• “From this book, you’ll learn how to sharpen your own inherent intelligence gathering, strategic and critical thinking, decision making, and formulation of inquiry skills using the amazing computer between your ears. Unlike other books by psychologists or reporters, though, this one will not just tell you what your brain can do or how people are using theirs to the limit, it will show you.”
• “Learning to see what matters can change your world as well. I invite you to open your eyes and see how. I bet you’ll discover you didn’t even know they were closed.”

• “The process starts when light passes through the pupil of our eye and is converted into electrical patterns by neural cells on a membrane at the back called the retina. When I tell   I remember learning in high school that the retina is like the film in a camera, he shakes his head at this common misconception. “It’s definitely not film,” he says. “The retina’s such a complicated structure that it’s not even a camera. It’s more like a computer.”
• “The retina isn’t a passive pathway but a part of the brain itself formed in utero from neural tissue. “Studying the retina is our easiest way into the brain,” Seung explains, “because it is the brain.””
• ““Some of the first steps of perception are actually happening inside the retina itself, even before the information reaches the brain,” Seung asserts.” This means that we don’t see with our eyes; we see with our brain.
• “Scientists have discovered that as we slow down or stop flexing our mental muscles, the speed of neural transmission dramatically slows, which in turn leads to a decrease in visual processing speed, the ability to detect change and movement, and the ability to conduct a visual search. Since our brain controls every function of our body, any lag in neural processing will likewise cause a delay in other systems, including what we see and how we react to it. Slower reflexes and remembrance times aren’t caused only by physical aging. It might be that we just haven’t exercised our brains enough or in the right way. Fortunately for all of us, throughout our lives, our brain is continually making new connections and reinforcing old ones based on learning experiences . . . as long as we are learning.””
• “When we’re forced to use our personal and professional skills in an unfamiliar venue—which art analysis is for most people—we engage an entirely new thought process. In 1908, Harvard psychologists discovered that the brain is most effective at learning new material when stress hormones are slightly elevated by a novel experience, a theory verified by modern brain imaging. Therefore, the best way to rethink something we’ve been doing for years—the way we do our jobs, the way we interact with others, the way we see the world—is to step outside of ourselves, and outside of our comfort zone”
• ““the four As”—how to assess, analyze, articulate, and adapt. We’ll start with how to assess a new situation by studying the mechanics of sight and our built-in blindness, and I’ll give you an orderly process for efficient, objective surveillance. Once we’ve figured out how to gather all of the information, we’ll learn what to do with it: how to analyze what we have uncovered, including prioritizing, recognizing patterns, and the important difference between perception and inference. Finding what we find and knowing what we know are no good if we don’t tell someone else, though, so next we’ll work on how to articulate our discoveries to ourselves and others. And finally,we will look at ways to adapt our behavior based on the first three elements. But before we begin, I have one more, very important A for you: autopilot. Turn it off.”
• The author argues that students who wrote information on paper as opposed to typing remembered and understood that information better because they were slowed down.
  I personally do not agree with this, for that a person could be slowed down when information is given to them yet their mind could still be on autopilot. Slowing down is not the only necessary component of better retention and processing of information. Slowing down might be a manifestation of a process of comprehension and retention going on but it also might not be. The better measure would be to develop ways to ensure the mind’s presence when dealing with anything. We need to have the right mindset that leads us to go through information in the right speed.
  And so maybe it should be slowing down with intent.
• “Studying this Vermeer painting shows us in practice that the longer and more attentively we look, the more we will discover. George de Mestral, Betsy Kaufman, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci all believed that invention is less about creation than it is about discovery. And discovery is made possible by simply opening our eyes, turning on our brains, tuning in, and paying attention.”
• “The most important skill was a simple differentiation between passive sight and active assessment.“
• “Before we can really hone our observation skills, however, we need to understand the built-in biological mechanisms that render all of us at one time or another “blind” to objects, even when they’re massive, moving, or should otherwise bememorable. And we can do that with a little help from an orangutan named Kevin.”
• Humans are faced with two types of distractions: external stimuli – noise, visuals and internal ones – thoughts, memories. The brain has to choose what to give attention to. This is called Attention.
• “Samuel Renshaw, an American psychologist whose research on vision helped the armed forces quickly recognize enemy aircraft during World War II, believed that “proper seeing is a skill which needs to be learned, like playing the piano, speaking French or playing good golf.” He claimed that just like a pianist’s fingers, the eyes could be trained to perform better. Likewise, multiple studies published in the Journal of Vision have confirmed that we can increase our attention capacity dramatically with challenging visual attention tasks. Studying provocative, intricate, multidimensional, and even off-putting art affords us exactly that opportunity.”
