Bulging Heart on First Date Assumptions
A glance at a profile page and you’ve got me dialed in, eh? Bring on the psychographic discussion when the sound of insight is drowned out by our own heartbeat.
Photo credit: 19Production House | Matthew Osborne | HMU Lisa Jelic Watson
Sometimes you meet people who are oozing with a story to tell, but regardless of how interesting or not I always walk away with food for thought.
Catching a quick 3-hour flight, I find myself quickly engaged in conversation with the man sitting next to me. It doesn’t take long to realize that we will be talking the entire flight and so I am not stingy on uncommon questions.
I discover he is launching a new hobby-meets-career as a traveler. His plan, he tells me, is to vlog for 1 month and 2 months at a time showcasing a budget amount and how he survived (and enjoyed) on that budget in different countries. He planned to be transparent about what he ate and where he lodged. His goal is to show people that they don’t have to wait to travel the world, they can manage with any size budget. His first stop, he tells me, is a trip on $1,000 for the month which includes transportation. I am immediately excited about this concept and my intrigue skyrockets when he reveals that one of his stops will be the Philippines. He has done a lot of research and sounds remarkably ready to travel around the Philippines alone. I offer a little color to his research and give a few of my own insights into traveling our rural islands.
What came next was really a bit of external processing on his part, so we can extend grace his way. This half-baked idea, though, warrants a full-blown column.
He proceeds to convey his heart for the impoverished villagers. He desperately wants to help them discover how to pull themselves from poverty. He intends to show them an app so that instead of keeping their extra pesos under their mattress they could buy fractional shares. I feel my stomach pinch. The first false assumption he has made is that everyone has a smartphone. Villagers might have a phone to text, but by “text” I mean “22 + 2 + 8” to spell “c-a-t.” Remember those?
Additionally, even if they have a phone that means they have to “load” it periodically, so they often go without phone usage if they cannot afford to load the phone. The way that money is spent and earned in the villages is primarily around the season because of sugar cane and rice. In “rainy season”, for example, people are not spending much or eating much because there is no work. Many areas will only eat one time a day. The assumption that they have extra coins is a remarkable leap, but even if they did have spare change how would they get it into the phone when they don’t have access to banking? Lastly, for some reason, he expected that they would trust him. Even if they spoke the same language, how easy is it to trust the advice of a total stranger? It is why great financial professionals spend so much of their energy building relationships rather than pushing a product. I liken his approach to the world of dating, where you might have a first encounter and jump to some enormous conclusions about the person based on your lived experiences.
Recently on my podcast, Pull to Refresh, I was joined by cultural expert, Lisa Zakrzewski. I shared with her my encounter with this well-meaning man and she commented on this man’s heart being in the right place but added, “Our worldview may not match up to the actual market that we’re trying to provide more value to.”
While this is not your everyday case of misconceptions and assumptions, I believe it sheds light on the fact that we do not always know people’s lived experiences or current circumstances, we don’t know if they’ve had a rough day, if someone close to them recently passed away, or if certain things (like money) trigger unexpected emotions.
There is a misleading phrase about putting yourself in someone’s shoes, but how incomplete is that? Being in their shoes does not compare to walking in them daily for 40 years. Since we cannot live a lifetime in someone else’s shoes, what questions could we ask to help us understand their perspective? Simply asking questions is also not enough. I have been the victim of being asked questions only to have my answers receive further criticism. The gap between what we understand and what we don’t know is further complicated by our willingness to explore beyond our own logic. How unnatural it is to rewire our mind from what is decidedly logical?
There are two things that stand out about problem-solving for someone else: 1) we must ask great questions and 2) we must respect that a different perspective means there is something we do not understand about their view. There is a lot we do not understand about one another. What I do know is that I do not want to be caught with simply a big heart.
Originally published in The Naked Professional.
