Why You Owe It To The People You Know to Share Your Voice

First published on July 6, 2018

Sometimes, I feel like the lone different voice in the echo chamber of my Facebook feed. Mostly, I find it too frightening to post the thoughts that make me feel like that, frightened of people disliking me, or unfriending me, or something. And sometimes I do post them. I posted one this morning. A different voice to what everyone else is saying.

Also this morning I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell's podcast. It's as brilliant as his books. I love the way he brings his fantastic eye for something that doesn't make sense, and his awesome storytelling, to show us things we haven't seen before. Today, I listened to an episode about the idea that the least Agreeable (this is a term from one of the key traits that psychologists say people differ along) people among us, can see what the actual best things to do are, even when most of us - because we aren't so Disagreeable - may think it is a terrible idea. Because he's Malcolm Gladwell, he uses ice hockey and a home invasion movie to demonstrate this. In the latter, the best thing to do with a psychopath in your home threatening your children - the only way to take their and your chances of survival up - is to run yourself, leaving your children with him. Because either he's going to kill them anyway, or he is not going to hurt them because you're not there any more and so there's no point hurting them, and either way running for help is the only way to save some or all of you. Now most of us - because we can't get this cold about things - couldn't make that decision. We couldn't leave our spouse or children in the hands of Evil Idris Elba (in this particular movie), because it's just not human to do that. But by staying with them, we stay at a 0.5% chance of survival (let's say) rather than giving everyone at 5% chance of survival (let's say). How is this the way to look after our children? It's certainly not rational.

I have worked in some of the most humane and Agreeable sectors - arts, charities, and now coaching - full of people with incredible empathy (often the really Disagreeable people don't have that at all), and incredible care for people. And I have done this because I have this too - I can understand people deeply, and feel deeply. It's one of my strengths. And yet there's another strength, too.

When I was 14 we had standardised tests at school. I scored top in my year in maths. I think I scored 117 (not out of 100, but if I remember right, and I find it hard to believe this, I think out of 120). This was at a new, bigger school, and I knew something was up at that point. There was something I could do here that others couldn't do. And maths is about engaging rationality and persistence, and finding the right answer.

These days, I don't think about that much. But today, I did. Because if I believe so much - and I do - in a strengths-based approach: that the way to improve the world for ourselves and everyone else is to do the work that we are uniquely suited to do, to find our zone of genius and create from there, then I can't ignore this.

My brother once showed me a rather unsettling clip of the psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose work includes those personality traits like Agreeableness. He said that we have a responsibility to speak the truth as we see it. We see the world differently from everyone else, and we owe it to everyone to respect what we see, and to share it, rather than hide it away.

Out of about 120 people I was the best at maths. Only just, someone else - I think maybe my friend Lindsay - scored only a couple of points behind, but the best, nonetheless. And I've added all sorts of learning and understanding to myself since then, in rational and less rational places.

It's uncomfortable to feel like the lone voice, but don't I owe it to the people I know to offer the perspective that they may not have seen yet? To give them the choice to see from that perspective if they want to, where they may not have had that choice before? To be my mix of the rational and the emotional - to bring my mix of the search for the right answer and my understanding of people? I had a gift that set me apart from most of my classmates, in rationality and persistence and finding the right answer. Don't I owe it to them to help them see what I think the right answer is?

You may not have been the best person in your year at maths, but there is a unique mix of strengths and thoughts in your mind that no one else has. Don't you owe it to the people you know to try and help them develop their understanding, by sharing your voice?

I think you do.