• The author argues that we can increase our attention and observation skills with training – just like playing the piano or speaking a different language. The way to do this is with challenging visual attention tasks, and studying intricate, multi-dimensional and even off-putting art. 
• The author brings up the example of a medical student who had an interest in art. She describes how the student changed her style of medical report writing after she took an art class in observation.
  Her reports used to be clinically-focused: “He is a middle-aged white man, tired eyes, pale skin, somber, and very quiet.”
  Her reports started including additional details: the magazines beside the patient’s bed, the TV program he/she is watching, the kind of flowers might be lying beside them and who sent them, the stuffed animals, and their favorite foods.
  The student reasons that if she pays attention to the surroudings, she’d have a better chance of figuring out what keeps the patient motivated to live, what enhances their quality of life during their illness and any alternative treatment they might consider to paliate their suffering.
• ““Powers of observation can be developed by cultivating the habit of watching things with an active, enquiring mind. Training in observation follows the same principles as training in any activity. At first one must do things consciously and laboriously, but with practice the activities gradually become automatic and unconscious and a habit is established.” Practice also makes permanent, as neuroscientists believe that practicing new skills rearranges the brain’s internal connections. So technically, biologically, we can wire our brains to see better.”
• you need exercises to improve the attention and memory.
• Exercise: Do the following each day for a week: pick an object that is rich in detail – eg: watch, jewellery, a piece of art, etc. Observe it for a minute, then write up as many details about it as you can remember. Retrieve the object and observe it for 3minutes instead of one -noticing how much additional detail you can add. To further enhance your abilities you can wait an hour and describe the object again.
• You should never assume that people experience anything the same way you do, even if they are there with you experiencing it. We all add our filters to any situation depending on our state of mind and our unique experiences in the world, our upbringings and culture.
• Biases that cloud our judgement to observing things objectively:
  • Confirmation Bias: wishful seeing, my side bias or tunnel vision. It is subconsciously focusing on the finding information that supports your pre-formed opinion of a situation. You selectively exaggerates any observation that agrees with the conclusion you have about the situation and ignores other facts that do not.
    Frequency Illusion supports Confirmation Bias because suddenly you think that something occurs/appears more frequently than before just because you started noticing it  -eg: you buy a Tesla and suddenly you think there are more Teslas on the road just because you start paying attention to all the Teslas out there. There are two questions to ask prior to engaging in a situation to help bring confirmation bias to the forefront: “Is this information consistent with what I initially thought?” and “Deos this information benefit me personally or professionally?”. Your findings might still be factual if you answer yes to both, but by addressing your expectations up front, you can add more transparency to information gathering process. It is about remembering that the tendency to expect a certain outcome pre-disposes us to look harder for evidence that supports that expectation.
  • Seeing What We’re told to see: We are given information prior to the experience or are told to look for certain things. This ends up biasing our experience with the situation. Eg: knowing the title of a painting and the artist who created it. To help reduce this impact, attempt to see things first for yourself: without lables or any external opinons. Subsequently, you can consult with other people to get their subjective inforamtion and labels, then you can go through the experience again with that information. In addition, pay special attention to any suggestion or restriction that might be placed on your observation skills.
  • Not Seeing change: the gorilla in the video example.
• “Just because someone says something is a fact doesn’t make it so. People lie, and as we’ve just learned, we can’t even rely on our own eyes to always tell us the truth. To make sure a fact is a fact, you need to verify it every time.”
• “One way to ensure that our observations remain objective is to quantify them by counting, estimating, or using measuring tools. “Small” might mean different things to different people: a ladybug is small compared with a dog, but a dog is small compared with an elephant. Adding numbers will help remove interpretation and doubt. “Small” is subjective; “one inch across” is not. Measure whenever you can, estimate when you can’t, but always use numerical values. Instead of saying there are “many” lights on the ceiling above the woman in Edward Hopper’s Automat, note that there are “two rows of seven lights.” Rather than stating that “there are a few chairs” in the scene, be specific: “there are three dark, wooden, armless chairs visible.” Even phenomena that can’t be counted or measured can be quantified. Instead of saying that the dog is “smelly,” quantify it: “On a scale of one to five, five being the worst, the smell emanating from the dog was a four”
  Finally, replace descriptive adjectives with comparative nouns. “Smelly” is subjective. So is “smells bad.” What smells bad to some—cut grass, gasoline—smells wonderful to others. Instead, find a concrete noun to compare with the smell you’re describing: “The dog smelled like dead fish.” Striving for the objective doesn’t end with observation, however; we must ensure that when we draw conclusions, we are also using only facts, not opinions.”
• The Building blocks of an effective observation: When, Who, Where, and What. 
