Trusting the reviewer in you

We all have a reviewer's mentality inside of of us. We review or pass judgment on just about everything every day. Yet I routinely speak with people who are uncomfortable trusting the internal reviewer when it comes to evaluating what they hear in their systems. Partly because people are afraid of ridicule from peers, but mostly, I believe we have trouble differentiating between our emotional side and our analytical side. In yesterday's post, Break In, I touched on a deep interface and a light interface, referring to either an emotional response or an analytical response. I would like to explore that a little in this post. We may have not noticed that we have two distinctly different internal reviewing systems within each of us: Paul the analytical reviewer and Paul the emotional reviewer. They are very different from each other. The analytical reviewer reads the label of different ice creams to make a purchasing decision. The emotional reviewer just tastes the two to make the same decision. Might not work so well for ice cream but a great thing for figuring out if you should use a certain medicine or not. What happens when analytics and emotions collide in the decision process? Which do you trust? The answer lies deep within our experiences. As young people we trust our emotions almost exclusively because we are still developing our analytical side; it's really all we have. At one point in our lives we transition and try out our new found reviewing skills to see how they serve us. The results, over time, form our trust levels in each process. Some of us have more success with one than the other. I would propose each of us needs to rethink our decisions, because some situations really are better served with one set of skills than the other. For example, my emotional skills (my gut reaction or common sense) tell me that if I have a bullet in one hand and gun in the other and I drop the bullet and fire the gun at the same time, the bullet ejected from the gun at a high speed and propelled over a great distance will take longer to reach the ground than the one in my hand. The answer from an analytical viewpoint is, of course, that both get there at the same time. Emotionally satisfying, factually incorrect. The other side of coin: a power amplifier with great specs should sound better than one with terrible specs and I make a purchase decision based on that analytical evaluation. The answer from a listening standpoint may be very different. Factually correct, emotionally incorrect. Whenever you start to question your internal reviewer's judgment, look first to see if you've applied the right process and then if so, go with your first call. Works more often than not.

Tomorrow: The perfect volume