be effective and thrive in our roles. SEE has served as a beacon of light for me during a time when nonprofit staff and volunteers are unanimously tired of pivoting to meet the changing demands of their organizations, as well as the dynamic community health situation presented by COVID-19.

Nonprofits and many industries need their personnel to continue doing more and we are not seeing a reprieve soon. As I was preparing and polishing things to share during my SEE Learning Circle, I reviewed the principles of Supportive Environments for Effectiveness. It reminded me to “hang the mirror”. In other words, it is not enough as managers to just encourage and support our staff to take care of themselves, but we also need to practice self-care and model what that looks like. When people take care of themselves, they are better able to step up, lean in, and help the community. If you lead staff, volunteers, programs, or a friend group, empower those you lead to give themselves permission for self-care, demonstrate self-care, and celebrate when people take care of themselves.

I am proud that I am part of teams and collaborations that are brave enough to be honest and vulnerable to say, own, and acknowledge individual feelings and an emotional state of being. All feelings are valid; it is okay to feel overwhelmed, tired, stressed, etc. Whether your feeling is negative or positive: own it, acknowledge it, and reflect on it. If it is negative, through self-care, and resiliency, I hope you can let it go (at least for a little bit). As winter thaws here in Iowa you may increase your ability to be capable and clear your head by taking a brisk walk on a sunny 55-degree day or basking in the sunshine and peering out your window at the green grass starting to peek through the melting snow.

As managers of humans, I hope that taking care of ourself is seen as an expectation, not a suggestion. The belief of always needing to do everything and be “on” all the time slowly wears on us and can deplete our drive to achieve goals that we’re passionate about. Self-care is not something that we only do at the last hour when our passion is a tiny lingering flame about to be burnt out; we need to dedicate time for resiliency in team meetings, have self-checks and report-outs, and create team trust to allow for vulnerability.

For our organization, considering our individual needs takes shape in several ways. For example, during supervision check-ins, we ask people about their capacity and what they are doing to recharge and reset. We provide permission to pause activities/projects to allow people to refocus and be more capable of executing a higher priority item. We also ask people what drains them the most, and to assess if continuing that task is necessary or whether in the long-term, it could be a better fit for another team member. I would recommend considering taking your supervision check-in outside or having part of it as a strolling meeting to encourage self-care, while also restoring your ability to focus in the hours ahead.

There is little in life that you are alone for; always ask yourself, how can you engage others? I challenge you to rethink asking for help instead as a means to invite others to grow with you and deliver the mission of your organization. By leveraging volunteers and empowering staff, you are a stronger employee; often skilled volunteers can do things better and faster because it is what they do best. We need to leverage the talents of our network to work smarter, not harder. In our own team, when one of us needs help, we lean in and help each other. The key is having a team culture of transparency and vulnerability so that everyone feels comfortable about sharing how the team can rally to support each other. I hope that others are able to recreate a similarly supportive environment in their own jobs.

Ironically, in addition to the SEE framework helping me to hold myself accountable for self-care, I will also be using it as we continue to invite others to grow with us and deliver United Way’s mission. No matter if it is staff, or a volunteer, we need to make sure that we are empowering them with enough information to be capable, and yet not overwhelm them. You wouldn’t want a project-based volunteer to feel like they need to take a semester-long course to help. So often we provide more information than is necessary for the volunteer to perform their duties, and potentially make it seem that years of expertise are needed to create an impact. Many of the volunteers that I leverage bring skills, talents, and perspectives to the table that we can start with and build upon. If we build on their familiarity and passion, they will more quickly make an impact. We know that volunteers will continue to lean in, delivering more support and services for our organization when they feel that they can do what we ask of them. Making sure to acknowledge and thank those that help also helps them realize the extent of their impact.

If you need a little beacon of light to help those that you lead, I encourage you to check out the full SEE framework. However, if three quick bullet points are all that you have the capacity for at the current moment, I would encourage you to ask yourself:

• How are you giving people the information they need to succeed and be excited about the work without overwhelming them?

• How are you creating space and the expectation for people to take care of themselves while they bring their skills and interest to work?

• How are you ensuring that people know they are making an impact and see the results of their efforts?

I would also challenge you to engage in a little self-care too:

• Reflect on what excites you about your work.

• What can help you create resiliency and restore your passion? Build two or three self-care moments into your day.

• End your day by reflecting on three ways you made an impact.