• The reason why we have inattention blindness is that our brains use it as a way to focus our awarenss on what seems to be worthy of our attention. There is so much happening around us at any given moment in our daily lives. Our brains deal with it by categorizing: processing the minimum we need in order to behave properly. Our brains make the determination as to what is important quickly, involuntarly and somewhat unconsciously. The brain scans information received from the environment until someothing captures its attention, only then is it uploaded to our consciousness.
• Our brain’s ability to bridge the gap has served us well in ancient times when it came to survival. Yet at the same time, it has been a hinderance on our ability to employ first-class observation and communication skills.
• Mastering the detail will give you the edge in success. Thoughtfulness and thouroughness will make you stand out with your ability to problem-solve. The solution often lies in the details many people ignore.
• Observe in body language: facial expression, posture, voice tone, and eye contact.
• The author suggests the following systemtic approach to reduce our attention blindness. It is one that has the acronym COBRA – perhaps alluding to these reptiles exceptional abilities to see things from far and in unusually difficult circumstances: at night.
  • Camouflage: our brains are wired to ignore things that fall in place, and instead selectively look for new, exciting and novel things.
    Examples: If we are observing a party scene, we may see people gathering there is a normal part of it. We wouldn’t focus our attention on any particular person unless there is a reason for us to.
    We need to be cognizent of this and remember to: look again, zoom in and out, look at the same situation from different perspectives and angles.
  • One Thing at a time: our brains are terrible at multi-tasking. The more we try to do at once, the less effective and efficient we will be. This is why it is best to do one thing at a time and do it well
  • Break: every 20mins, unfocus your attention momentraily before bringing it back.
    Example: if you have been reading for the last 20mins, take a moment to look away. Don’t read emails – same activity. Instead, do something different.
    Every 90mins, take a 10-min break and engage in a different type of activity: do yoga, or go for a walk.
  • Realign your expecations: re-examine the perceived notions of what you think you’re set out to do and just.
  • Ask someone else to look with you: It won’t weaken your position, it would strengthen your reputation as a seeker of the solution.
• Complete implementation example: A sales manager managed to convince a prospect of their need for his company’s cleaning service. There was a catch: the prospect company was into its second year of a 5-year contract with a competitor. The prospect committed to signing with the maanger if he managed to get them out of the contract. Manager did the following:
  • Camfoulage: the manager spent his time initially focusing on the dates’ part of the contract to see if he could find a way out for the prospect. He realized that he should focus on a different part of the document
  • One thing at a time: manager got rid of distractions – phone, laptop, etc.
  • Break: after 20mins, he hadn’t found anything, and decided to get up and take a walk to the break room.
  • Realigned your expectations: he was set out to get the prospect out of the contract. But perhaps that is the wrong expectation. Maybe he needs to look for the opposite: a way for the client to stay in the contract? could the prospect hire his company while still fulfilling the competitor’s contract.
  • Asking someone for help: This is where a friend of his pointed to an article in the contract stipulating the minimum service required – 50 dollars per service. This allowed the prospect to fulfill their existing contractual obligation at a minimum cost while entering the new contract.
• “The cure for tunnel vision is the same as the strategies we should employ to combat our other unintentional visual lapses: Look in a different direction, look to the edges, take a break from your current activity, and step back to make sure you’re seeing the whole picture”
• “If you missed the rainbow or the spectacles, the sheath or the oversize books, remember to engage COBRA when searching for details. Look specifically for things that might be camouflaged, concentrate on just the one task of looking, take a break and come back to the search, realign your expectations of what you thought you might see, and ask someone else to take a look with you.”
• A daily maxim “Change the way you look at things, and the things that you look at change” Do this literally and figuratively: physically change the angle at which you look at something. Look behind, under, left, and right. Step back, crouch down, and walk around. Things are not always what they appear to be, especially at first glance from one angle.
• Instead of defaulting to what’s right in front of us, we must keep shifting our perspective. We must keep our heads on a swivel.
• One of the tricks the author learned from the FBI is to look back when you are in an unfamiliar territory: it helps you trace your route back quickly in case of an emergency as opposed to getting confused by suddenly looking at the backside of thing you passed when you entered.
• Adopt the approach of going to see where the critical work takes place as opposed to just sitting in your manager’s office.
  Our brains are very effiiciency-driven. This means that they will take the same approach and line of thinking whenever possible. This can get us stuck in our own perspective and prevent us from seeing things from a different perspective.
• Limit yourself to one hour without making progress. Take a walk. That is because one activity that stimulates one part of the brain will stimulate other parts as well. Focus on the who, what, where and when. So try to observe. When you gain experience through observation, this activates performance-enhancing neurons which accelerate learning and the capacity to learn. The more unfamiliar territory you traverse, the more potential there is for you to break out of “functional fixedness” – the habit of seeing things from only one perspective.
