When I was growing up, math and science usually made sense, humans rarely did. The words they said and what they actually meant seemed to be two different things. Somehow, they all seemed to understand each other, like they had all been given a codebook that I never got. It got to the point where I thought people were being difficult on purpose. Choosing not to understand what I said. Making vague comments that they knew were difficult for me to understand. Pretending to like things no one would like. I felt confused and isolated.

In a high school English class, Mr. O’Brien gave us an assignment. Write a paper, then read it out loud to the class. The question was “what is one change we can make that would help save the earth?” I spent hours on this, making multiple changes along the way, which was unlike me. I would normally write English papers and only fix obvious spelling errors before turning them in. I was elated with how it came out and, while I dreaded speaking in public, I was excited to share my idea.

Many of my classmates’ ideas were boring to me. Stop air pollution was the most common, followed by recycling and saving the rainforests. The most interesting one I heard was to stop wars, because wars not only killed humans, but damaged the environment and polluted the air. I couldn’t wait to share my idea, because it addressed every issue they had brought up.

I started with “There is one thing that damages this planet more than anything else by far, and that is humans.” My proposal was that we stop reproducing and end our species. Humans are the ones who pollute the air, cut down rainforests, overfish the oceans, and make war. Without humans, the earth would get back in balance. Pollution would clear up, plants and animals would come back, and the earth would recover. There was stunned silence, until someone asked me if I was okay.

I had interpreted the question “How to save the earth” literally. The earth was made up of thousands of species on land, sea, and air. Humans were a tiny fraction of the life on earth, yet we caused almost all of the damage. It seemed perfectly logical. Everyone else had interpreted the question as how to save humanity, not the earth. I couldn’t understand why they’d all written about something different than what was asked. If that’s what Mr. O’Brien had meant, why had he stated the assignment in a code I wasn’t given?

The “aha” moment for me came when I took the Myers Briggs MBTI assessment, along with a three day course on what the results mean. There were about thirty of us in the class, and for the first time I realized that people weren’t being difficult on purpose. They just saw the world through a very different lens than I did. My preferences for introversion, intuition, thinking, and perceiving were so strong that the teacher used me as an example a lot. It became clear how far out onto the bell curve I was in many ways.

When she put me in a group of people who favor feeling over thinking, it came to a head. She asked us to decide who at work should get a prize. I thought their ideas were ridiculous, and they thought I was a monster. The teacher had to separate us because it got so heated. It wasn’t until she asked us what our priorities were when making the decision that we started to cool down. I’d viewed the whole thing as a theoretical exercise, wanting the measurably best answer. They wanted to support their core values, which were to help people. Once we understood where the other was coming from, their decisions made sense. Without the teacher’s prompting, we would have never thought to ask, and would have stayed dismissive of each other.

Taking that class changed the trajectory of my life. I realized how differently people see the world, and how much that shapes communication, especially for someone like me. I wanted to learn how to close that gap. When I went to college, I majored in Mechanical Engineering. I also got a minor in Psychology, because there was so much more I wanted to know.

That’s where my journey started, and I’d like to think I’ve come a long way since then. Miscommunication still happens from time to time, it’s unavoidable. The good news is I catch it faster now, and recover before it does too much damage. While I may not be a perfect communicator, I’m confident the lessons I learned the hard way will make communication easier for a lot of people.

That journey has resulted in my book “NeuroConversant Leadership: How to connect with people who think, work and see the world differently”, coming July 28^th.