Remember that to best care for others you first need to care for yourself.

Kayla Paulson is a Senior Manager at United Way of East Central Iowa (UWECI) working in Community Resources and Volunteer Engagement. UWECI connects community members, nonprofits, companies, and more to address community needs through asset-based approaches, sharing time, talents, and treasures to create sustainable and lasting solutions for systemic change.

If You Don’t Feed the Horses They Die

People thrive on opportunities to do things that matter. Having a sense of purpose makes people more motivated and increases their overall physical and mental health. How could you help meet someone else’s need to make a difference? How might this improve their world and yours?

Photo by Kyriacos Georgiou on Unsplash.

Kids often speak their minds from the backseat of the car. When my daughter was six, she piped up, “I wish I lived in the olden times.” She was deep into the Little House on the Prairie book series at the time so I understood “olden times” to be the era when Laura Ingalls Wilder was a girl and I guessed that the allure of that period had something to do with horses. It did, but not in the way I thought.

“Kids in those days got to do things that mattered,” she explained. “Their jobs weren’t just things like making the bed. If you don’t make your bed nothing happens, but if you don’t feed the horses they die.” And just like that, she had both explained my uphill battle to introduce chores like making the bed and summed up a powerful universal psychological need. People – adults and kids alike –want to know that what they are doing matters and is valued.

It’s hard to feel motivated when you have the sense that what you’re doing doesn’t make a difference. It’s easy to become demoralized when what you’re doing isn’t appreciated. On the flip side, people thrive on opportunities to do things that matter. Having a sense of purpose not only makes people more motivated in the short run but it also increases their overall physical and mental health.

The current war in Ukraine and the outpouring of help from around the world shows what people can do when they feel they are making a difference. In Barcelona, where I live, the Ukrainian consulate is overflowing with donations of everything from coats to medicines. People across Europe are opening up their homes to Ukrainian refugees. Many others are opening up their pocketbooks or holding fundraising events to aid victims of the war. People are acting because their action is needed to save lives. Not only is aid getting to the victims of this awful war, but the people helping are also meeting their own need to make a difference.

Sometimes it’s harder to see the differences that we are making. The teacher who struggles with dwindling resources and uninvolved parents in a failing school may start to think that what they do doesn’t matter. The team member who feels that their work is undervalued and unappreciated may feel no motivation to excel in their job. This is where feedback comes in.

The Importance of Feedback

Expressing appreciation, acknowledging value, and helping people see how their work fits into the big picture is an important part of bringing out people’s best. I recently wrote about some common reasons for feeling unmotivated and what you can do about them. That list includes some effective things that you can do for yourself, but sometimes you need a little help from those around you.

A friend of mine had a manager who never went out of his way to praise the people on his team or even acknowledge a job well done. “Why should I praise people for doing their job?” he once asked. Was it any wonder that team morale languished?

It’s true that an overabundance of praise quickly loses its value – I’m thinking about the cry of “great job!” that has become a parental reflex or the ubiquitous “amazing” that people mindlessly post in response to artwork shared on Instagram. But meaningful feedback, praise, and appreciation can be hugely rewarding and motivating. In fact, appreciation and positive feedback can have such a powerful impact on worker satisfaction that it would be a shame to confine them to once-a-year Employee Appreciation Day.

People are at their best when they are doing things that matter. How could you – as an employer, a supervisor of volunteers, a patient, a parent, a friend – help meet someone else’s need to make a difference? To let them know their work is appreciated? To show how their actions matter?

As for my daughter, we eventually stopped worrying about whether her bed was made and set her to work in the kitchen. Unlike the horses, we weren’t going to starve if she didn’t make cookies. But it did mean that our lunchbox contents would be much less interesting. Thankfully – for our tastebuds if not our waistlines – the sense of purpose and the positive feedback she got from providing the family with baked goods meant that was rarely a problem.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She has a BA in Cognitive Science from Stanford University and a PhD in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Motivation is Not a Thing to Get

What if we think about motivation as a feeling to be developed rather than an elusive thing to get? There are at least five common causes for feeling unmotivated. Identifying the root cause, or causes, is a first step in creating a path toward motivation and getting the job done.

Recently, my husband told me he just couldn’t get motivated to put his talk together for an upcoming seminar – something he both enjoys and does well. Procrastinating in the hopes of getting motivated didn’t seem to help. This got me thinking: Is motivation a thing waiting to be gotten?