• We live in a very visual world, one in which what we see with our eyes command the most of our attention. Yet, it is important to engage all of our senses of smell, taste, feel, and hearing so we are more present. The good news is that the more often you engage all of your senses, the more automatic the process will become. And your other senses will enhance what you see.
• ““You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” To do so is to elicit empathy, which is a vital competency for collaboration, managing conflict, and creative thinking in both professional and personal settings. Forbes magazine calls empathy “the force that moves business forward.” Jayson Boyers writes, “The reality is that for business leaders to experience success, they need to not just see or hear the activity around them, but also relate to the people they serve”
• The author tells a story of a 15-year old who wants to put a photo taken during a bday party. The girl was dressed appropriately and everything looked normal but she was surrounded by two shirtless guys.
  Before posting the photo online, the daughter asked her mom for her opinion. She noted that she’s not doing anything wrong in the photo but just wanted to make sure.
  The mom started asking the daughter questions that encouraged the daughter to consider the point of view of the wider audidence that see the photo: what would her boyfriend think? what would a future prince-charming think who sees her surrounded by two muscled guys when he’s not muscled himself? would that scare him off from asking her out thinknig that the guys in the photo are her type? what about a future colleague recruiter? employer? grandmother?
• The amygdala is where emotions are encoded in our brains, and the hippocampus is where memories are stored. When we experience hightened emotions, our amygdala tells our eyes to pay closer attention, giving our hippocampus more to store. However, while emotional involvement hightens our confidence in our memories, it doesnot neceesarily enhance their objective accuracy.
• “It’s critical that we know how we prioritize information because what we label in our minds as most important is what we’re going to act upon. Up until now, everything we’ve covered has dealt with assessing information and analyzing what we’ve gathered. How we prioritize that information, however, whether consciously or not, will most directly affect our actions. As soon as we have multiple data points, we have a choice: which will we act upon? Our resulting actions are not always as extreme and physical as deciding whether to shoot a stranger. We might have to make less life-threatening but still critical decisions such as determining which pieces of information we’re going to dedicate resources to pursuing and in what order. We can’t physically or mentally follow up, hunt down, or investigate every single piece of information we uncover, at least not all at once. In reviewing the cognitive limits of the human brain and the myth of multitasking, we’ve learned that a single human cannot do multiple things at once. Walking and talking, yes. Reading a book about neural connections while interviewing a university professor and his orangutan puppet? No. If we don’t consciously decide which task to deal with first, our brains will choose for us based on our built-in perceptions and biases. And that’s not always a good thing”
• To illustrate the point that humans act based prioritze acting on what they deem to be most important, the author brings up an example of a person who’s undergoing police training. As part of the training, she’s put in a machine that creates situational visuals and she’s asked to decide whether she should fire a gun or not. In the first situation, a man attackes her in an alleyway, she just fires at his feet. In the second situation, a man charges on her with a big stone that he throws right on her head. She doesn’t fire back because she says he didn’t have a gun. In the third situation though, she’s driving a car – something she’s not comfortable with, and as soon as she parks outside her home, a woman standing by tells her that there is a stranger inside her home and her son’s life might be in danger.
  The trainee enters the home, sees the man running away without any weapons and her son unharmed yet she kills him. She’s the only one in the batch that day who fired at the third person. She did so out of her own bias as a parent to protect her own son and maybe also as a reuslt of the nerevousness that occurred as a result of her driving the car.
• The author places paramount importance on the need for us to prioritize information when sharing it with others. If we don’t do that ourslves, others might incorrectly prioritize it. Picture a situation in which a 911 operator shares events with the police in the sequence in which they received it, as opposed to focusing first on what is important. This can make a big difference especially in time-sensitive situations. Prioritization allows us to be more focused, more efficient, and more decisive.
• To help you proiritize information, ask yourself: what do I know? what don’t I know? If I could get more information, what do I need to know?
  • What do I know? to answer this question, use the assessment techniques mentioned in the book:
    • Start with observation from the ground above
    • Answer the who, what, where and when
    • Practice shifting perspectives mentally and physically, reorienting youself to better see the big and small picture.
    • Once all of that is done, you analayze the data and decide what’s most important.
  • What don’t I know? This takes a similar skillset to answer as “What do I know” questions, but the focus would be on what is not there. This is extremely important because the error of omission is a manifestation of not mentioning things that are usually assumed to be there in a specific context but in reality aren’t – in the specific case we’re dealing with.
    This concept is also important in the world of medicine. The absence of certain symptoms, object, event or behavior can be an indicator of a certain condition. Identifying what is missing gives our observation more specifity.
