The Honest Underscore
There’s something both beautiful and powerful about musical underscore. Its purpose is to creatively support a storyline in order to incite the observer to feel something and react to the events being observed. It serves as a lens through which we interpret and react to each scene. In fact, I believe truly effective musical underscoring so intricately and intentionally supports the storyline that you come to see it as part of the story itself and not a separate underlying element. It’s interesting that you can watch a movie scene with the exact same sequence of events set to two different musical underscores and have two unique experiences from what you observe. It’s the same events occurring but experienced and felt differently. How does that happen? I’ve often wondered if that imagery is similar to how we experience events in our own lives.
Is there an underscore in life that serves as a lens that drives how we interpret and react to our experiences?
I couldn’t number for you the times I've left a particular situation and thought, “That didn’t go the way I saw it play out in my mind.” In our household we call that Tuesday because it happens so frequently. Even when end goals are obvious, clear, and mutually desired, people can still come out with conflicting experiences of a shared event that bring them further from the goal instead of closer to it. It’s like witnessing the same sequence of events set to completely different underscores. You're left with deteriorated relationships, eroded team unity, or even dismantled peace in your home. I see it over and over again.
We typically think of decision-making, or reaction, in the following order: we observe something and then react to it. How is it that we can observe the same sequence of events and come out with different reactions to it? Wouldn’t a shared experience incite the same emotional reaction across observers? Consider if I were to bake a loaf of bread and set it on a table before 10 different people. Would those people observe the bread and react to it the same way? If the previous logic stands, they should. Bread should elicit a specific and fixed response from each person around the table. But maybe one person would smell the bread and be reminded of an endearing childhood memory of their grandmother. Another might see the loaf and think back to the many times they’d baked banana muffins for their loved one who is no longer present and be immediately filled with a sense of loss and grief. A third person might see the loaf, question his or her competence in baking, and walk away feeling the need to purchase a cookbook in order to meet a perceived standard of baking that had been set. Three completely different reactions to a shared experience. And that’s only addressing 3 of the 10. Was it the bread itself (the input) that caused those reactions (the output)? If not, then what did?
It seems there must be a missing step that allows for nuance of experience and expression. The book Crucial Conversations poses that the step in between an observance and a reaction is actually a story that you tell yourself. The book reasons that there’s a subconscious narrative, unique to the observer, that serves as a lens through which our observances are interpreted, and that lens drives our reactions to events themselves. Much like musical underscoring does to the overall storyline of a movie.
“There is always an intermediate step because actions themselves can’t and don’t cause emotional reactions. That’s why, when faced with the exact same circumstances, ten people may have ten different emotional responses.”
If this is true, then the stories we tell ourselves serve as the lens through which we view and react to our experiences. This would reconcile why two people can have a shared experience but come to very different conclusions and reactions to it. Their underscores allow for uniqueness of interpretation and expression. Their stories are both genuine in that the experience is real to each observer as he or she interprets it, even though they differ. And sometimes their stories regarding a shared experience can actually be in conflict with one another. Like the imagery above, each person witnesses the same sequence of events but set to two completely different underscores. And the underscore, or in this case the story the observer is telling him or herself, incites different emotional reactions.
I’ve seen so many instances of this play out leading to the question: “how did ____ get here?” You fill in the blank. I. We. Our team. Our organization. We find ourselves straying from desired outcomes and not really knowing why or what to do to effectively redirect ship. And though there are times when things happen beyond our control, I can no longer unsee this ongoing underscore or lens through which I interpret and respond to my experiences and how it impacts my life in both positive and negative ways.
What is the honest underscore that drives our decision-making?
That question has given me new perspective in my relationships, in my work, and in other areas of life most meaningful to me. My intent is to consciously acknowledge that we each have one. At times they may be in sync, or harmony, and at other times they may be in conflict, or dissonance, with one another. But nevertheless, our experiences are constantly underpinned by our stories. I desire to identify the honest underscore of my experiences and hope in doing so, I can better understand the stories that drive my decision-making.