Just like happiness, motivation is a feeling – feeling excited to do something or, if not exactly excited, then at least feeling fine about it. But feelings aren’t really something to be “got” – we don’t usually sit around waiting to get happy.

So why are we often passive when it comes to motivation? We wait for motivation to strike and, if it doesn’t, we try to power through the task without it. But what if we treated motivation like the feeling that it is and figured out how to more actively develop it in ourselves?

If you go to a therapist because you are unhappy, you expect more than a list of ways to get happy. Your therapist will start by helping you explore why you are unhappy and then move on to offering suggestions for dealing with those root causes. The same should be true when it comes to motivation. Feeling unmotivated can have many causes, each suggesting a different route toward change.

Five Reasons for Feeling Unmotivated – And What to Do About Them

With my husband, I suspected that the underlying cause of his lack of motivation was mental fatigue. He had been working hard, we were skimping on restorative activities, and I guessed that he just didn’t have the mental bandwidth for working on his talk.

Sure enough, after a couple days of prescribed mental restoration – in this case, morning walks in the nearby park – he was working with his usual enthusiasm.

But a walk in the park is not a universal prescription for developing motivation. Mental fatigue is one of multiple causes of feeling unmotivated, each of which suggests a different strategy.

Mental fatigue. As was the case with my husband, one symptom of mental fatigue can be a lack of motivation for things that require mental effort. We spend mental energy doing all kinds of tasks that require focus. And if we aren’t refueling the tank at the same rate that we are depleting it, it becomes hard to focus on anything.

When we’re suffering from mental fatigue, it’s time for some mental restoration in the form of good sleep, walks in the park, or other activities that allow the brain to quietly rest and unwind.

Lack of clarity or confidence. Sometimes we shy away from a task because we don’t understand what to do or we feel that we lack the skills to do a good job. This was certainly the case for me with many tasks when we first moved to Barcelona. I had trouble motivating myself to do things like make medical appointments because I didn’t understand the system. And I procrastinated phone calls because I knew it would be uncomfortable muddling through in my fledgling Spanish.

When the problem is a lack of understanding, you can work on building appropriate mental models. I finally cracked the Spanish health system by doing my research and talking to other expats. Making phone calls was easier if I imagined how the conversation might go and wrote out some phrases to keep myself on track – I still might not like making them, but that’s a problem that I can solve through discipline (more on that below).

Feeling overwhelmed. You might have a pretty good idea of what a job will entail, but sometimes it just seems so overwhelming that it’s hard to start. If this is the problem, it can help to break the project down into small concrete tasks.

For me, the hardest thing is usually starting – whether it’s starting a new painting or writing a blog post. If I can identify a first small step and just do that, the rest often starts to flow and I become more motivated to get the job done.

Disliking the task. Feeling unmotivated can just be a reflection of not liking to do the thing that needs doing. Cleaning the bathroom, filling out time sheets, filing taxes – there are some things you many never feel motivated to do. That’s where discipline comes in.

Many people think that discipline is all about willpower and that some people have it and others don’t. But studies have shown that discipline is not an inherent trait – it’s something that you do, not something that you are. Making a plan, setting a schedule, and removing distractions can help create discipline. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel motivated to make calls in Spanish, but I find that if I put them in my calendar and do them in the morning, I can get them done.

A judicial use of treats can also help make a disliked task more palatable. Some people save their favorite podcasts for doing things they don’t enjoy, like working out or cleaning the house. And although using food as a motivator can be a slippery slope, we got our kids up the last bit of many mountain hikes when they were little with well-timed chocolate.

Depression. Depression can make people feel unmotivated and uninterested even in things that normally excite them. Just as with motivation, there are many underlying causes of depression and seeking the help of a mental health professional may be the best way to get at the root causes and identify strategies for addressing them.

Creating Motivation Through Small Experiments

When it comes to motivation, why not be proactive rather than passively waiting for a feeling – one that may never come on its own – to strike?

If you’re not sure what’s causing your lack of motivation, try some small experiments. Refresh your mind by getting out in nature. Brainstorm on all the steps to getting the project done and then start with a small one. Journal about what might help give you more clarity or confidence. See what happens.

I’m sure there are more causes for feeling unmotivated and more good solutions for addressing them. What causes you to feel unmotivated? How do you “get” motivated?

Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE): Model Building and Being Capable. As the SEE framework points out, we rely on our mental models to effectively interact with the world. When we lack the appropriate mental models – for example, if we don’t understand what a project entails or don’t have the skills to carry it out – we may decide that avoidance is the best strategy. In this case, the route to motivation lies in building the appropriate mental models. But even if we have an adequate mental model of a particular project, it can be hard to feel motivated if we’re mentally fatigued. When we’re lacking adequate mental energy, developing motivation requires recharging our mental capability through restorative activities.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She has a BA in Cognitive Science from Stanford University and a PhD in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

The Unexpected Benefits of Covering My TV

Fighting distractions and temptations has a hidden cost. Although you might win the fight, you will have to spend mental energy to do so. This leaves less energy for doing other things, like resisting future temptations or getting work done. How can you minimize this drain on your mental energy? As I was recently reminded, sometimes the best strategy for fighting distractions is simply to avoid them.

Covering the news … and everything else lurking in our TV.

Up until about eight or nine months, babies don’t have object permanence. Even if you hide an object while they are watching, once it disappears from sight, they assume that it has disappeared altogether. If it’s a beloved toy, they might become upset and if it’s something less interesting, they might just forget about it and move on.

Adults, of course, do have object permanence. When you put the cookies in the cupboard you know that they still exist behind the closed door. Even so, putting something out of sight can send it to the back burner of your mind. This phenomenon has its negative side – it’s easy to ignore a humanitarian crisis, for example, if it’s happening somewhere else. But reducing the mental pull of something is often to one’s advantage.

Out of Sight Out of Mind

During our recent home organization and beautification spree, my husband and I realized that the television was a problem. I personally don’t like the look of big black reflective screens and I also dislike how they so often become the focus of a room. It was time to hide the TV.

A quick look on Pinterest shows many creative solutions for hiding TVs. Ours was simple and decorative. We put the TV in a wide storage cabinet and hung a weaving – made by my mother – across the opening.

As expected, I’m much happier overall with the living room. I am no longer annoyed by the big black box and I get a little zing of pleasure from seeing the weaving.

What I wasn’t expecting was the significant drop in our TV viewing. Now that the screen no longer beckons, watching things in the evenings – a habit that was solidified during Covid lockdown – is no longer our default.

Reclaiming Mental Energy

We spend a good deal of mental effort ignoring and resisting distractions and temptations. Just like we have to resist the siren call of a naked TV screen, we must willfully resist the offered dessert when we’re trying to cut back and fight to keep our eyes on the road when confronted by video billboards. These things are hard enough to do on a good day, but when we’re mentally fatigued, like I often am by evening, resisting distractions can be almost impossible.

Dealing with distractions is a mental double blow. They not only create problems in the moment but they also reduce our ability to stay on task in the future. Distractions get their hooks into our attention and do their best to pull our focus away from whatever else we’re trying to do.

There are numerous studies demonstrating how our effectiveness can tank in the presence of distractions. Worker productivity in open-plan offices suffers in the presence of distracting side conversations. A moving goalkeeper distracts even expert penalty kickers, making them less likely to score. And cell phone use, even if it’s hands-free, siphons attention and worsens driving performance.

Even if we ultimately win our fight with distractions and finish that report, make the goal, and arrive at our destination safe and sound, the battle itself requires mental energy. This drain on our mental resources – and the mental fatigue that can follow – makes it difficult to focus and meet the next attentional challenge. Although mental energy is renewable, topping up the tank takes time. Wouldn’t it be more effective to conserve what we have?

Simple Solutions

One of the best strategies for conserving mental energy is to tweak our environment so that distractions and temptations are avoided. Granted, this isn’t always easy – the ubiquitous eye-level candy shelves at grocery store check-outs come to mind. But dealing with some distractions might be as simple as covering the TV.

Years ago, my husband finally dealt with the problem of a distracting candy bowl at the office by asking the admin to put it in a cupboard – a simple act that significantly cut his sugar consumption. More recently, my brother’s solution for fostering effective family co-working while confined to the house during the pandemic was to buy everyone noise cancelling headphones. This not only made it easier for everyone to do their own thing, but it saved the collective family sanity in the process.

What temptations or distractions are draining your mental energy?

What simple things could you do to put these distractions out of sight or out of mind?

What would you do with the mental energy you save?