    Medical personnel can tell a lot from who is missing: the absence of relatives and friends in the hospital speaks volumes about the patient’s life and support system.
    It’s also helpful to look at Who, What, Where and When from a missing perspective.
  • What do I need to know: This question can help us prioritize the potential follow-up work by showing us where to dedicate our time and resources.
• It is important to differentiate between urgent and important when establishing priorities. Urgent could prevent you from focusing on what is important.
• While each person has their own priorities, each person’s priorities reveal a lot about them: do our loved ones know that they rank higher than our professions? does our date know that she’s more important than the phone call? do our kids know that spending time with them outweigh everything?
• Even though prioritization might feel that it slows us down in the beginning, in the long run it will help us increase our speed because it helps us focus our action in the right direction faster.
• Communication: It is extremely important that we assess situations objectively, and use the techniques described above to create an appropriate depth and breadth to our understanding of any situation. Yet, it is extremley important that we communicate our understanding just as accurately. A single word used incorrectly can impact the message that we are sending.
  The easiest way to ensure that we’re communicating objectively is to consciously choose objective words. Surefire, always safe objective words include numbers, colors, size, sounds, position, placement, materials, location, and time. Instead of saying “too much,” give the actual amount. . use comparison, measurement, estimation instead of saying “big”.
  There are some subjective signal words that can cause our listeners to tune out or worse turn against if we’re not careful. Examples below:
  • Clearly, obviously: try using “it appears that x is:
  • Never, Always: give a concrete or a definitive number. If that is not possible, use “Frequently” or “Seldom”
  • Actually: use “I don’t believe” instead.
• “It’s especially when we don’t like something or wish to avert our eyes from it that it becomes essential that we’re able to describe it objectively, putting aside both assumptions and emotions.”
• “We can’t gloss over facts that we find distasteful, distressing, or disturbing because the unimaginable happens every day. We need to be able to communicate when it’s business-as-usual but also prepare our business for the unforeseen, for the emergency, for the impossible.”

“”More important, we can translate this skill of precisely assessing art that is out of our comfort zone into handling difficult communication, because while looking at paintings is most likely not part of your daily routine,
managing sensitive information is. We all have to deal with difficult situations and discuss uncomfortable topics. Professionally, at some point we’re going to have to ask for a raise, challenge a new company policy, reprimand an employee, or resolve a dispute. Personally, at some point we’re going to have difficult talks with our partner, our child, or our parents. Once again, the problem with ignoring something is that it’s dangerous. Training surveillance agents in the intelligence community is a constant reminder that things you don’t talk about won’t go away. In fact, they may escalate, cause more damage, and increase your own exposure. In contrast, the willingness to tackle difficult subjects and situations can earn you the admiration of your boss, your customer, your potential donor, and even your loved ones. Children in particular need direct, forthright communication, especially concerning troubling issues. Minimizing, sidestepping, or denying others’ concerns will not make the problem go away and can hurt the relationship we have with them. I once coached the headmaster of an elite Manhattan private school who had the unenviable task of telling the parents of a teenage honors student

parents of a teenage honors student that their beloved baby girl had been giving sexual favors in the boys’ bathroom. The conversation did not go well because the parents refused to have it. “That is an outrageous accusation!” the mother fumed. “Our daughter would never!” The headmaster explained that it wasn’t an accusation or an assumption. The girl had been caught by a trustworthy, tenured faculty member. The parents stormed out, refusing to continue a conversation that might ultimately help get their daughter the counsel or discipline she needed. They were taken aback and possibly taken over by their emotions and

disbelief. However, turning away from it didn’t make it go away; in fact, it possibly made the ordeal worse, especially if they swept the situation under the rug at home the same way they did in the headmaster’s office. According to family therapist Ron L. Deal, when caregivers turn away from an upsetting situation concerning a child, the child often interprets it as the adult turning away from her. This can lead to the child permanently turning inward, acting out with negative behavior, or losing long-term trust in the parent figure. Deal says, “Over time this goes a long way to increasing emotional distance in the parent-child relationship and diminishing the parent’s

voice with the child.” To prevent this, the parents needed to rise above their discomfort with both their daughter and their daughter’s educators and have an objective conversation about the facts. When we are emotionally overwhelmed and can’t seem to think straight, we can always fall back on the same investigative model we’ve learned to use to gather facts: who, what, where, and when. Instead of letting their emotions dictate their response, the student’s parents could have asked: “Who was involved in our daughter’s activities?” “What exactly did the incident entail?” “Where did this happen?” and “When did it occur?”

True leaders can handle an uncomfortable conversation as easily as a crisis. They know how to digest and deliver bad news without displaying subjectivity or emotion, even when they don’t like it. And in every course I teach, I can spot these people immediately. They’re the ones who when everyone else says, “I don’t like this,” or covers their mouth with their hands, or turns away, say with a definitive nod, “Interesting.” Their brains are engaged, overriding their guts and their body language.
