How often do we hear the phrase: you don’t understand me! And we ask ourselves the question: how did this happen, because just yesterday this person was different, a good partner, or seemed different to me? – That’s just the point, it SEEMED...!! Not everything that seems is reality!! In order to understand how we get into the “seemed” situation, it is worth understanding the mechanism of perception of the surrounding world. As Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy (one of the popular trends in psychotherapy), wrote, there are three levels of perception of reality. The external level is contact with the outside world through hearing, vision, touch and smell. The internal level of perception is our emotions, feelings. There is also a middle zone - our thoughts, interpretations and fantasies, that is, what happens in our mind. And the trouble is that a modern adult often perceives the world only through the prism of this particular middle zone, while not noticing the signals coming through other channels of perception. It happens something like this: a person hears someone’s words, and in response to them, thoughts are automatically born in his head: “Yeah, I see, that means that... Yes, that’s because...” and then the conversation is built around these “because what" and "it's clear". Attention is concentrated around one’s own conclusions and reactions to what is heard, reality, that is, what is happening to the interlocutor, ceases to be perceived, as if “floating” from consciousness and one’s own thoughts appear on the internal stage. - An example from life: the director of company X is used to negotiating on an equal position - only with directors. However, the director of the company, Y, prefers to delegate matters to his manager, perhaps believing that in the eyes of the counterparty this will benefit his image and will add solidity, perhaps believing that the allocation of a special manager is a sign of respect for the client. But the director of company X repeatedly states that he would like to discuss the details of the transaction not with the manager, but directly with the director of company Y, since in his worldview, according to business etiquette, it is recommended to negotiate on the same official line. Therefore, he is perplexed and perceives the transfer of negotiations with him to ordinary managers as disrespect for himself, not realizing that company X has its own rules. At the same time, the director of the company U is also perplexed and perceives the counterparty’s reluctance to negotiate with the manager in his own way: as dissatisfaction with his company. “He is dissatisfied with my employee, he doesn’t like it with us! The fantasy continues to unwind further: “He doesn’t like my company, which means I don’t!” And no one knows to ask another, what exactly is happening to him? And where can we get to a deal?! - Or: “This company does not want to cooperate with us - because they said that their budget is already closed! – says the manager, “What’s the point of calling them?!.” - Yes it is. The budget is closed. But who said that the company does not want to cooperate? The budget for this quarter is closed, you are late, but there are still so many budgets and plans ahead - which means opportunities. A banal, but very familiar plot. And such stories in relationships happen not only at work, they begin at home, in family life and are cloned at work. At first glance, people are engaged in a dialogue, but in reality there are two monologues and everyone hears only themselves, without being interested in what is actually happening with their partner? The inability to distinguish what we actually see and hear from what we think, the replacement of seeing with thinking is, unfortunately, a fairly common story that gives rise to misunderstanding and, ultimately, conflict. We listen but do not hear, we look but do not see. But all the time we think “about”, mistaking our own thoughts and fantasies for the real world, replacing the real world with a fantasy world, giving harsh assessments to others. Why is this happening? We are accustomed to measuring the world of human relationships by linear cause-and-effect relationships, and this can be called a social problem. AllThe school system is built on the development of only the “logical” left hemisphere. Therefore, we evaluate human relationships, as in Newtonian physics, according to the principle: “This is all because...”, forgetting that quantum physicists at the beginning of the 20th century proved the diversity of the world. Hence, we are accustomed to measuring human relationships by straightforward cause-and-effect relationships - and this is always a search for someone to blame, always a rigid approach of dividing the world into two parts, “this is white, and this is black,” “this is good, and this is bad,” and further: “I right, and you are wrong.” But a person’s mental life and his relationships with others are influenced by many factors: his childhood, life stories, social stereotypes, physiology; in addition, a person lives in interaction with other people. A simple example: a young unmarried man will be satisfied with salary X, and will be active at work, smiling often, while another, who already has two children, will be gloomy. The manager can attribute different moods of employees to character traits. At an enterprise, a person’s behavior, his activity or passivity is determined by the corporate culture, and its consequence - the psychological climate that is created by both employees and managers. In family life, both spouses are equally creators of relationships. And the problem of misunderstanding is that one person did not explain to the other the reasons for his action, and the latter, without asking what was actually happening to the person, built an incorrect chain of cause-and-effect relationships. Unfortunately, we are more attentive to our thoughts than to the feelings of others. Ask yourself how often are you interested in the state of another person, how often do you wonder: “What is happening to my friend? A child? An employee? Partner? How does he feel when communicating with me? How often do you say about others: “I know everything about him! I know exactly what he thinks, what he will do” - Indeed, people love to undertake the task of explaining and predicting the behavior of others, but here’s the paradox - they are very bad at predicting their own lives and actions! Knowing yourself turns out to be much more difficult than knowing another... Another reason for human troubles in interpersonal relationships is that we ourselves have created a world of evaluative culture, the roots of which go back to the Soviet era, where there have always been extremes and confrontations: “red” and “white” ", good - bad. In such a world, where there are no halftones, there is no place for accepting the otherness of another. This is the second reason for misunderstandings, quarrels, and conflicts. Listen to passers-by on the street, what, or rather, how they talk. “You are so and so! “And you yourself are like that.” We give a person an assessment: “I like going to the movies, but you don’t.” That means you don’t understand anything about art.” Or here’s another real case: one manager asks another for an opinion about a product that for some reason is not selling very well. The friend says that, in general, the quality of the product could be better. In response he hears the following: “So you don’t like our company’s product? - what an intolerant person you are! (rating) Well, we don’t produce a very good product, but these are the conditions of our life, we also need to live somehow! And you are an unkind person if you say that you don’t like our new product (an assessment based on a direct relationship) and this means that you don’t like our company. (fantasy) But you once worked there. I see, that means you were unhappy with her. (fantasy) You can’t do this - You have to forgive people!” (assessment based on fantasy) As a rule, assessments addressed to another cause a reaction corresponding to the assessment. “I am like this, but I am not like that,” which essentially means: “I want to be myself and I want you to force me to be like you.” (I don’t like your products, and I have the right to say this) But we evaluate others by our own standards, our “coordinate system”, which “lives” in our individual consciousness, without even realizing that the other person has a different one. There is a good one on this topic).