Connection to the Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) Model: Being Capable. An environment filled with distraction and unwanted temptation is the very opposite of supportive. Resisting distractions takes mental energy, leaving us with fewer mental resources for dealing with other things. Although there are ways to help restore our mental resources once they have been depleted, it’s even more effective to change our environment in order to eliminate or reduce unnecessary demands on our attention.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She has a B.A. in Cognitive Science from Stanford University, and a M.S. in Resource Policy and Behavior and Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Aging Four Months With One Phone Call

The way that we understand the world is based, in part, on cultural norms. These norms are often so deeply ingrained that we don’t stop to think that they might be arbitrary – they just feel objectively right. In fact, they are so obviously right that we tend to assume everyone else, if they are reasonable and rational, must understand things the same way. But what happens when they don’t?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

Did anyone else grow up thinking that Do-Re-Mi was something invented for The Sound of Music? That was what I had always assumed until we moved to Ireland and I happened to be chatting with my Italian friend while waiting to pick up the kids at school. Our conversation veered toward music lessons and went something like this:

Roberta: “The way they teach music in Ireland is so confusing. I don’t know why they use letters for the notes instead of teaching it the normal way.”

Me: “Umm, what do you mean?”

Roberta: “You know, how they use letters like A-B-C instead of the actual names of the notes, like Do-Re-Mi.”

Me: “A-B-C are the actual names of the notes. It’s the system of semibreves and crotchets instead of whole notes and quarter notes that I find weird.”

Roberta: “What’s a quarter note?”

Me: Sound of brain exploding.

It turns out that what I’d always thought was the way to communicate about mainstream western music is just one way.

The difficulty with communicating across cultures was apparent again this week when I found out that my medical claim for an eye problem that was treated while vacationing in the US could not be processed by the US-affiliate of my Spanish health insurance. The problem was a discrepancy in my birthdate. But the real problem is that Europeans write dates as day-month-year while Americans write dates as month-day-year. You can probably guess what happened.

Remember how your science and math teachers were always reminding you to include the units with your answers? It turns out there was good reason. To anyone in the US, 6/10 is clearly June 10th, but to anyone in Spain, it is just as clearly October 6th. My insurance problem still has not been resolved, but it’s looking like the easiest thing to do is ask the clinic to age me four months so that everyone’s numbers match even if the actual dates the numbers represent do not.

The problems that arise from different systems of describing music and dates can make for cute stories partly because they are relatively easy to see and remedy (fingers crossed). But a lack of shared understanding often flies under the radar, causing problems and prejudices that are hard to pinpoint and remedy. When someone doesn’t behave in what is (for us) an acceptable way, or understand what is (for us) obvious, or do things in a way that is (for us) logical it’s very easy to blame the person – they are unreasonable or rude or just plain stupid. It’s much harder to accept that “right” and “obvious” are sometimes arbitrary.

It took me almost six months of living in Ireland before I realized that stopping the car to let pedestrians cross the street was not the cultural norm. In fact, people I knew would regularly wave at me while driving right in front of me as I waited with one foot in the road. It finally dawned on me that what I had assumed was rude behavior was actually the “right” way to drive according to Dublin cultural norms and I had to try and revise my assumptions about people who routinely failed to stop for me and the kids as I walked them to school. This was no easy feat – the speed with which we tend to form opinions and the strength with which we hold on to them can make them very resistant to change.

Even harder was accepting that my own behavior of stopping for pedestrians was probably confusing everyone and was likely more dangerous than kind. My small-town Idaho upbringing still forced me to stop during a driving lesson in order to let an elderly man cross at a minor intersection, but my brief moment of feeling virtuous was squashed when my driving instructor yelled, “What are you doing?! Just don’t do that during your driving exam!”

Since that driving incident, I’ve become ever more aware of cross-cultural differences in how people understand the world. And I’ve experienced how these differences can cause all sorts of problems, from failed communication attempts, to being unable to navigate a country’s system for getting things done, to ingrained negative perceptions of people who you don’t understand.

Looking at my own country with my expat eyes has also made me aware that a lack of shared understanding isn’t just a problem between people from different countries, it can be a problem between people period. There has been a lot of talk lately in the US about “American culture” – and, even more dangerously, about “real American culture.” But the reality is that the US is a country of layered sub-cultures tied to age, religion, race, gender-identity, geography, workplace, family, and more. You can’t assume that the people in your office or at the town park understand the world the way you do any more than I can assume that my Catalan neighbors in Barcelona share my understanding.