Here’s how to be that person.

• OUTSMART YOUR EMOTIONS

  Just as with observation skills, the most important thing we can do to sharpen our communication skills, especially in times of stress or duress, is to separate the objective from the subjective. In assessing, we separate fact from fiction. In analyzing, we separate inference from opinion. In stressful communication, we must separate the message from any and all emotion. Humans are emotional beings. Emotions are a natural part of who we are. As the psychologist and emotion researcher Paul Ekman explains, we developed emotions to deal with ancient threats such as saber-toothed tigers, and as a result we often experience them unconsciously. “They have to happen without thinking or you’d be dead,” Ekman says. Emotions are also what we’re wired to pay attention to. If we didn’t have an instant fear of becoming a tiger treat, our legs wouldn’t move us out of harm’s way in time. Particularly in stressful situations, people will be emotionally sensitive. Communicating emotionally with them will make them answer in kind. Emotional volleying does not accomplish concrete work. Instead of focusing on the information or task at hand, emotions can cause us to stew over the personal.
  When you convey information, especially to people who report to you,
  choose your words and requests with care. If you include even a hint of negative emotion—disappointment, disgust, disbelief, condescension, sarcasm, passive aggression, or veiled insults—that’s what your listeners will hear first and hang on to the longest. I once worked with a woman who was particularly skilled at demeaning her subordinates with corrections wrapped in insults. Unfortunately, while her criticisms may have been valid, her reproachful tone and the wounded reaction of the recipient made it very difficult for them to register. One person on the receiving end of a red-lined rampage wasted days wading through and fixating on the unnecessary censure before she could get back on track and fix the factual issues. Comments such as “Work on tone!” came across as in-print yelling. “You need to do better” was taken as an insult. The writer obsessed over the reprimand “This isn’t the way to do this. Google and Wikipedia are not valid sources.” As a corporate communications specialist with a degree in journalism, the writer knew Google and Wikipedia weren’t credible references, and she didn’t use them. Did her boss think she did? Or was it just a derogatory censure? Instead of bolstering her research, as the writer agreed she needed to do, she spent hours prepping a defense of her skills. She was defensive and angry and eventually reluctant to change anything. Both the writer and her boss had the same goal: a well-written, well-researched report done in a timely manner. Miscommunication that threatened to undermine that was ultimately detrimental to both parties. It wouldn’t have taken the boss any extra time to construct more helpful edits such as swapping “That’s not what ‘ambivalent’ means!” with “‘Ambivalent’ means having mixed feelings about something, no?” Doing so would have saved the entire team from the resulting wasted time and interoffice drama. That’s not to say that we can’t ever express emotion. If you need to convey a feeling—I love you—use emotion. When you need to convey a fact—your performance is below par—eliminate emotion unless that’s all you want in return. Since our own emotions can seemingly come out of nowhere and take us by surprise—“You might not even know it until someone says to you, ‘What are you getting so upset about?’” Ekman notes—the first step to mastering them is getting to know them. Just as with our subconscious perceptual filters, introducing a conscious awareness of our emotions into the communication process will help us overcome them. To start, Ekman recommends being aware of our facial expressions, our body language, and any tension we might be carrying. If you catch yourself clenching your jaw or tightening your shoulders, use it as a sign that you might be emoting unwittingly. If you find that to be the case, do the same thing we do when looking at art: step back, assess, and evaluate. Ask yourself, “Why am I emotional? What could have triggered it? Did I misunderstand something?” 

  Patients can tell when we can’t wait to get out of their room. Kids can tell if we hate helping them with their homework. That client can tell if we secretly think he’s ignorant. And the minute they see it, we’ve compromised the quality of our relationship, the care or advice or instruction that we can provide, and possibly even our professional or personal integrity. Pretending our emotions don’t exist isn’t a solution. Trying to suppress them might be not only futile—researchers at Queensland University of Technology in Australia found that people who attempted to suppress negative thoughts in fact spawned more of them—but harmful to our health. A 2012 experiment at Florida State University recorded stronger stress responses based on heart rate from people who tried to restrain their negative thoughts than from those who didn’t. When it comes to negative emotions or thoughts, experts advise: let them flow to let them go. When you first approach a situation, before you communicate anything, give yourself a few moments to work through your emotional response. In a session with medical students at The Frick Collection, I split up the group into pairs and assigned each pair a work of art to observe, study, and then present to the class. I could tell from their body language that two young men—first-year medical students—didn’t appreciate the portrait of a woman, Jacques-Louis David’s Comtesse Daru, I asked them to assess. They stared blankly. They shifted their weight. I finally said to them, “If you don’t like it, that’s fine. Just be able to tell me why.” Suddenly they found their tongues. They told me they thought the subject was unattractive; she was cross-eyed, her hat looked like a shower cap, and her dress was ugly.

