Our invisible differences
Some differences reveal themselves quickly. We learn about a person's experiences, background, values, and perspective through conversation and observation. But there's another kind of difference that's largely invisible, yet shapes our lives just as profoundly - cognitive difference.
My wife Michaela and I think about the world in a very similar way. We're both Conceptual - we live in possibilities, in meaning, in big ideas. It's a large part of why we married, and why we now work together.
But there is one place we diverge. Michaela is also Relational, and I am not. I'm unimodal Conceptual, which is a precise way of saying that the part of her that instinctively connects ideas to people is a place I don't naturally go.
When we're operating in a good place, that difference is an advantage. My unimodal thinking fixates on solving the problem in front of us, which gives us momentum on our ideas and initiatives. Her relational side brings humanity to every project - she can sense when something will land and when it won't. She's the reason this newsletter has stayed consistent over the last six months, because she reminds me why it matters and that people value these reflections.
But add stress or pressure, and the same difference can flare into friction. I'll lock onto the problem in front of me - the page that isn't right, the tool that needs refinement - and want to push straight through it. Michaela will stop and notice that someone we're working with has gone quiet, or that we've been so heads-down we've stopped keeping up with other things in our personal life.
In that moment, her instinct to tend to the human side reads to me as a detour from the thing that has to get done. And my drive to finish reads to her as proof I've stopped caring about the people. We're each defending the mode we trust most - and deciding the other person is the problem.
Those misunderstandings don't always stay small - they can accumulate. A dozen of them become a recurring argument, a distance that's hard to name, a pattern of feeling misunderstood. So we fill the gap with a story and treat a difference in thinking as a flaw or a defect. But people do genuinely process the world through different modes - we just can't see the thinking.
Which is why language changes everything. The moment you can name how someone thinks, you can begin to see them more clearly. Michaela's Relational mode stopped feeling like an unnecessary detour and became strategic insight that supports our work and our home life. My Conceptual focus is perceived less as intentional distance and more as a valuable asset for moving big ideas forward when there are multiple priorities.
What Michaela and I have learned over the years is that we don't need to become more alike - we need to understand the ways we cognitively differ.
Over the last year, we've been building something designed to help make those invisible differences easier to see for everyone.
It's called Modes, and I'll be sharing it with you very soon.
Gregor