I’m not suggesting that problems with communication can all be attributed to culture or even to individual differences in understanding. This is especially true when people have differing opinions that are based, not on a deep understanding, but on something at once more superficial and harder to change. We might have differing opinions on vaccines, for example. If those opinions are based on how we interpret the evidence, or how we understand public health, or the experience of our culture with vaccines in general, then we could likely have a productive discussion. If they are based on anger or political ideology, then we probably cannot. Not every disagreement can have a happy ending.

But there are many times when misunderstandings, miscommunication, and disagreements over the best way to do something are caused – or at least made worse – by the assumption that everyone understands the issue or problem the way that we do.

What would happen if we stopped to consider that what is obvious to us might not be obvious to someone else? That behaviors that we think are normal might be perceived by someone else as rude? That what feels so strongly like the way to do something might just be one way? We might just end up making the world – or at least our small part of it – a better place.

In the meantime, I’m off to unwind by listening to Bach’s Chaconne in, as my friend Roberta would say, Re-menore. I just love Bach’s prolific use of demisemiquavers.

Connection to the Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) Model: Model Building and Being Capable. People build and rely on mental models that encode their understanding of how the world works. Culture, with its system of cultural norms, is one way to fast track model building and ensure that a particular group has a shared understanding. Although sometimes cultural norms are arbitrary, they can feel logical, obvious and universal – until you discover that they are not. Problems can arise when our models don’t match the reality of another culture or country, making it difficult for us to feel capable and get things done. Even within our own culture, problems with communication and collaboration can arise when our models are not shared by others with whom we interact.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She has a B.A. in Cognitive Science from Stanford University, and a M.S. in Resource Policy and Behavior and Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Banishing Everyday Stressors

Life’s daily hassles can add up in a big way, affecting our health, our stress level, and our ability to get things done. I had stopped noticing many of the little stressors around our house, but I saw them with fresh eyes when we returned home after an extended holiday. We embarked on a campaign against these small annoyances and not only improved our space, but reclaimed some mental energy along the way.

When I return home after a long time away, I often have a new perspective on my life and surroundings. It’s as if my mind has been reset so that – for a short time – I can see things as an outsider and notice the things to which I had become habituated. This was certainly the case when I returned home to my Barcelona apartment after a 5-week trip to the US.

There were many things about my home that I appreciated anew, like the amount of light that comes streaming through our windows. But there were fresh annoyances – the pile of boxes that had taken up permanent residence in the hallway, for example, and the near impossibility of matching lids to containers when putting away leftovers.

Spurred on by our new awareness of little annoyances, along with the autumn clutter-control bug that seems to strike so many, we decided to do some major organizing. Our approach was part analytical, favored by my software engineer husband, and part simple observation. We spent time walking around the apartment and identifying what we found stressful and we also started paying more attention to what we found annoying in the moment. Many of these things were fairly trivial – the cluttered nightstands, the disorganized drawers, having to move seemingly hundreds of body care products in order to clean the kids’ bathroom. But taken together, these small everyday annoyances can really add up.

The Surprisingly Big Impact of Little Annoyances

Most of us are aware of the negative impacts of major chronic stress, but a number of studies have shown that even minor everyday hassles impact health, mood, and cognitive function – not only in the moment, but also in the long term. Back in 1982, for example, Anita DeLongis and her colleagues at UC Berkeley studied 100 people over the course of a year. They recorded the everyday hassles people experienced – things like not liking work duties or misplacing something. They also recorded major negative life events and measured physical health and energy level. The researchers found that although both daily hassles and larger negative life events impacted people’s health, the daily hassles actually had a bigger effect.

A more recent 2016 study, done by Nicole Mead at Erasmus University in the Netherlands and her colleagues, showed the shorter-term effects of everyday hassles. They found that the more annoyances people had to deal with during the day – things like traffic on the way to work or a dead cell phone battery – the less progress they tended to make on their daily goals and the more mentally exhausted they were at the end of the day. On the brighter side, the researchers also found that the more pleasures people experienced during the same day – things like looking at the stars or spending time with a friend – the less impact the annoyances had. This is good news for me because it means that my organized closets are a double win. Not only am I no longer annoyed when I open a closet, but I get a little jolt of pleasure when I see the order that has replaced the mess.