• In life you’re not going to like everything or everyone. When you meet someone and instinctively dislike them- a colleague, a classmate, step back and ask yourself why: Perhaps they remind you of an ex, of a teacher who humiliated you in the 2nd grade. When you recognize how insignificant and biased this rash judgment is, you’ll be able to move away from it pretty quickly. 
•  Yet, we’re not always going to be successful in being objective in every situation: sometimes we’re going to find ourselves in a heated situation as a result of a misunderstanding or misinterpretation. In such situations, it is important to use repeating, renaming, and reframing:
  • Repeating: you should re-express the points that the other person is emotional about in such a clear way that the target would say “thank you, you worded it better than I did”. After re-explaining the situation, try to explicitly call out points of agreement and new things you have learned. 
  • Rename it: to relieve yourself from a he-said she-said situation, and from having to litigate how certain events in the past occurred, you could just label the entire situation as a miscommunication. This way, no one is blamed and you offer a path forward for all involved. 
    The book brings up an example of a person who scheduled a meeting with a client. The client had to take a long flight to attend the meeting and watch the business person in action giving a presentation, but nobody showed up to the presentation despite the business person’s meticulous planning efforts: he sent the invites well in advance and got confirmations. 
    Business owner was many things: embarrassed, disappointed, and upset. He realized though that these feelings will not help and that shifting the blame onto someone else won’t be a good look on him. Instead he labeled the situation a miscommunication. This was a fact and it allowed everyone to move on without invoking any negative emotions. 
  • Ask questions: this is a much better way of obtaining information and inviting the conversation to continue as opposed to stating problems or issues. Rather than saying “nobody was here which was horrible”, the bussiness person asked the attendee’s rep “where was everyone?” the rep explained that attendees worked at a company that could have unforeseen and sudden emergencies that would require all employee’s involvement. This made the business person understand the situation and plan not to invite clients to future meetings with the same type of attendees. 
  • While we may have a better idea about what objective-communication looks like by now, it is also important that we are thoughtful in the way we receive communication. 
    First and foremost, regardless of the situation, do not respond with your emotions. Ever. Instead, focus on the facts. Check in with yourself: absorb negatively-charged emotional communication, process it, let it go and move on. When the other party didn’t do their part and checked their emotions before talking with you, you need to do it for them. 
• If repeating, renaming and framing still doesn’t do the tricks and the emotions are still running high, ask yourself: who this person is, where are they from, why would they wanna behave that way?
• Example: sales rep storms into the manager’s office as to why “a newly-signed big contract got cancelled”. The sales rep shouted “This can’t be blamed on me!” and stormed out of the room – shutting the door hard. 
  The manager might be tempted to fire the rep on the spot, because he felt emotionally-charged against his behavior. 
  Yet, as the manager takes a minute to breath-in and think through the situation, he started asking himself if he should fulfill emotional want at the expense of a negative consequence in real life: losing the top performance rep at the company. He knew that there would have to be lots of explaining need for the upper management as to how he would let a top-performer go at the expense of the financial consequence for the company? 
  He decided that he should resort into starting by listing the facts that occurred in that exchange.
  • The salesrep lost a big contract because of price. 
  • Salesrep was yelling as he slammed the door shut. He acted unprofessionally. 
    He caught himself using the word “unprofessionally”: was it objective or subjective? he decided to cross it out. 
    Now: What caused the outburst?
    Customer cancelled account. Account was the sale’s rep acct. 
    Now: Why did this happen?
    Customer thought that the price was too high. 
    This made the manager pause: the customer canceled the contract becuase of the price, not because of the rep had yelled at him or slammed the door of his office. 
    The manager asked if there was a relationship between the customer’s cancellation and the sales rep’s actions? the answer was that the rep didn’t present new pricing in person, sent via email instead. 
    The exercise of writing down the objective facts gave him the opportunity to calm down and let his own emotions subside before he acted. Indeed, the act of writing just the facts defused a lot of his own feelings. He noticed for example that he listed the sales rep’s behavior before the more critical fact that a major client has been lost. 
    This allowed the manager to shift his focus: were the pricing standards and procedures clearly communicated with his team? Did it need to be reviwered or did they need more training?
  • Absorb difficult situations in life the same way you approach the difficult in art: take your time and gather facts. analyze them and prioritize them. take a step back and consider things from alternative perspectives. consider your body language and nonverbal communication and that of others. Be objective, accurate and precise. And know that the result of learning how to separate the subjective emotions from objective communication is confidence. 
