Turning Fear Into Love
Inspirations for today’s blog post:
Krista Tippett’s conversation with Christiana Figueres on the On Being podcast
Thich Nhat Hanh's book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm
When we open our computers to do our work, we are in relationship with our technology. The same is true when we log into our databases. Just like the relationships we have with our friends, colleagues, family, acquaintances, and loved ones, we bring our internal experiences to the interactions we have with our technology - and those internal experiences are invisible to the other party in the relationship. Just as we bring our internal human experience to our relationship with our technology, so too does our technology bring a kind of internal experience to its relationship with us - and that internal experience is often times invisible to us humans who haven’t coded and built the technology.
In the book Fear (linked above), Thich Nhat Hanh writes that “Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions. To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong perception.” For our work with data & technology, I would co-opt and change this wisdom to read “Much of our suffering comes from wrong EXPECTATIONS. To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong EXPECTATION.” We come to our technology expecting it to work a certain way, work always, work like magic. Our technology comes to us expecting us to give it the inputs it mostly expects to receive. When we cannot see, feel, or understand the internal experience of the other in our relationship, we develop expectations that will not be met and will leave us frustrated, angry, disappointed, and disconnected.
To learn more about the internal experience of the other person or the technology with which we are in relationship, we can take an action in radical self-care. As Nhat Hanh also writes in his book, “When you make the effort to listen and hear the other side of the story, your understanding increases and your hurt diminishes.” Not only does our hurt diminish when we can learn more about the other entity in our relationship, but our understanding grows and, I would add, our expectations change. They change for the better.
Do you experience any kind of “fear” as part of your relationship with your data and technology? This fear can often take the look of insecurity, hesitation, avoidance, and sometimes even abandonment. Don’t give up on yourself or your technology!! Achieving our missions depend on you using, learning, and even finding some love for these tools that are so integral to our work and all work now. You can turn fear into love by learning and using your technology - by digging even deeper into the relationship and understanding more about how the other side works.
Deep listening in relationship with technology may feel like a weird concept at first. But what it means is to be open and receptive to learning, to be willing to engage with and use technology even more, and to be able to find understanding and even sometimes common ground between your own internal experience and the internal experience of your technology. The more we understand our technology, the better our relationship with it will be.
Consider technology coaching as a pathway towards this better relationship. A coach can help you face your fears directly, can help translate and give you a shared language with your tech, can help build your tech-listening skills, and even to help you find out what LOVE for technology means to you.
