What I wish I'd understood earlier
What is obvious in my head is not self-evident to others. If I had known this earlier, my interactions with so many people would have gone very differently.
The idea itself is simple. Each of us has a cognitive profile that is often very different from the people we're talking to. That applies at work, and it applies just as much at home, to the people in our family, the people we love, the people we'd like to be closer to.
But we keep reverting to the same assumption - that our way of thinking is the correct way of thinking.
When I think back to the people I felt most misunderstood by, what they had in common wasn't disagreement. It was a lack of curiosity about how I thought, as if their way of thinking was somehow better. And the reverse was also true - I sometimes had little curiosity about how other people thought.
It's a hard thing to notice in ourselves, because from the inside our own way of thinking is the only one we experience.
Cognitive awareness doesn't change who we are. It's the recognition that other people do not process information the way we do, and it lets us see them through that lens instead of our own.
Gregor