  • A Person attested as to how focusing on facts and leaving emotions by the wayside helped make them more confident. 
  • Now that we know about objective communication even in difficult situations, it is time to focus on some of our subconscious behavior and see which unintended ones we might want to avoid.
• We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are. 
• Nothing is black and white – overcoming our inherent biases. 
• Even though she had been a nurse with the New York State department for over 10 years, Lucy never had to investigate a case like this: an alleged abuse case at a nursing home where a male stripper was invited to the care facility. The lawsuit alleges that a resident had suffered psychological and physical harm as a consequence. 
  The agency representing the home mounted a solid defense: residents weren’t forced to go through with the event and instead requested it. 
  Lucy interviewed every single person involved in the event and found that overall, residents of the care facility wanted the event to happen and actually requested it.
• “In scientific and sociological terms, a bias is a perceptual filter that doesn’t just change how we see things but can affect our actions.”
• We’re inherently wired to have biases, and they aren’t all negative. The problem arises when we refuse to acknowledge or be aware of a bias, think it through, and reject it if it is not based on truths or facts. A bias that is not grounded in objective truth can lead to bigotry and stereotyping. 
• We are all biased toward the things that we like, the things that we grew up with, and the things that are familiar to us. They invoke a sense of security, safety and familiarity in our brains. There is an evolutionary explanation for this: people who looked like us meant they belonged to the same clan and so they were less likely to be marauders. In today’s borderless world, this bias isn’t helpful. 
•  3 steps of effectively dealing with biases
  • Recognize your biases and boot out the bad ones: If you cannot get rid of the bad ones, avoid situations that may trigger them.
  • Don’t make biases facts, instead use them to find facts. Turn potentially-biased statements into actuall questions. Example: “The guy in the uniform is the only one working” should be turned into a question “is the guy wearing the uniform the only one working?”
  • Run your biases by others 
• “That some situations aren’t straightforward and might never have definitive answers doesn’t mean we can’t address them. When the problem or scene or challenge we face is nebulous, morally ambiguous, or otherwise in the gray area, consider it a subjective problem, then deal with it objectively.A problem is a problem. Handle the subjective ones the same way you have learned to handle the objective ones. Gather what facts you can by looking at both the big picture and the small details, step back, consider other perspectives, analyze, prioritize, ask questions, and communicate clearly and concisely.
• the MET museum in NYC displays pieces of art that have not been fully finished – they do not hide them in storage. They do so because they believe that such pieces highlight the hard work that goes into creating art pieces and because it also reflects that life is a work-in-progress, not everything in it is perfect and finished. 
  Many people might find themselves uncomfortable with such pieces, for we are naturally inclined as a species to want completeness: Perhaps because when something is complete, it allows us to close the loop in our brains and not think about it anymore. Anything that is incomplete occupies some of our attention, hangs over us like a weight haunts the corners of our mind and feels as if it is sitting on top of our chest. 
• The success of game Tetris is driven in part by the brain obsessiveness over tidiness and completion. The game uses that trait of the brain against it to get it hooked on the game. 
• Our brains are obsessed with completion regardless of the magnitude of the task – whether it be ending world hunger or replacing the electric pencil sharpener. It also includes not only items we explicitly called on the to-do-list but also items we internalized and agreed to do such as answering every email, or promising to have a plan for dinner with a friend. This creates the cycle of stress – having too many things to do and never enough time to do it. 
• Having the ability to deal with situations where you have incomplete information prepares us for the curveballs that life throw our way: sudden layoffs, firings, unexpected departures or a sudden loss. We need to make a go of it even when we have incomplete information or resources. 
• Throughout the book, we have learned not only how to sharpen our observation skills but also how to build a new way of thinking. We have learned the power of recognizing that your assumptions might be different from others who are observing the situation – and did not let that alter our own perception. We have learned to ask the what, where, when, and who of the person/people involved in the situation.  We have learned how to make decisions when not all information is available to us and act quickly, and to package our observations with a message specific to the listener.
• Don’t be afraid of complexity and don’t rush into judgements.
• Peel off the layers of complex situations one after another.
• Start with what is most important and do not ignore the basics.
• Ask yourself if you have missed anything or if you are sharing the right information with the audience.
• State what you’re seeing even if it seems very obvious to you because it may not obvious for other people.
  • Do not forget the basics, say that one scene is a painting and another is a photo.
  • Assume that the person you are communicating with cannot see what you’re seeing at all
• Make sure that you’re only seeing things in facts. Describe things objectively without letting your emotions and assumptions block your perceptions. 
• Do not divorce yourself from the experience you’re going through and how it might bias your observation, but be cognizant of it.