Some kinds of therapy seem to suggest that the way to get better is to inspect yourself a great deal. Now there are moments that you certainly need to come to a realization of what it is you’re like and what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, of course. But it’s often better that you should lose yourself in something.

Iain McGilchrist

It is not the hearing that improves life, it is the listening.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow)

These days I feel like I’m drowning in data. Messages, emails, videos, articles, documents, spreadsheets, lists, tasks, tickets. Packets and packets of data that are all screaming for attention and consumption.

There’s work data pointed at me, there’s personal data and there’s a constant leak of environmental data too, overheard conversations, dog barks and billboard advertisements.

It’s no surprise then, that I tend to bias toward capturing and making sense of the world with words – data out of data. Apple notes tells me I log about 5 notes per day. Thoughts, things to remember, insights, random facts. Same goes with reminders. Less verbose, but still a sort of documentation or type of information processing.

There’s value in this type of practice. With knowledge work, ideas and projects often succeed on the strength of their documentation. One pagers, narratively-structured memos, wikis, JIRA initiatives. Over time these habits of extracting and boiling information can become addictive. We get tunnel vision, lost in a vortex of productivity that forms when we are constantly writing, logging and summarizing. 

But the main danger is that we actually communicate less effectively. We miss the bigger picture.

Take therapy for example. Therapy as we know it today has been around about 140 years. Freud believed that there was a ‘talking cure’, that by talking about thoughts and feelings would give you insight into unconscious material and find relief from psychological distress. So therapy is a sort of conversation, a special type of communication between patient and therapist with the goal of shedding some light on previously unknown parts of your psyche.

The talking cure cures. I would walk out of a session with more clarity and more comfortable space around problems that previously felt claustrophobic. I’d excitedly write down what we talked about, eager to apply it. But over time, I found the more I tried to capture what was getting talked about, the less I got out of it. Like a raccoon washing cotton candy, the insights and lessons I had just experienced seemed to melt away into nothing. Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson says he hates when people to notes in their analytical hour: 

“They’re trying to instantly to catch something in canned tomato juice form that they can take home and drink later, and it doesn’t work. Any teacher worthy of this name is frequently wanting to yell at someone – for god’s sake forget about the notes and remember the level of consciousness you have at this moment.”

You can’t blame us for wanting to capture canned tomato juice. We have a bad habit of seeking the summary and skipping the thing itself.

• When we are reading or listening or learning about the context of a problem, we quickly start thinking about solutions. Stop. Wallow in the problem. Feel around in it blindly. Instead of rushing off to brainstorm anemic solutions, we should be storing up and absorbing more problems than we think we can handle. The solution will be better.
• We all know the difference between a good and a bad conversation. Author and Psychologist James Hillman describes some things that can interfere: “just talking out loud about what we feel. Complaints. Opinions. Information doesn’t work–Simply reporting what’s new, where you’ve been, what you’ve heard. Lullabies don’t help either-singing charming little stories to prevent anything from entering the heart or mind. And boosterism isn’t conversation either-broadcasting, self advertising what we are doing, have done, going to do. You can’t converse with a sales pitch or positive preaching.” ¹So, just like therapy, a personal conversation flows better when and stop trying to capture and control the moment.
• Watching or listening to someone or something passively. Assuming you have the attention skills to concentrate and remain undistracted for 30 minutes, we rarely absorb most of what is being said. If it’s an important announcement at work, although we frown our faces so we look very serious and concentrated, and even write down some notes, we are not really listening. Maybe we are thinking very hard about a smart sounding question we can ask at the end, or wondering what this film or book is ‘really trying to say’. When we do such things, we have stopped engaging with the prime material. 

Whether you are listening or conversing with an analyst, a friend or the CEO of a billion dollar company, drop the notes. By not taking notes, you couldn’t possibly be taking it more seriously.

Also published on Substack

1. Hillman, J., & Ventura, M.. (1993). We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse (p. 99). HarperCollins. ↩︎