Many people secretly believe that other people should just know what we’re thinking. When your co-worker doesn’t acknowledge your contribution in a meeting or when your client appears to be ignoring your carefully crafted advice, it’s natural to feel slighted. The narrative that forms in your head is compelling and feels true: they don’t care about you, they don’t respect you, or worse, they’re deliberately undermining you. And, in these situations, your focus is on the wrong participant in the meeting or conversation.
The narrative focusing on others is almost always wrong. The fact is that they simply have no idea what’s going on in your head. Think about your own mental state right now. You’re juggling deadlines, worrying about your own projects, replaying conversations from earlier today, thinking about what you need to pick up on the way home, and processing dozens of competing priorities. Your consciousness is a crowded, noisy place. Now multiply that chaos by every single person you interact with professionally and the fact that those people are going through the same thing you are with their own deadlines and issues.
The world operates under a dangerous assumption that competent, caring people will simply intuit what others need. You think that if you work hard, your efforts will be noticed or if you need support on a project, one of your teammates will volunteer. But intention doesn’t equal impact, and internal experience doesn’t equal external expression. You will find that people you work and deal with genuinely are shocked to learn that you feel undervalued or ignored, likely responding with complete sincerity, “I had no idea you felt that way.” The vast majority of slights aren’t malicious acts; they are failures of communication.
Even when you do speak up and clearly communicate your needs, you’re fighting against the forgetting curve. The person you’re expecting to know what you want, or need has had seventy-three fires to put out and processed hundreds of emails since your last conversation. Your ambition and issues, which feel so central and urgent to you, are but one or two data points that for them are buried under an avalanche of competing information. This isn’t an excuse, but it is the reality of how human memory works under cognitive load. People need reminders and needing to remind someone doesn’t mean they don’t value you.
The solution is to recognize that clear, repeated communication is a feature of healthy professional relationships. When you need something, say it explicitly rather than stewing in resentment. When you’ve communicated something important, circle back on it without feeling like you’re being annoying. The most successful business relationships aren’t between people who can read each other’s minds, they are between people who’ve accepted that mind reading is impossible and have built communication systems to work around that fundamental limitation. People aren’t ignoring you because they don’t care. They’re just trapped in their own heads, same as you, trying to make sense of their own world and reality.
As always, this post and others can be found on my blog, Business Law Guy.