During a typical workday, you meet people who are not directly involved with your business as employees or clients or suppliers. They could be people you meet through acquaintances. They could be people you meet through your Chamber of Commerce or another association. Or they could be people you meet through volunteer activities in your community.  

You may meet with these people occasionally or you may meet with them regularly.

Over the course of years, you may have talked about your business with these people many, many times. You may believe they have a very good understanding of what you do when you go to work…that they understand the value you create when you are at work. 

Because it is important to you, you probably go out of your way to help some of these people understand what you do when you're at work.

If you do that, you may be very surprised to find out later just how little most of these people know about what you do while you're at work. 

I have had a number of discussions with friends on this topic, recently. Many people are telling me they are surprised to find that even close acquaintances do not understand what they do at work. In some cases they have had numerous meetings with people and provided numerous explanations of what they do and how they go about doing their work. Regardless, they find out later that other people do not understand what they do at work. 

When they find out this is the situation, many people are extremely disappointed, their feelings have been hurt. Their ego has been let down. As a result, they share their concerns and wonder what's going on.  Some people have asked me, Why does this happen? 

It seems to me, there are some fundamental reasons why this happens. Here are two examples: 

• Many people think they are too busy so they act accordingly. The rush through things. The fact is - they simply don't listen. 
• Perhaps, people think others who explain what they do at work are too aggressive, too pushy and too self-centered. So they turn off in the presence of those people. Again, they simply don't listen.

Hindsight is 20/20...and while hindsight conversations can be annoying, that's not going to stop us from having them. Something in our nature causes us to want to second-guess decisions we have made and action we have taken.

Foresight is an energy-consuming process that often yields unreliable results...but that's not going to stop us from planning for future events. We want to believe in cause and effect, we want to exercise our willpower and we will fight to hold onto a level of control. 

Presence - our ability to be present -  is so rare it seems to be close to an unnatural state of mind...we spend so much time thinking about the past and the future we hardly ever do justice to the present. Of course, we are distracted in the present: the present is chock-full of external stimuli - all changing rapidly.

Hindsight, foresight and presence have one thing in common - Problems. 

Hindsight deals with second guessing past events: with old problems in mind, we ponder the possibilities of better decisions and better actions; we waste time thinking about and sometimes agonizing over what we could have done, what we should have done, etc.

Foresight deals with anticipating problems and creating strategies and tactics for dealing with those problems...we use foresight when we anticipate outcomes, seek solutions and seek opportunities. While we know we cannot accurately predict the future we gain a level of comfort thinking about the 'right things' to do to get to where we want to go.

Presence - our ability to be present - is only as good as our ability to set aside hindsight, set aside foresight, and filter through all the current/present stimuli to find the really important things...the things worthy of our attention and our thoughts. 

And, some of those really important ‘present’ things will be problems...problems we should tend to. It is OK to ‘have’ these important, present-problems  – it is good to ‘have’ and deal with these present-problems. Other problems, especially those from other time zones, are less real and less important and beyond our control – it is not good to let them ‘have’ us.

I think most people object to, argue against, or otherwise resist New Things (...as in - People Do Only 3 Things: Good Habits, Bad Habits & New Things).

Other people bombard us with advice and suggestions about 'better ways' to do things. When we understand "People Do Only 3 Things", it is easy to see how our Bad Habit ruts make it very difficult for us to see value when other people talk about accomplishing New Things.

This is especially true when other people's New Things are grandiose goals. And, of course, regardless of their size New Things face criticism. One person's BHAG is another person's grandiosity...and worse - many small-but-fresh ideas and little innovations face stiff arguments and criticism from those who 'know better'. That's to be expected. There's a lot of entrenched thinking out there.

But...

We can buck that trend.

We can take time to understand other people's thinking.

We can choose to keep our minds open to possibilities.