So let pretend for one moment you work for an insurance company selling doctors medical malpractice protection, (what the hell has this to do with kitesurfing I hear you scream…bear with me!). You are asked to discover who amongst the physicians are most likely to be sued.
Where do you start?
Do you anaylse their records, training, credentials, judging them on formal qualifications or past experience or do you listen to very brief snippets of conversation between each doctor and his or her patients?
Unbelievably the second option would be a much more accurate way to go about this. The risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes. There are highly skilled doctors that get sued a lot and many doctors who screw up all the time and never get sued.
In other words lawsuits aren’t filed because patients are harmed in the course of their medical care they are filed because they are harmed and something else happens along the way to convince them that suing is a good option. (bear with me, we’re getting there!)
What came up again and again in these cases is that people sued because of the way they were treated by their doctor, they felt rushed, they were treated poorly, ignored etc. It seems that:
“People just don’t sue people they like.”
To explain this an experiment was set up to investigate further. Recordings were made of doctors talking to their patients. Roughly half of these recording were made by doctors who had been sued several times, the other half by doctors who had never been sued. Upon listening to the tapes it was discovered that the doctors who had never been sued spent a lot longer talking to their patients and engaged much more with them as people asking more personal questions. Interestingly there was no difference in actually quality of care.
Taking this one step further (and if your still with me this is where things get interesting) a further study was then done which took a single 10 second snippet of each of these conversations and removed the high frequency pitches which enable us to determine individual words. What’s left after this is a kind of gobbledy gook message that preserves intonation, pitch and rhythm but erases content.
Judges then rated the voices in the snippets for qualities such as warmth, aggressiveness, dominance, anxiousness etc. From the results of this alone it was possible to predict which doctors would get sued. The more aggressive less compassionate tonalities belonging to the most sued doctors.
Why do you care?
When your learning a new trick or practicing something for the first time, you have a little voice in your head talking to you, asking questions, giving you feed back all the time. Most of us are so used to this voice that we don’t even notice it most of the time. Take a little time to listen to that voice now. How does it speak to you, is it aggressive, encouraging, critical?
The way we talk and more specifically the tone of voice we use to talk to ourselves has a massive effect on our everyday performance, so even discounting the words you use when you mess up a trick do you snarl at yourself, “you idiot” or do you laugh and lightly berate yourself (with the same words) in a way that actually encourages you, like you might to a mate who has just shared a very funny, self depreciating story with you. Try out a few different tones, and monitor your reaction, just like the patients of the doctors in the example above you’ll probably find you have very different reaction to the same event by simply doing this?
I’m not for one moment suggesting here that you need to be all new age with yourself and talk to yourself as if you love yourself all the time, there is a place for anger and that snarling tone of voice as it can push it to greater levels. By being aware and in control of the tone of voice you are using on yourself, you can modify it to serve you rather than being a slave to it.
Still talking about the little voice, who’s voice is it? Most of us have a default voice which is our own. Try playing around with the voice you use. For example when I’m jogging I use the voice a sexy woman encouraging me to just get around the next corner, for me this motivates me much more than adopting a sergeant major snarl and curse approach. But the opposite might be true for you…the options here are limited only by your imagination and you may find that you develop different voices for different occasions, whatever works for you works.
Interested in this?
Check out Blink The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell