Emotion: Confusion

Meaning: 1) We feel like something makes sense, AND
2) It isn’t making sense to us.

Confusion is another exciting emotion. It tells you that you’re close. Like Frustration, it tells you that although you’re close, you’re missing something. In the case of Confusion, it has to do with something making sense. You feel Confusion when you feel something makes sense, but it isn’t making sense to you.

The first thing to do is try to find out if something really does make any sense. If someone is making up something nonsensical, it might not make sense, such as certain comedy sketches or some philosophical or dry humor. Sometimes someone will even admit that something they’re explaining doesn’t make any sense but this is how they feel, a common result of people who talk about their emotions.

Sometimes you can be hearing a set of conflicting rules that honestly don’t make any sense because they were put together to deal with a set of conflicting circumstances. The final result is sometimes a set of conflicting rules, regulations or laws that seem to have no bearing on what the laws claim to do, but were passed as “feel good” laws so lawmakers could show that they were “doing something” about a given problem. This has it’s own rules of logic, and if you consider that rules are often created based upon special circumstances and unusual situations, they begin to make sense.

More often than not, however, Confusion means you’re missing something. Sometimes you’re missing information that bridges the gap between what you know and what it takes to accomplish your result. Sometimes you’re missing a key, something that will help your mind understand what something is and how it works.

In a discussion about Bible translations, a Christian leader tried to explain the different translations and what each of them did well, and what each of them did poorly. The new Christian was still confused, not understanding what was just explained. She still thought that there were entirely different Bibles. Another leader came up with an analogy that was the key to unlocking the logic behind all the translations. She asked if the woman knew the story of Cinderella, the original fairy tale, the Disney cartoon, and the Rogers and Hammerstien musical. The woman said yes. Then she said that Bible translations were a lot like that. The presentation is a little different, but the story is the same.

Sometimes the answer will be over your head. In that case the information you need to make sense of something might require more time and effort than you are willing to invest in the answer. If Confusion results from something relatively unimportant, or something that isn’t urgent, you can set it aside and wait until you have a better grasp of what’s going on. This is often the result if you come in late to some educational process. You might not understand what they’re talking about because you missed the foundation for the lesson presently being taught.

Sometimes you need to resolve the Confusion even if something is over your head. In that case, you need to find help. You need to find someone who not only understands what it is you are trying to figure out, but can also explain it to you in a way that makes sense to you. The key here is to realize that your Confusion means the answer is close. So long as you think the subject matter is confusing and don’t realize that Confusion is what is happening inside of you, your Mind will seek to reinforce the Confusion.

However, if you understand that Confusion is inside of you, and you understand that if anyone else can understand a subject, you can also understand it, then you can unlock the key and it can all make sense. If you keep in mind that you are actively looking for a key, the thing that will unlock the logic and sense of it all, the piece of information or way of looking at an issue, you will be much more likely to really understand.

CONFUSION AND FRUSTRATION AS A PRELUDE TO LEARNING

I read in the newspaper that a major study was done trying to study what they called the “Eureka Moment.” They are tracking down the neuro-impulses in the brain that reveal information about that moment in which the brain goes “aha!” An interesting effect of the study was that they found that people remembered better if they had to struggle with something for a moment before they actually understood what they were doing. This pattern is played out in my own experience, and the models we use to discuss the design of the human mind support it.

When we start off confused, our brain is telling us that it believes that the information makes sense, but it isn’t making sense to us. When the emotion is particularly intense, it means that we’re certain that there’s a meaningful pattern here, and we sure that we should figure it out, but we just can’t quite put it together. What we need is a key to unlock the mystery, a missing piece of information that will complete the picture for us or show us how to put it together.

If the starting emotion was frustration, it means our brain is telling us that we ought to have produced the intended result with what we did, but the result did not occur. It might be that we studied and our test score was still low. It might be that we did all the steps in the instruction book, but the new software still isn’t working. When the emotion is intense, it means that we feel certain that we did everything we were supposed to do, but the result still didn’t occur and we remain certain that we should have succeeded.

What makes both of these emotions so powerful is that they are both emotions that reveal the the brain thinks it’s close. When the Emotions attach these feelings to an event, it means that it needs more focus. It may need expanded thinking. It may need more attention to detail. It means that we’re almost there and we just need to take one or two more steps to arrive at our desired result. We need to do it just a little bit differently.

The proper response to confusion is to look for a key, to try to put the pieces together differently, to guess through all reasonable possibilities and try them to see if they could be the one. Even a young child knows that when he doesn’t know the answer to 2+2 that he should keep guessing small numbers. He’s not likely to guess “J” because he knows the answer has to be a number. He’s not likely to guess “15,000,000” because he knows the number has to be somewhere close to 2, maybe 22, but not likely a really high number.

The proper response to frustration is to tinker with what you did. Frustration means that you think that what you did ought to have produced the result, but if the procedure works and it just didn’t work this time, you might have missed something. If there was something wrong in the procedure, then it needs to change, maybe just a little, maybe a lot. Something needs to be done differently.

At my business, one of my lights went out and needed work. It was a good opportunity to learn something new, so I read up on how to fix them and set about to do so. However, the number of wires on my replacement ballast did not match the number of wires on my light. The ballast is the electrical fixture inside the flourescent lights in most businesses. Of course, I was confused at first. I knew that the system made sense to whomever built it, and that the light used to work and that I had what was almost certainly the right part. However, the directions and what I held in my hands didn’t quite match up.

It turned out that the light wiring combined two of the wires in the ballast, so I had to wire it a little differently than the instructions to get it work right. It was just a matter of modifying the procedure to match items from two different manufacturers, carefully reading the labels of each so I did not create a problem. In short, all I had to do was carefully read the labels and compare them to one another and my directions. I discovered how each was put together and was able to safely figure out how to resolve the challenge.

When we’re dealing with Emotions, the intensity of the feeling tells our Mind how important something is. When a child starts off confused or frustrated, the Emotion has attached some importance to it. If a child simply waits for the answer to be given, there is no importance attached. The conditioning becomes “If I can’t do it easily on my first try, just wait and someone else will do it for me.” Learning is substantially diminished.

This is part of what makes the asking technique so powerful when teaching children. The natural fear of being wrong can be a strong fear in adults, much less children. It’s easier to simple remain silent, maybe shrugging one’s shoulders or answering with “I’m not sure,” or “I don’t know.” That way the brain doesn’t have to work. That way we don’t have to try, and therefore we do not risk failure. People who in part measure their self-worth by not being wrong often use this strategy. It’s the opposite of the person who is only concerned about how many times they are right - you are right more often by guessing wildly than by not trying at all.

However, when we don’t try, we kill the possibility of success. Not only that, but when someone does come to our aid to simply provide the answer with no effort on our part, we don’t remember it nearly as well - if at all. We learn to be weak, and we learn that being weak and simpleminded is the path to avoid failure. To avoid being wrong, we unintentionally avoid being right. To avoid looking like we don’t know something, we end up not knowing anything nearly as well as we could.

Part of learning for ourselves means being willing to face confusion and frustration on the path to learning. It means recognizing that those emotions are part of the process at its most effective. It means that when we are teaching our children, we learn to let them struggle, and we learn to give them hints and clues and keys, but we don’t simply give them the answer. This way, they can reap the benefits of the process done right. It means that when we do have to give them the answer, we make them answer the question again later with the right answer so they learn it.

The more we understand how the Emotions and Mind work, we can employ our Will to produce the best result. In the case of learning, those moments of struggle lead to the highest level of success.