Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, but “beholders” (that’s all of us) make surprisingly consistent choices. Beneath individual tastes lie deep-rooted preferences that shape many of our choices and actions. 

You, too, were probably an annoying toddler. You did what most 3-year-olds do, but you didn’t know it. Nor did you mean to be annoying or realize that you kept asking the same question. Why… why…why???? You were simply on a necessary mission: making sense of the world around you. A mission that never ends.

Familiarity, like the air we breathe, gets little notice. It hides in plain sight, creating our vital, intertwined structures (aka mental models), which are at the core of everything we do and care about. The mental models of those with whom we want to, or need to, communicate are also invisible to us. That often leads to inadvertent confusion, miscommunication, and missed opportunities.

Listening is a multimodal enigma. We, humans, have done it for millennia, and individually depend on it our entire lives. We are unlikely to have thought about how fundamental listening is to our understanding, explorations, and the ways we interact with our worlds. It is a key source of input to our knowledge and awareness, as well as key to the roles we play in other people’s lives. 

How can we bring out the best in ourselves, and others? The SEE Framework can provide some insight. One of SEE’s key tenets, Meaningful Engagement, proposes that people need 1) to feel they make a difference, and 2) to foster a sense of belonging through relationships grounded in mutual trust and respect.

This essay by reDirect’s co-founder, Rachel Kaplan, looks at how each element of the SEE framework intersects with Meaningful Engagement and talks about the important roles that participation, feedback, and small experiments play.

This blog is a companion resource to the video titled “Bringing Out the Best.”