You can relax, I don’t think about you the way you think I think about you.
I was recently on a first “on site” meeting where I met my team face to face for the first time. A few things came to mind in the moment.
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How incredibly fast communication could be. Less about the body movements and more about the lack of the brief pauses that happen everywhere when on a video call.
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How pronounced each person’s attributes became, like cranking up the social contrast on each person. The quiet/smart person was more noticeably quiet. The highly productive person was noticeably straight forward and to the point, etc.
Later, upon reflection, I started to realize that this was an incredible moment in that it was a microcosm of team social dynamics. And importantly, as Adlerian psychology would posit, all problems are inter-personal relationship problems.
The key insight, was that this dynamic social situation let people to very quickly modify their behavior to reflect their perceived inadequacies in a way that they thought others were perceiving in them. For example, Jane thinks Bob is really smart. Jane thinks that Bob thinks that she is very slow and not as smart. Bob actually thinks Jane is quite good and appreciates her creative insight. But when Jane says something and Bob corrects her and moves on, Jane then modifies her behavior. She feels shame and reinforces the idea that now Bob really thinks I’m an idiot. She shuts down and doesn’t contribute further.
This is one small example, but exponentially expand this to a group of six people working in one room for eight hours straight, all working on the same problem. At the end of it, the ideas of what people think others think of them is so distorted that it’s a miracle the team isn’t fully crumbling.
You can imagine, when the number of people or the closeness or amount of isolation of the group increases, that this is how “tribes” form. It’s all imagined sympathetic reflective judgement that magnifies our ego.
I wish there was a way to inject this thought between each social interaction:
You can relax, I don’t think about you the way you think I think about you.
Having more than one social groups can artificially help in that it gives another perspective of reflecting on yourself through another’s eyes eyes.
But the real fix is to look within. To understand your consciousness in the context of the universe. To know what is important to you and to see that the judgements of others are an illusion created in your own mind. And, even if they really do think some judgement about you, that it is so trivial as not to even be worth your time to acknowledge.