To Say or Not To Say

The title may give you a perception that this might have something to do with concepts of communication; well it does have a link to that but let me come to that a little later. Let's go to the basic nature of communication, it's about sharing. But what I would really want to broach today is, what do we share?

For which, I would like to trace back to a situation I was in with my friend maybe in 9^th grade, we had just finished our quarterly exams and happened to discuss about how we wrote our papers and the topic came to what score were we expecting in the paper. My friend just stopped the topic and said ‘I would not like to share anything more as I feel saying it would have an effect on the score itself’. Truly, I didn't go further on that topic; what was even more surprising to me was I seemed to totally understand what he meant and felt the same way.

From then on I have been facing this phenomenon all my life, across groups of people that I have come across, friends, family, acquaintances, anybody, I see them having a similar perception about holding on to share about something that might be happening in their lives till the end of that instance. I can even safely say that almost 50% of those groups have displayed such a behavior as if it was a religious fervor in their lives.

My take is, in any occurring there are only 2 possible outcomes “I knew this would work” or “I knew it wouldn't work”. What’s interesting in both these outcomes is the common word is “knew”, indicating that the person knows the outcomes all along subconsciously.

However, there seems to be a better way of handling that knowledge at the end of the situation compared to the start of it. It's interesting to know how such a thought is ingrained in us somehow, that it may not happen the way it we intend it to, just because it’s been 'said', isn't it ;-)

So looking at similar scenarios in an office atmosphere, most of the time we do need to keep all the things informed as a process or a project does need information on a regular basis so we end up sharing that in the form or reviews and presentations. But, in a closed room when a similar question is posed by a colleague, peer or manager, we actually end up not telling them about what is really happening and would wait to tell them all about it after things are done and complete. Familiar? 

Out of sheer curiosity how do you explain this human nature? Let me know, and see how many such unsaid things you have at this time :-)