WHEN TO FISH OR CUT BAIT?

WHEN TO FISH OR CUT BAIT?
By
Bill Cottringer

“Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson.

One of the hardest places to locate intellectually and emotionally is getting to the comfort zone where you can make the right decision to fish or cut bait—to continue trying to do something to get a positive outcome, or accept that it isn’t going to work out as hoped for. This is the confusing point of deciding to get divorced or stay married, fire an employee or continue working with him, give up an uncomfortable job for none at all, trust your teenage daughter on a date, buy a house, retire, move, or quit or hang on to anything in similar gut-wrenching situations that may not have a positive outcome. You never know if you have enough of the right information to predict the future with certainty, but in the end it is always trusting in what you know and feel and making the final leap of faith from the heart.

Obviously knowing what not to quit is just as important as knowing what to quit as well as how to do it. The problem is often compounded by vivid, relevant experiences of past successes or failures, the plethora of thoughts and feelings that can easily surface in trying to understand something, and the extreme difficulty in communication these days. Another problem is that there is a major paradigm shift going on in the world today—taking us all from a controllable, predictable, familiar and certain world to an uncontrollable, unpredictable, unfamiliar and uncertain one, where all the tried and true success prescriptions no longer work. It is easy to miss this change or want to deny it, but that just puts us further behind in the change learning curve.

Getting to this point of knowing when to fish or cut bait has always given me great difficulty. There are several reasons for my having this difficulty. First of all both my parents instilled in my brain the values of tenacity and perseverance with an ironclad no-quit fiat branded across my forehead. Next came several years of psychology study which fine tuned my problem-solving and conflict resolving skills, along with giving me unbridled optimism and belief in every person’s unlimited potential for growth and goodness, without any room for doubt. Every person and every situation can be made better, it just depends upon how much time and effort you want to invest.

This parental and school education was followed by decades of public and private management experience and training that leads managers to believe more in employee’s potential assets than red flag liabilities (everybody can be motivated and productive) and also the value of ongoing conflict and chaos in organizational development. And then my perspective was even more confused with a lifetime of successes at cutting lots of bait easily, chased by a spiritual quest leading to the important realization that we can change any reality we take enough time and effort to truly understand and apply the right mixture of acceptance and intervention .

So with all this training and experience, you would think I would be an expert at knowing when to fish or cut bait. But I have less of a certain conclusion than when I started. I can openly admit that I am not the expert on this important topic and this confession might be a key to growing and succeeding in this world of uncertainty that we are all now part of. After all, when you can admit what you don’t know, you can begin to learn what you need to know.

Here are four activities that I have recently discovered which may make the road to this fishing/bait-cutting decision less likely to be a dead end or an unpaved one filled with pot holes and sharp twists and turns. In other words, less crashes, stalls or flat tires.

CRITICAL THINKING

The way the brain processes information does not always guarantee its accuracy or completeness. Placing complete trust in the quantity or quality of information you have in trying to arrive at one of these fish or cut bait decisions is probably not smart. For one thing the brain processes complex realities and reduces them down into artificial simplicities for easier understanding and storage. Another brain research-proven reality is that you really can’t trust the recall of past memories that well because the memory process is designed mostly for convenience and efficiency rather than accuracy or completeness. The total disagreement of eye-witness testimony is a perfect example of this dysfunction.

Other “brain tricks” are the drive to prove things you already know instead of disproving what you don’t know, seeking only new information that fits with what you already know, the inability to shed a belief despite the compelling evidence to the contrary, and the bad habit of making a universal law out of a one-time personal experience. And this doesn’t even get into expectancy theory which tells us the power of optimism and pessimism in effecting positive and negative outcomes of important events. Below that is the awesome power of earlier imagination , which very well may start everything we are trying to deal with in the here and now.

It is extremely difficult to use critical thinking to get better at fishing or cutting bate, because then you become like the golfer who is so concerned about a proper swing, that he misses the ball altogether. The best you can do is question the information you gather, along with what you think you already know, with an open mind (and soft heart) and accept that you will never be certain about anything. With that, add the humble realization that all you think you know may not always be so.

