While speaking at the Elevate Leadership Summit in Idaho, I wanted to illustrate how differently we all see things so I relayed a story about the day I brought my future husband home for the very first time. Within about two minutes of walking in the door, he asked for a hammer. He wanted to pound in a protruding nail on our stairway before something or someone got caught on it. He could not not see that nail. Nor could he leave it sticking out. I, on the other hand, along with my two parents and four siblings, had lived with that nail for a cumulative count of over 200 years without it ever occurring to any of us to do something about it. I certainly knew it was there; I used to wrap the phone cord around it while sitting on those steps and chatting with friends. (Yes, that dates me!)

If a protruding nail can be a preoccupation for some and effectively invisible to others, you can never assume your co-workers are noticing or thinking the same things you are. Nor can you fault them for not seeing what you see. This fact is at the heart of my Disconnect Principle.

These huge gaps in perception and awareness don’t just occur between people. They also occur within each of us!

After my keynote, I seized the opportunity to visit Yellowstone, which I hadn’t seen in years. Pictures and memories are never the same as the real thing, obviously, but on this third trip to Yellowstone, I may as well have been a totally different person! The things I noticed and that awed me were completely different than my previous visits.

As a child, I remember the bears, the rotten-egg smells, and the weirdness of all the boiling mud, fumaroles, and geysers.

As a mother of young children, I am not sure I noticed anything! I was totally preoccupied with their experience, making it fun, enjoying their reactions, and answering their questions.

Returning now, I was blown away by the enormity of the caldera, the fact that two thirds of the world’s geysers are in Yellowstone Park and a quarter are within sight of Old Faithful, the frequency of earthquakes (daily), and the abundance of evidence that this land is constantly reforming in major ways right beneath our feet. I also had the time and the patience to track a wolf for an hour and a half as he traveled about two miles through a valley teeming with bison, none of which, unfortunately for the wolf, were unable to join a protective cluster as the wolf approached.

The moral of the story is that not only do we hear, see, and value different things from everyone else, we also see, hear, and value different things at different stages in our lives, and even on different days, depending on what’s going on. We only see, hear, and value what we are predisposed to see, hear, and value!

Nonetheless, through honest, open, curious communication, we can identify our disconnects and increase each other’s awareness of the many things there are to see and hear, and the many different ways each of us responds.