Mature hackberry trees stand on the property line on either side of our small city lot and effectively form a green canopy over our back yard. The yard is also overshadowed by two black walnut trees and another hackberry tree, making it difficult to grow anything in our gardens except hostas and ferns.
I’d never encountered a hackberry tree with its strangely-ridged gray bark and small purple berries (not that I am aware) before moving to London from Kitchener twelve years ago. London is only a little more than 100 km to the southwest of Kitchener, but it lands in plant hardiness zone 6b whereas Kitchener is in zone 5b—meaning that winters are not as cold in London. As a result, species of trees associated with the Carolinian forest such as hackberry, redbud, sycamore and tulip tree are common in London but seldom seen in the Kitchener area. What I learned about the hackberry (specifically, the common hackberry, Celtis occidentalis) is that it prefers the rich, moist soil found in bottomlands, low-lying land along rivers. That should have been a sign to me.
Our house is close to the Thames River, but sits on a hill about 30 m in elevation above the river. You wouldn’t typically describe our neighbourhood as bottomland, but after our basement flooded for the first (but not the last) time six weeks after we moved into the house, we learned that the entire Old South area of the city suffers from a high water table. The presence of hackberry trees—which prefer rich, moist soil—in our back yard should have been a sign to me, but I missed it.
“Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs.” Nature has many signs. If I want to determine which time of the day our sun-starved yard receives the most sunlight, I only needed to pay attention to the day lilies that were blooming three weeks ago. They lean strongly to the west—indicating that the yard receives more sunlight in the late afternoon than any other time of the day. Some signs like this are obvious (if you know where to look), others can only be sensed. The most valuable signs are those we can pick up—if we are attentive—from within our closest, most trusted relationships. Once long ago, when I crawled into bed with Judy in the early hours of the morning after watching a “Baby Blue” movie on City-TV, she rolled over and said, “What have you been into?” Without knowing what I had just done, she could smell the guilt on me. She hadn’t seen or heard anything but a sixth sense told her something wasn’t right. Her words were a stern warning to me that deception or disloyalty in my relationship with her me would not go undetected.
That sixth sense that told Judy something wasn’t right with me is intuition, what we often describe as “gut feelings”. We often say, “I just didn’t get a good feeling about that person”, and almost involuntarily our intuitive reaction begins to affect our responses to the person. Properly understood, intuition isn’t a random, baseless impression, but the outcome of a series of information-processing shortcuts—like pattern-matching—that take place in our thinking, especially when we are feeling uncertain or are in unfamiliar territory. In situations like these, our brains propose answers “based on everything that is available to the brain at that moment, including feelings, memories, knowledge and any subtle cues from the environment.”
Intuition can be a great gift to leaders, because it enables them to “‘cut to the chase’ to make fast, accurate decisions in the face of seeming uncertainty based on their capability to select the right cue” from their previous experience. On the other hand, when a leader finds himself in an unfamiliar situation, he may miss cues in the new environment, rely on patterns from past, dissimilar scenarios, and arrive at a faulty, intuitive conclusion. Like me when we arrived in London: I believed I knew trees, but I didn’t know the trees of the Carolinian forest, and I missed the sign that the hackberry trees were offering—an example of confirmation bias at work.
I recall a situation where the sign that intuition was offering was too pronounced to ignore, but I didn’t at first understand why I felt the way I did. I was hiring for a key position in the organization I was leading at the time. After three rounds of interviews, one candidate seemed clearly to be the strongest contender. The panel who had interviewed him with me unanimously recommended that we make an offer; the chair of our Board of Directors recommended that we move forward; a peer with an affiliated organization who had also interviewed the candidate as a courtesy gave him a thumbs-up. But my gut told me he wasn’t the person we were looking for. I couldn’t ignore my intuition, but I needed a more reasonable explanation for why I was backing away. After some thoughtful analysis, I came to realize that all of us had failed to pay attention to the critical issue of culture. Given the influence and authority of the position we were seeking to fill, it was essential that the person we hired be a “good fit” with our organizational culture. From what I had learned of the candidate we were considering, it seemed unlikely that he would either understand or appreciate our culture. Intuition prevented me from making a bad decision, but I needed to combine it with rational thinking in order to explain my decision to others.
This partnership between intuition and reason is what some call the “wise mind”. Wise Mind is a concept that comes from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy that suggests there are three types of mental states that describe our actions. The two primary minds are the Reasonable Mind (“an intellectual, logical approach to interactions with people and the world”) and the Emotional Mind (“thinking and behavior driven by intense feelings”). We all tend to default to one or the other. The Wise Mind is the space between the two: “the ability to blend rational thought with emotional support and understanding, with one leading the other based on the context of the situation,” This is wisdom: listening to your gut with the conviction that comes from slowing down and thinking things through, especially in stressful situations.
Wisdom is listening to your gut with the conviction that comes from slowing down and thinking things through…
Paying attention to signs is a critical practice to develop in life, relationships and leadership. Only when we slow down long enough to take in all the cues and clues we are offered, and allow the still small interior voice to wisely and truthfully interpret what we are observing, will we fully benefit from the signs that are planted like hackberry trees in our pathway.
Text and photos © 2019 Ed Wilson
