Office Diaries

An insider's guide to success in the workplace

by Donna Flagg

The Mysteries of Knowing vs. Doing

We're stuck moving information in only one direction.

Published on December 4, 2011 by Donna Flagg in Office Diaries

I often wonder, why is it so difficult for people to do for themselves what they do for others? It happens all the time. In business, we know exactly what to do for our clients and how to advise them. Personally, we dole out advice to friends and family with nuggets that are fit for the best of advice columns. So why then, is there frequently such a gap between what we say and know with what we actually do?

It's not uncommon to see companies offer services to clients that guide them along a certain path, driven by expertise and advice that they themselves do not follow. How many social media companies promise to crack the code and impress you with results? And in fact they may, but for some reason they don't practice what they preach internally. How many strategy companies don't seem to have a strategy? How many matchmakers have bad relationships? How many therapists have messed up lives? How many website companies have crummy websites? Even personally, look at how often we give advice that we ourselves have trouble putting into practice when the tables are turned.

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I used the think the world was filled with hypocrites, and perhaps it is. But, now I think the reason that it is so hard for people to align their actions with their words has more to do with an inability to reverse our innate and outward-bound view. It seems to me that there are two separate, independent channels through which we see - one extremely developed and the other not at all. We are trained to deal with incoming information. We are taught to understand the world as it exists around us, not within us. We are conditioned to develop an outlook that is one directional. Our senses are set up to receive information and our brains have adapted, unfortunately at the expense of balancing out the "traffic" going the other way. It's as if the very skills that enable us to create success for others are absent when it comes to making them work for ourselves. Short on answers and solutions, we are not. Not by any stretch. Cognition is not our problem, but turning it into behavior is.

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