Reclaiming Mental Energy

We’re not always aware of stressors and their effects, especially ones to which we’ve become habituated. In some cases, I became aware of my negative response to small annoyances around the house only after those annoyances disappeared. For example, I notice the mental cringing and spike in stress when I open the hallway closet only because the tumble of loose grocery bags that I’m expecting fails to emerge from the recently organized space. It’s a quirk of human cognition that we are more likely to notice when our assumptions are not met than when they are. As I habituate to my new organized normal, even this anticipated stress response is disappearing.

Not only is my organized home a more pleasant place, but the time and mental energy I wasted looking for things and being annoyed can be used for other things – like getting into my art studio or writing this blog post. Now I’m ready to extend my organizational spree to things that are less tangible than my physical space, like being more organized about how I keep track of my to-dos.

What is stressing you out? What small changes could you make to alleviate that stress? What difference might that make to your life?

Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE): Being Capable. It’s hard to feel capable when we’re not at our mental best – like when we’re stressed out or mentally fatigued. Sometimes we’re aware of the things that are depleting our mental energy, like a major project at work or dealing with a difficult client. But there are often smaller things, of which we might not even be aware, that can chip away at our mental resources and make us less effective in both the short and long term. Doing what we can to fix or avoid small everyday hassles is like fixing the drip in a faucet – it may not completely solve the water shortage problem, but it’s a start.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She has a B.A. in Cognitive Science from Stanford University, and a M.S. in Resource Policy and Behavior and Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

The More You SEE, the More You Know

The Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) framework gives me a way to view the world from the perspective of what people need to be their best selves. As I look through the lens of SEE, I’m noticing new things, understanding people’s behavior at a deeper level, and seeing how I can improve my own life and my interactions with others.

Have you ever taken a course or read a book and started seeing examples of the ideas everywhere? That was my experience with the first environmental psychology class I took with Steve Kaplan the year I began graduate school. The course was called “Neural Models and Psychological Processes” but it was really about the interactions between people and their environments. We covered a wide range of issues, from how people perceive and think, to what types of environments they prefer, to how different environments can help or hinder reasonable behavior.

As the class progressed, I couldn’t help but start looking at everything around me through this lens of environmental psychology, much as a student of Freudian psychology probably can’t help but analyze everyone they meet. Things I’d never really noticed became relevant. I’d never thought, for example, about why being confused is both painful and hard to admit. Things that had mystified me yielded to explanation. I could now understand why my statistics professor, although clearly an expert, was so bad at explaining basic concepts. And solutions to certain problems came into view. Perhaps the antidote to my fatigued brain, I realized, was in my own backyard.

Many years later, environmental psychology still colors how I see the world. And now the Supportive Environments for Effectiveness framework (SEE) provides an even finer-grained lens for understanding people. The framework brings together decades of ideas and research in environmental psychology in a way that spotlights what people need to function effectively and how environments can be created or tweaked to help meet those needs.

The SEE Framework

The needs addressed by the SEE framework are cognitive needs rather than physical needs. People need sufficient food, water, and shelter, but they need so much more. Cognitive needs also have little to do with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – that general model of motivation proposed in 1943 that many psychologists now consider to be of limited use but that has nonetheless proven to be quite cognitively contagious.

What are cognitive needs? They are the needs we have for knowledge and understanding. People’s survival has always depended more on their brains than on their speed or raw strength. Because of that, we have become hard-wired to need information. We are driven to gather information, to make sense of it, and to use it to make decisions and interact with the world. We are at our best in environments and situations that support these needs.

There are three basic cognitive needs addressed in the SEE framework: 1) the need to make sense, 2) the need to feel capable, and 3) the need to make a difference. These needs are deceptively simple. Making sense, for example, has very little to do with how smart you are. It’s more about how your brain represents and understands the world around you. The need to feel capable isn’t just about having the right skills to do the job, it’s also about having the mental bandwidth to focus on the task at hand. And the need to make a difference isn’t necessarily about doing something big, it’s more about feeling that you have the ability to impact your world and that your contributions are valued.

SEE – Bringing the World into Focus

Looking at the world through the lens of SEE gives me a new perspective on my everyday experiences and environments. Once again, I am feeling the excitement and energy of noticing new things, understanding people’s behavior at a deeper level, and seeing how I can improve my own life and my interactions with others. I plan to share some of these observations in future posts, with the hope of helping bring the SEE framework to life. Along the way, I’d love to hear about how your own experiences are explained or guided by SEE and about how you might apply the SEE framework, in ways both big and small, to bring out the best in yourself and others.

