The Red Car: You Find What You’re Primed to See
This one is for the leader who spends more energy reading the room than being in it. If you have ever left a meeting fine and been sure by dinner that your manager is unhappy with you, keep listening. It comes from The Part That Doesn’t Fit, the work I do with leaders whose wiring runs a little different, and it is a five-minute tool called the Red Car.
Here is where the name comes from. The day you decide to buy a red car, you start seeing red cars everywhere. On the highway, in the parking lot, three on your street. They were always there. Nothing changed except what your attention was told to collect.
Now the version that costs you something. Say you have started watching for signs that your manager is annoyed with you. Monday, a short reply to your email. Tuesday, a meeting gets moved. Wednesday, you are not copied on a thread. By Thursday you have three pieces of evidence and a feeling to match. Except a workplace produces short replies and moved meetings by the hundred, every week, for everyone. You did not find a pattern. You found what you were looking for. And here is the hard part: some of what you noticed may be real.
The problem is not that you see things. It is that you see them at a rate that has nothing to do with how often they happen, because you are primed for them.
So the tool. Three steps. First, write down what you have been watching for lately. Three to five things. The signs your boss is unhappy, the signs you are being left out, whatever it is. Second, for each one, give it two numbers, one to five. How often do you notice it. And, looking only at the actual evidence, how often is it really happening. Third, look at the gap between those two numbers. The item with the biggest gap is your red car. The tool names it, and it asks one more question: what has the watching been costing you. Sleep, focus, the meeting you sat through half-present because you were reading faces.
Then the move, and it is the only one that works. You cannot tell your attention to stop looking. It does not take instructions like that. What you can do is point it somewhere else. For one week, watch for the opposite. The times you were included. Copied in. Asked for your opinion. Told something directly. Write each one down. You are not talking yourself into anything. You are giving your attention a new thing to collect, because it will collect something either way.
The red cars do not go away. You just stop counting them, because you are busy counting something else.
The Part That Doesn’t Fit. Working with your wiring, not against it. thepartthatdoesntfit.com
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