Venn You Can’t Get Along

Today is the Friday before a long weekend. It is the end of a long week full of travel, learning, fun, excitement wrapped in my signature overlay of anxiety. I am tired and I am energized. All leading to the terrible play on words in the title, albeit punny…sorry, I did it again. This gets better.

This week I had the good fortune to attend the Association of Legal Administrator’s conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Three of the best keynote addresses I have ever seen happened this week. As a teacher of public speaking most public speakers start at a bit of a deficit with me, my expectations are always guarded- unfair I know.

Alison Levine, Tom Flick and David Meador proved to be absolutely amazing in content and delivery, a rare and wonderful treat. The overarching theme for this conference was leadership. And each of these speakers, though infinitely different from one another and even more strikingly different than me and, I would wager, most of the audience brought out relevant and poignant charges to better our leadership abilities.

In addition to the amazing keynotes where the great educational sessions. In one of the sessions they had you complete an assessment that pegged you as a certain type of leader. And while I read the descriptions before I even completed the assessment and felt pretty good about my prediction of where I would land (I was right, by the way) what I found most helpful was noting where those that I follow and those that I lead, landed (per my estimation). And discovering that my landing spot and theirs were, in some cases, the opposite or overlapped or complemented, this really helped my understanding of the challenges we face and how I could do better in my interactions.

I enjoy these self-reflexive exercises and glean a lot personally from trying to understand other people’s motivations. I want to try and meet people where they are coming from rather than dragging them reluctantly to me to start the conversation. The frustrating part is the realization that other folks are not going to extend to me that same interest and/or willingness to understand my motivation or where I’m coming from.

I love Venn Diagrams. One of the very few math class lessons I can really remember. Bear with me, this relates. You know how a Venn Diagram works, right? Two separate circles with their own attributes, completely separate and unique within themselves. And at some point they overlap. There is some similarity that makes a sweet spot of being separate, but now with a highlighted element of sameness. Our relationships with others are like Venn diagrams. (There is a whole Social Penetration Theory sidebar that could be had here too- perhaps another post). Anywho, these diagrams, like our relationships with one another, can become really complex the more variables or attributes you take into account. But there is always a way to find some overlap.

Someone may be your polar opposite in what seems like every way. You may have to really search out that overlap, that commonality, but there will be something. A love of black and white movies, an aversion to seafood (take whatever you can get). Even if all you can claim as common ground is that you are both human beings. Isn’t that a HUGE overlap? After all, you happen to know a LOT about being a human being. And in that knowledge you can make choices about how to treat and deal with that other person based on that knowledge. You’re a human and you like to be approached with respect and understanding. BOOM- now you know how to approach that completely different, completely opposite, possibly, that completely irritating human being- because you are paying attention to that sweet spot of sameness that says you both belong to humanity. And what a glorious thing to have in common.