“A doctor walked into a bar”…Well…ok, I was the doctor and this was no joke. I did walk into an establishment but it wasn’t a bar. It was a Denny’s on the main drag in beautiful Sierra Vista, AZ. I was about to start my first job since our relocation from Colorado. The entire office staff had planned a luncheon to meet their newest edition in pediatric care. I knew none of the staff, only the physician/owner of the practice. So, as you can imagine, I was a bit nervous.
As I made my way around the back of everyone’s chairs headed toward my final destination, the only empty chair at the table, I passed by what I ASSUMED was a preteen girl with a high ponytail, wrapped in a pink scrunchie. I ASSUMED one of the staff had invited their daughter to my celebration. Being a pediatrician, I immediately gravitated toward the only child in the room and proceeded to start stroking her cute little ponytail as I asked everyone, ” Who does she belong to?”
To my horror, the staff became deadly silent. Then as she turned her head so I could see her face, I realized I was stroking the hair of a forty-some year old woman. My heart went into a flat-line pattern with no defibrillator in sight, as one brave soul squeaked out, ” She’s our office manager”.
As you can imagine, this will go down in the how-stupid-can-you-be-Lisa annals. It was and still is one of the most awkward and hilarious moments of my life. You see, what I thought was one thing, was something completely different! My ASSUMPTION had led me astray.
Assumptions can be so dangerous. They lead us into erroneous thinking, self-shaming and a shit storm of negative self-talk. Assumptions start wars and end relationships. Yet, we need them in our daily arsenal to function. They are the mind’s way of making sense of what we see or think we see. Assumptions allow our mind to quickly build roadmap and tuck it away for future access when needed. Assumptions allow us to create quick narratives that usually serve us well, save time and perhaps, save our life.
I’m sure you are aware of the human eye’s blind spot. We all have an area in the back of our eyeball where the optic nerve is connected to the retina. It’s an area devoid of rods and cones, the essential components needed to absorb light and color. Without these cells, the brain has no input to tell the visual cortex what is in that area of the visual field. But the brain does an amazing thing. It fills in the blanks!
It ASSUMES that since the rest of the big picture looks like something it recognizes, it will fill in the blind spot with information stored within memory. Even if it’s a novel image, it will quickly fill in the blank spot with the most logical probability. So if it sees only webbed feet, a beak, and white downy feathers, it will add a cute little bunch of upturned tail feathers to complete the picture. I even think our brains can override poor assumptions we may make. Like assuming that those soft brown feline eyes staring intently at us cave people eons ago really didn’t belong to a saber-toothed kitten, but rather a feline of sorts with 10 inch fangs! That’s where the adrenaline kicks in.
So, in essence, we need our ability to assume. We need it to infer and to make split second decisions. It’s a life saving, integral part of our make-up. Unfortunately, in life there are so many times that we don’t need to be saved. We just need to navigate our way through this insanely chaotic world. But so many times, our assumptions kick in before we allow ourselves enough time to obtain more information. If I had taken a few more seconds to look at my new office manager’s face, crow’s feet and all, before I started playing with her TOTALLY age-inappropriate choice of hairstyle that day, I could have saved myself a lot of embarrassment and humiliation. But my brain filled in the blanks for me. It just assumed…
So, in our relationships and our daily human interactions, we need to try to avoid assumptions. We need to ask for more information or communicate that we are hurt or admit that we don’t understand. We shouldn’t always assume it was something we said or did or didn’t do. The other person may just be having a bad day or we may have started our own day ripe for self-pity.
So, I guess, if we just try to remember we all have blind spots. We all have to rely on assumptions to some extent because of this. But we need to be able to ask for clarity. Be patient. Practice honesty and diplomacy as best we can. Give someone the benefit of the doubt, but more importantly, give ourselves a break. Don’t allow the knee jerk reaction be one full of negative self-talk. Because in between all of our successes, there will be lots of failures. And don’t be led down the path of assuming either of these entities are all entirely of our own doing.
And remember, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and and quacks like a duck…It might just be an assumption.
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