"But this is not you, is it"
I asked my father if he wanted to do Modes. He said yes, which surprised me, and I passed him my phone. Within seconds I could see I had him wrong. I have known my father my entire life, and I was watching a lifetime of assumptions come apart.
My father and I are very different. Throughout my life he had often raised valid concerns about decisions I made, so I had always assumed he was a dominant Analytical thinker.
But he answered too quickly for that. Not carelessly - quickly, and without hesitating. Analytical thinking tends to slow down to examine before it commits. He was not examining.
I watched his hands while he tapped through it. I have known those hands my whole life, mostly working with tools, patiently showing me how he did things.
I leaned over his shoulder. I have worked on the Modes questions for two years and I know them by heart, so I could see where it was going before he even finished. LoRe - Logistical and Relational.
Everything I had filed under one explanation moved to another. How he ran his life. What he was good at, and what he cared about. How he was with the people around him. How he parented. The times we misunderstood each other, and the stretches where we didn't make sense to each other at all.
In that moment, I realized that when he had pointed out the risks in my decisions, he wasn't trying to undermine my reasoning - he was trying to strengthen the logistics so I could make those decisions work in the long term. And I had spent a lifetime reading it as something else.
He was smiling when he turned the phone around to show me. Then he looked at it again and said, but this is not you, is it.
No, I said. He smiled at that too. You can know someone your whole life and still hold assumptions that are not true - because what you see is mostly what they do, and rarely the thinking behind it.
At eighty-five he recognized himself immediately. The thinking had not changed. Only the language for it was new.
If you want the language around your thinking, try Modes. It's free, and it only takes a few minutes.
Gregor