Common Sharing During Debrief Copy

During our debrief of the In & Out of the Box Experience, participants share many insights. The purpose of this sharing is to connect the experience of the physical box with their thinking box.  We draw out they experienced with the box on their head and then ask whether there is some similarity to how the boundaries of their thinking impacts them on a day to day basis.

The Box is Limiting and Stifling

Not surprisingly the first thing most participants do when they take the box off is to complain how physically uncomfortable it was. At the beginning of the debrief it’s common for participants to question the metaphor, “I could never live with something so suppressing, limiting or stifling. I don’t experience that kind of filtering or limitation. This box has a bigger impact on me than my thinking does.”

Our invisible thinking box limits us in much the same way as our physical box, the difference is we have learned how to cope with and function within the confines of our thinking.

When doing the program in a luxury retail outlet, one of the participants said, “Oh I get it. It is like my ability wear high 5-inch high heels. If I had never worn them before I would think it is impossible and the pain is unbearable. Now that I am used to wearing heels, I feel less comfortable without them.

The In & Out of the Box Experience is designed to be uncomfortable because it is a simulation of how our thinking can limit us and the resulting emotions that come with that. Rather than discounting the experience, let’s explore the what happened when we thought in the box and when we thought out of it.

It feels great to take the box off.

The first moments when the box comes off there is such a great collective expression of relief. There is a kind of connectivity that the group shares as they are able to see each other’s faces. They look around the circle smiling at each other with smiles and a look of, “At last! I made it!”

When we connect these feelings to our day to day experience there are two parallels brought up.

First, people will talk how much more connected they feel to each other when the boxes are taken off. They talk about relationships they have with people where they can “take the box off,” and be more authentic. For some that is their family, for others a select number of trusted colleagues, or classmates they have known for a long time. These are the relationships we look to when our thinking is stifling us or we are uncertain of what to do.  We are able to drop the mask and open our thoughts to another and with that increased authenticity we feel a similar sense of release to that of taking the box off our head.

The other experience that is brought up is when we experience a breakthrough in our thinking. There are times when we are stuck in our thinking and feel like we have limited options.  When we have that breakthrough thought that provides us with new opportunities, it feels just like taking the physical box off our head.

To experience a breakthrough, you have to break through something.

The first insight gained by taking the box off our head is the thing that is broken through is our own limiting beliefs, and that feels great.

Spending too much time in The Box can change our mood

For some people, staying in the box for five or ten minutes can be a real downer. They get frustrated by the limitations it places on them and feel overly constrained and perhaps even feel some difficulty breathing.

As we talk about this, we explore the situations where we do not feel safe to take our boxes off. What happens if we stay wrapped up in our thinking for too long?

I remember being offered a big promotion and calling my wife to get her feedback. I said, “The good news is that it is a regional position which will mean that I have more influence, will learn a lot and have a big jump in pay. The bad news it means that I will need to travel more. What do you think?”

Her response floored me. “I don’t mind if you travel more as long as when you are home, you spend quality time with the family. Right now your body comes home from work, but your mind doesn’t.”

I was so wrapped up in my thinking that I couldn’t escape even to have a dinner with my family or even engage in a meaningful conversation.

When I shared this story one participant responded, “My husband won’t talk to me the first two days of vacation because he says my mind is still at work. It takes a couple of days to really let go of the tension and pressure I feel. I guess I don’t realize how much my thinking in the box impacts me even when I try to get out of it!”

Communicating Box to Box is Difficult

Our ability to communicate is greatly reduced when you have a box on your head and I have one on mine. Not only do I have to speak loud enough to let my voice make it out of the confines of my box, it must also make it into the box on your head.

Think of it this way. Without a physical box on my head my voice travels in waves from my mouth to your ears. When we both have physical boxes on our heads the box will interfere with those waves so they come through weaker. And there is not just one box that the waves have to travel through. They need to make it out of my box and then make it through your box. This double filtering of messages can make coordinating action with physical boxes on our heads very difficult.

In a similar way our invisible thinking boxes are also impacting our ability to communicate. Not only does the listener have filters which will determine what they are willing and able to allow into their box, the speaker has filters that impact what they are willing and able to communicate out through their box.

This is the source of the frustrations we all experience when communicating. In general, we tend to focus on other’s inability or unwillingness to listen. After all, it is easier to see their box than it is to see our own. We think things like, “They aren’t paying attention to me.”; “They aren’t listening.”; “They aren’t respecting me.”; “They aren’t trying to understand me; I’ve told them a thousand times and they still don’t get it!”

Just as it is easy to blame the other person’s box as our major impediment in communicating during this exercise, our own box has as big or bigger impact in our ability to communicate. We filter in what others are saying and we filter out what we are saying to them. In both caseswe have filters that limit what we can understand or say and the stories or analogies that we can or are willing to share.

“I Hear Myself More Clearly than I can Hear Others.”