What happens when you start looking at the world from the perspective of what people need to be their best selves?

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She has a B.A. in Cognitive Science from Stanford University, and a M.S. in Resource Policy and Behavior and Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Reflections on Learning Circles: The Nonprofits’ Journeys

reDirect has used Learning Circles as a strategy for collaborating with nonprofits experimenting with Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) within their organizations. The organizations have taken different journeys—some have dabbled in several areas of SEE applications while others have focused on just one. Here are a few of our takeaways.

SEE is about culture change.

Light bulbs turned on all year as participants realized that incorporating SEE relates to their entire organization and how it does its work. It has implications for how people think about themselves, their interactions with others, as well as how they approach their work. They said this in so many different ways: “SEE is not a project. SEE is becoming part of our DNA.” “SEE relates to how we do our work, not the what.” “It has become the litmus test for how we think.” “SEE is a verb – we SEE things.” “When we asked folks at staff meetings how they used SEE, we used to hear crickets. Now, folks have examples!”

As organizations have reflected on SEE as culture change, they’ve shared some other realizations:

• Helping people get their heads around SEE takes time, intentionality, and multiple experiences. reDirect has supported many touches with the organizations’ leadership and will be encouraging additional opportunities to engage with staff.

• SEE helps build a shared language that takes the “personal” out of conversations. People can step back from their egos/sensitivities to work together and see others through an “assume best intentions” lens.

• SEE provides a robust framework for applying other tools (eg DISC, Emergenetics, Strengthsfinder). This is a really interesting hook for organizations because they often flounder at the “now what do we do” stage with these tools. Having a SEE-informed mindset has helped them implement some strategies for using the insights they gained from these tools.

The power of having a small experiment mindset.

The notion of small experiments has been instrumental in helping participants overcome inertia and start doing something tangible. It gave organizations and individuals permission to try things, to play with ideas, and to be ok if something did not work out.

Less is more.

What a liberating concept this has been for some folks. It is so hard for people to really believe and act on this principle and so effective when they do.

The physical environment matters.

We made a point to remind grantees to be mindful of how the physical environment impacts their work experience and effectiveness. While infrastructural changes are harder to figure out (e.g., changing an open cubical space), participants talked about the positive impact of instituting walking meetings, being more comfortable defining their need for quiet space, and being intentional about how they set up their desk/workspaces.

Learning Circles as a Funding Strategy

Fashioned after the Denver Foundation's Inclusiveness Project, reDirect initiated Learning Circles to help our grantees build a peer network as they develop a road map for implementing Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) in their organizations. Our Learning Circle cohorts have focused primarily on using SEE to improve internal organizational functioning.

Below are some of our biggest takeaways as a foundation seeking to authentically work with nonprofits.

reDirect’s work fills a gap in the funding world.

While many nonprofits acknowledge that having effective, highly functioning staff is essential, they have difficulty dedicating adequate resources or time to systematically improving their systems and work environment. And very few funders provide monies to support this behind-the-scenes focus. Participating with reDirect, and engaging with the structure created by the Learning Circles, help organizations to be more intentional and to make time for this kind of work.

Learning Circles are powerful.

The Executive Directors and/or senior staff from each organization meet regularly to explore Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) as it relates to their workplace. These meetings have exceeded our expectations in terms of the level of participation and investment by the organizations, and the power of peer insight. Participants have been willing to be vulnerable and transparent as they collectively explore strategies to better engage with their staff and to improve their workplaces.

Some quick wins can improve the workplace right away.

One of our initial assumptions was that organizations would be investing in changes that might take a considerable amount of time to implement. In our Learning Circle meetings and sessions with staff, we have discovered that SEE has helped generate ideas that the organizations have been able to implement immediately. Even small changes such as improving the physical work environment with walking meetings or helping staff feel more appreciated by developing a birthday calendar can create more supportive environments for bringing out the best in overworked staff.

Our thanks to the nonprofits participating in this work with us: Colorado Alliance for Environmental Education, Colorado Nonprofit Association, Community Resource Center, Community Shares of Colorado, The Gathering Place, Spark the Change Colorado (formerly Metro Volunteers), The Park People, Playworks, and Youth Employment Academy. You can read more about what SEE helped them achieve here.