I had no interest in politics. I took no side one way or another. Yet I found myself being asked to advise someone who was running for office, helping them with their communication and influence both online and in public.
Before I could agree, I needed to understand the person asking me. Helping someone influence others carries a responsibility and if you make the wrong decision, there’s a lot more than reputation at stake. I wanted to know what lay behind their desire to hold office and whether I could trust the intentions they were presenting to me.
That required a conversation in which I could ask questions, listen carefully and pay attention to what was happening within me as they responded.
Let’s face it trust is difficult. In reality, I do not trust easily and have an issue with trust, which is a strange position to be in when so much of what I do depends on gaining the trust of others quickly. People in power are for the most part untrustworthy and that’s not just an opinion. Some roles require concealment and deception, even when those involved believe they are serving a greater good. That makes questions of intention and integrity difficult to resolve. Trust can be lost in a moment. Rebuilding it takes time. When someone asks us to place our experience and judgment in their service, there is a decision to make before the work even begins. I had to make that decision with this individual.
The question
During our conversation, I put forward a situation grounded in their experience. It involved wrong information, misinformation and disinformation, touching on issues that would create dissonance for them.
I will keep the particulars private. What matters here is the response the situation invited. I wanted to understand how this person would approach information that could cause discomfort and provoke a reaction. How would they decide what to believe? What would they do before responding?
Their answer, paraphrased, was that they would wait, assess what was in front of them and hold any response until they had the right evidence.
That answer mattered to me. They were willing to leave room for a cycle involving information, assessing and analyzing before committing themselves to a response. In work centred on communication and influence, that willingness had direct relevance to what I was being asked to support. It’s not about what you say, but how you say it and what is the intention behind the expression.
But the words alone do not explain why I accepted the role. There’s way more.
What I experienced
As I listened, I felt sincerity in the relationship between what they were saying and how they were responding. At the same time, a series of thoughts began to fit the pattern I was discerning. I could feel my body pulse with what I can best describe as an energetic sensation. The words were only 1 part of the pattern. You have to know what is in between those words, where is the signal coming from and what is the noise? Oh, and by the way, the noise can often be perceptive logic.
That is how I experienced it. I am describing something that happened internally, in my body and in my mind, as I engaged with the person in front of me. It was about intention, not assertion.
Each signal connected with another and the patterns emerged. Through my process of questioning and discernment, the main pattern became clearer. The responses contributed to it, as did the thoughts and sensations I experienced while listening. Eventually, I had a clear pattern on which to act.
Logic and intuitive intelligence converged.
It is difficult to convey that experience without making it sound more straightforward than it was. An internal sensation needs interpretation. A thought needs examination. What I feel about someone can be affected by my own expectations, biases, desires and experience. Discernment requires me to remain attentive to those possibilities while considering what the individual is actually saying and doing.
In this encounter, the connected pattern informed my judgment that their sincerity was real. I accepted the advisory role. For the first time, I became an advisor to a politician running for office, and I knew nothing about politics and kind of put every politician in a box - not to be trusted.
My lack of political interest makes that decision significant to me. I had entered the conversation without allegiance to a side. I came away willing to work with a person and not with a movement or indeed an ideology.
What happened afterwards
The initial conversation gave me enough confidence to accept the position. Working together gave me the opportunity to see whether that confidence was warranted.
Their conduct continued to support the sincerity I had perceived. It remained that way throughout our work together. Politics is ruthless and the opposition will do anything to discredit an opponent. Astonishingly, my colleague would not and remained steadfast in service. Once again proving, I had made the right decision.
That matters when I look back on the experience. My judgment had consequences: I was committing my skills to their communication and influence. Over time, I could compare the person I had discerned in that first conversation with the person whose conduct I subsequently observed. There was consistency between the two.
Trust had somewhere to grow.
Living with deception
I think about this encounter when I consider the information we are asked to accept today. Political messages, media coverage and public arguments reach us alongside efforts to influence what we feel and how we respond. I worry about how easily a compelling account can become something we repeat before we have examined it. I developed my own CLEAR framework that helps discern the messaging of the media, more about that later in another article.
Deception deserves our attention. So does our willingness to believe something because it agrees with what we already think. Distrust can become just as automatic. We can enter an encounter so convinced of another person’s motives that we give ourselves little opportunity to discover who they are. I already made my mistakes in that arena, and looking back, it does not feel good.
My experience with this politician reminds me to make room for sincerity, even where I might approach with caution.
Body language can be ambiguous. We may attach meaning to a gesture or an expression without understanding the circumstances behind it. Equally, words can be persuasive while leaving important questions unanswered. My concern is the confidence with which we sometimes turn an impression into a conclusion.
For me, intuitive intelligence has a role in directing awareness to intention. A signal can prompt me to investigate further, ask another question or examine a response more closely. The work is in discerning what that signal means and how it relates to the information available.
The sincerity I felt in this encounter emerged through that process. I asked questions. I considered the answers. I attended to the thoughts and bodily sensations arising within me. The signals connected, and I made a decision. The relationship that followed gave me further grounds for trust.
There is a responsibility in telling this story, too. The experience does not give me the right to promise that intuition makes anyone immune to deception. I can tell you what I experienced, how it informed my choice and whether the person’s subsequent conduct supported that choice. It takes development to be able to discern. Hence, you need to.
Learn to discern.
Learning to trust
The response I remember was a willingness to wait for evidence before responding. It has stayed with me because it speaks to a difficulty we all face: allowing uncertainty to remain long enough to understand what we are dealing with.
When information creates discomfort, the desire to settle it can be strong. We want to know who is right, who is wrong and where we stand. In that urgency, we can overlook the questions that would help us make a better judgment.
I had to decide whether to trust this individual with my time, experience and involvement. My questioning and discernment brought me to a point where I was willing to do so. Their actions sustained that trust throughout our work.
You need to learn to trust, and that is never easy. For me, this encounter showed how logic and intuitive intelligence could converge in a decision that mattered. It also showed the value of giving that decision time to be tested through experience.
I had no interest in politics. A conversation brought me into it. A question helped me understand the person asking for my support, and the pattern I discerned gave me enough clarity to accept.
The trust that followed endured. But, I myself am still learning to trust. It is probably one of my own weaknesses.