The physical box doesn’t just keep me from hearing others, it makes it so my own voice reverberates loudly, drowning out other’s voices.

Often in conversation, we’re so busy thinking about what we’re going to say next that we start listening to our own voice rather than listening to others. Our filters will also screen out other’s words and meaning; they might say 100 words but we’ll only really hear 20 –  and often we’ll be so focused on saying what is important to us that we won’t take the time to listen to what is important to others.

 

We Create Strategies to Improve Box to Box Communication

Participants recognize that with boxes on their heads their greatest difficulty is in just communicating so they devise certain strategies on the fly to help improve box to box communication. As we do the debrief we ask participants what coping strategies they found they needed to adopt. What emerges is that for every strategy we adopt with the physical box on our head, there is a corresponding strategy with the invisible thinking box.

 

“I spoke louder.” – This works to a degree, although if everyone does it the noise level in the room makes it even more difficult to hear. The trade-off for talking louder is that it makes it more difficult to receive messages from others.

A participant once said, “When I yell with a box on my head it hurts my own ears, and other people still may not be able to hear me. This is like when I yell at my children or my colleagues. In the end it hurts me to do this, and the message still may not be getting through.”

When we get on our soap box and start yelling at people, we are speaking but not listening; we diminish our capacity to listen.

“I moved closer.” As I move closer to those around me I can get their attention and they have mine; I don’t need to speak so loudly to be heard and can hear them better. Proximity doesn’t have to mean physical closeness; it can also depend on how close we are in terms of relationship. If we can build a stronger relationship with another then to a certain degree, we get closer together.

“We aligned our boxes.” In other words, we positioned ourselves to make sure we have ‘front of box to front of box’ communication. Because if I’m talking to the side or back of your box or to the back, the assumption is that you are not really listening. Participants often equate this to the difference between face to face communication and less direct forms.

In a leadership team a participant once said to the others, “If I send you an e-mail I really have no idea whether you have received it – you might have marked it as ‘Read’ but might not have received or understood the real message I intended to deliver. If I can get you face to face then we can have a different kind of conversation and I can be more confident that you have received my message. “

“I repeated my messages.” The difficulties in communication mean that we often have to repeat what we say and say the same things in different ways to be understood. Repeating the message is a great way to ensure that messages get in and out of the box.

The most effective leaders we have worked with in the past are those that have a very clear message that they give over and over again; in different contexts and with people at different levels, they will find different ways of giving the same message. For example, if the goal is ten percent growth then they use that ten-percent over and over again.

While the box does impact our communication, by acknowledging those challenges, we can create strategies for improving our ability to connect and engage with others.

The Box Limits our Choices

With a physical box on your head you are seriously limited in what you can do. People walk around very slowly, and the pace of getting things done slows down considerably. There are some things we would like to do, but we simply give up because either we can’t communicate our ideas to others, or we think it would be too difficult or dangerous to implement the idea.

As a result, we end up doing things that are safer and simpler because these are the things that we feel confident that we can do with the box on our head.

“At first we wanted to go outside and do some really creative things with the box on our heads,” a participant once shared, “but as we were walking down the stairs we realized that it was taking so much time to navigate the stairs safely we wouldn’t have time, so instead we ended up taking pictures on the stairs.”

The same thing is true with our invisible thinking box. We may be able to imagine great things, but when it comes to executing those ideas, our box slows us down to the point where we just have to do something else instead. The box doesn’t always stop us from having creative thoughts or plans, it is often in the execution of those creative solutions that the box makes things so challenging that we have to adapt our plan.

The Box Stops me from Seeing the Other’s True Self

One frustration that participants often raise in the debrief is how difficult it is to communicate when they can’t see others’ faces. They often talk about the inability to look into the other person’s eyes to see whether they understand what they are saying.

When we ask how using our invisible thinking box replicates that, the response is usually, “Well sometimes I look somebody in the eyes and I think I know what they are thinking, then later I find out that I’m wrong.”

One participant told a story about catching their five-year-old girl in a lie. She had secretly watched the girl take a cookie. When she asked if she took a cookie her daughter opened her eyes wide and said, “No I didn’t.”  “I would have believed her if I hadn’t seen her take the action. From that moment on I realized that I can’t judge people by their appearance.”

We encourage participants to think about a close or intimate relationship, family, business partner, spouse or significant other and ask whether in the past few months there has been a time when they misunderstood this person or the person misunderstood them. The answer is almost always “Yes.” We explain that often, we think we are seeing the other person, think we are being transparent, and/or think that our good intentions are obvious.

We forget that what’s going on inside of our box still has to be sent through our filters, make it through the other person’s filters, and then hopefully understood. While we think we are talking person to person, we are actually speaking at a box to box level and we’re not seeing each other as clearly, transparently or wholly as we think.

The Box Stops Others from Seeing MY True Self

While it may be frustrating to not see others as they “really are,” most of us prefer having some aspects of ourselves remain in the box where others cannot access them.