COMMUNICATION

When you get into the edge of reason in emotionally-laden situations, in which most fish or cut bait decisions occur, communication becomes even harder. The closer you get to absolute truth, or worse, yet, to relative perceptions of realities, the harder it is to use words to accurately and be able to completely capture the essence of the experience you are trying to convey. This inability causes stress and frustration which greatly interferes with a solution.

The only way to communicate past such a blockade is to create a supportive tone and avoid saying or doing anything that contributes to a defensive one. This takes great sensitivity and self-control. Supportive communication, which enables a better exchange, conveys rapport-building and likeable things such as positivism, agreeability, equality, freedom, honesty, spontaneity, acceptance, empathy, humor and politeness. On the other hand, a defensive and disruptive tone that disables communication, conveys characteristics such as negativity, disagreeability, superiority, control, dishonesty, contrition, judgment, insensitivity, over-seriousness and rudeness.

To engage in this level of communication takes great personal courage, but the commitment to do so can often affect the timing and outcome of the decision. Like anything else, you are already a part of a situation you think you are just stepping into or are controlling from the outside. You can’t help but contribute to the outcome one way or the other, even when you think you aren’t doing anything.

UNDERSTANDING

Understanding a difficult situation such as knowing when to keep trying or quit takes critical thinking and good communication with a passion for the truth and an open mind to finding it. It also takes the uncommon abilities to avoid premature judgments, expand patience, suspend expectations for preferred outcomes and engage in extremely active listening. More than anything, it involves combining all your mental skills to join logic, practical common sense, intuition and creativity, to find a creative win-win compromise in which nobody looses anything of great significance and everyone something valuable. This is usually when you muster the courage and sensibility to question what this crucial situation is really all about. What is the main purpose of all this turmoil as to what to do? What will I be ultimately gaining, whichever way I lean? That is the peace of understanding that we all search for.

KNOWING WHAT YOU WANT

Now we get down to the real nitty-gritty of what the actual dilemma is that these three things—critical thinking, clear understanding and good communication—have to identify and solve. This process involves asking yourself what you really want from doing anything. What is your purpose for doing this or that and what do you hope to gain from either? The only answer I have ever been comfortable with is that I am as sure as I can be at the particular time that I am doing what it takes to get what I want, as the two are intimately intertwined like a pretzel.

Pretzel truths are very valuable. Take the important concept of rapport, being what you get from what you do to get it. Or take the other things like success and happiness , both being what you get (powerful, positive, satisfying, self-rewarding feelings) from what you do to get them (knowing where you are, making smart choices about movement, and giving your best effort to position yourself closer to what you know you need, either by staying put or moving). The bottom line is that you have to begin to precisely define what your particular ‘pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow’—way below all the superficial secondary and tertiary “rewards” that the real “object” offers—and then apply all the driving tricks that you can remember and learn to get there!

One very useful idea from which I have gotten a lot of mileage is to redefine important things I think I want, until they become what I know I need. For me success is simply being comfortable knowing I have tried my best to leave each new situation which I enter into in a little better shape than when I came upon it. With happiness , I have found that is more the peaceful absence of serious turmoil that disables people and that this highly desirable state is only temporary, usually being experienced by my own growing past a test of my character in an adverse situation. Learning to become more comfortable with the discomfort of the test is the key.

There is no tried and tested prescription for becoming a master fisherman or bait-cutter in this Information Age of Uncertainty. Today’s problems have to be solved individually, inch by inch, by critical thinking, careful communication, accurate understanding, and reconciling what you think you want with what you know you need. And each time may be a whole new learning arena. The best you can do is learn to separate the small amount of real sense from the overabundance of nonsense so your toolbox is equipped with the right stuff. It doesn’t get easier, but you become more skilled, especially in seeing clearer and choosing better. And remember, it is not the view at the top of the mountain that counts most, but the fun you have getting there.

Maybe we all need “permission” as to when to quit something legitimately. My experience tells me that you can only give yourself such permission when you can look yourself in the mirror and be absolutely certain that you have in fact tried all you know to do in order to get a positive outcome, and just fell short because success this time may not have been in the cards. And even if you do quit without such permission, there is always something to learn for the next critical choice that comes along.But before this permission coming to grips with the distinction between knowing how you be making the situation more complicated than it needs to be and knowing what the real compolications are.