When I ask if we should try to live without any box, the consensus is, “I wouldn’t feel safe if others could know all of my thinking, all of my past, all of my dreams and pressure.”

While we may feel frustrated in our inability to see inside other people’s box, there is a kind of safety that comes from having a box on our head. One participant once called it their safety helmet. “Just like a motorcycle helmet will keep you safe in the unlikely chance of having an accident, me choosing my public thinking and keeping some of my inner thinking private keeps me safe too. Many people won’t take advantage of you, but if you are too open in this company, the risk is too high.”

Another person chimed in, “I started riding a motorcycle when there wasn’t a helmet law. I was used to riding with no helmet, and had never had an accident. I didn’t want to wear a helmet. Now that I’ve been wearing a helmet for so long I wouldn’t want to ride without it.  It is not just about being safe if there is an accident. It keeps the wind and rain off my head and the bugs out of my teeth when I smile while riding.”

The Box Protects me like a Mask

Sometimes, when we have discussed many of the things that inhibit communication, a participant will sheepishly say something like, “Actually, I felt good in the box.” When this is raised, a number of others will usually chime in and agree, “The box protects me like a mask.”

The outside of the box, which I choose, creates a persona of me that’s not entirely me. There are times when I don’t really want people to know how I’m feeling or what I’m thinking or when I don’t want to be transparent.

As one participant said, “I like my box because my box smiles when I don’t.”

Another participant who was working in a hotel said, “The box is a little bit like my hotel uniform; when I wear my uniform I do and say things and act in a way that I never would if I was not wearing it.”

When they return from taking photos in public with boxes on their heads they often talk about how they did things that they would never have done without a box on their head. The box freed them to be more creative by being less sensitive to what other people think about them.

My public thinking creates a ‘me’ that can show up and be understood and accepted by others. This mask is not necessarily inauthentic or deceitful. It is selective. The more we align this mask with our inner thinking, the more others trust and understand us. If we put things on the outside of our box that aren’t aligned with the inside the box, we expend energy on maintaining the false self and live in fear of being found out.

 

The Outside of the Box Impacts How Others Interact with Me

In a final debrief, one participant shared his frustration at having the box on his head; he felt all alone in the process because no-one interacted or shared with him. One of the other participants mentioned that his box “looked scary.” He looked at the outside of his box and realized that he had forgotten that for whatever reason he had decided to draw something that was grotesque and scary. His insight in the debrief was, “If you want to have more interaction with people, don’t look too scary.”

This is a little deeper than it sounds.

Our thinking on the inside of the box, impacts how we are perceived by others as they look at the outside of our box. As one participant said, “Before I talk to my boss I’ll take a look and see what kind of mood she is in. It is very obvious when she is going to be in a receptive mood, and when I should just keep my thoughts to myself.

While we may be sensitive to how other’s thinking is impacting their moods, we are probably not as aware of how our own thinking is impacting others. After all, we are not looking at ourselves from the outside in.

A common part of many leadership programs is working on giving and receiving feedback. I had a participant who stated at the beginning of the session, “I ask my colleagues to give me feedback, but no one ever gives me any.” When it was his turn to receive feedback we all understood why. Each time someone would give him feedback he would start explaining why they were being unfair in their assessment, or would explain the back story why he acted in that way.  In the end we asked him to receive the feedback silently with the only allowed response being, “Thank you.”  His inner thinking created an outward response that scared away others from sharing their true thoughts.

From the inside of our box we might think that we are controlling our brand,  controlling our face and projecting a certain image of ourselves; others are very likely be perceiving us in a different way.

After a while I forget that I have a box on my head.

It doesn’t sound possible. How could anyone get used to having a box on their head?  And not just forget that they have a box on their head, we have participants who will also forget that OTHER people have a box on their head.

“At first I was hyper aware of the box,” a participant observed. “It bothered me that I didn’t know who I was talking to, or that I couldn’t connect with people. But after about five minutes, I had found my groove and I was getting things done.  It wasn’t until you asked us to take the box off our heads that I remembered it was even there. Once I took it off, it felt great, but it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined it would be.”

The same thing has happened to us with our thinking.  If we could take a mental time machine and go back into our thinking of ten years ago, we would be shocked at the boundaries we had set up for ourselves.  One way to get a read on how much our thinking has changed is to find a journal that you wrote a number of years ago. Looking at how you approached your life only a few years (or even months back) can bring your limiting thinking to awareness. Yet at that time, you probably didn’t think you were boxed in at all.

We are so used to our thinking that we forget that our thinking, by its very nature, is limiting. And we forget that other people have a similar limitation on their thinking too.

We are so used to the box on our head that we forget that it is necessary at times to think out of it.

We are so comfortable with the box on head that we get defensive when another person suggests that our thinking is incomplete or inadequate.

And just like with the physical box, one of the best ways to remind ourselves that our thinking box is there is to get out of it.