Recognizing personal biases

I was on a conference call for work and I was in the middle of explaining something I thought was important when the consultant said she had to go. Initially I was pissed. She was a consultant and should go out of her way to make herself available.

Then she said her five year old was waiting at the door of her home office for her. Immediately a switch flipped in my brain and it was fine that she had to leave, It actually made me like her more that she was putting us off to take care of her kid. If it had been almost anything else I would probably have still been a little upset or at least neutral but the mention of taking care of her child was all I needed.

Looking back on it, there were probably ways she could have handled the situation without abruptly ending the call. The child was five years old, tell him to sit down and wait while you take care of business or get Child Care while you have work to do. Those are all good options, but even listing them out here and thinking rationally about it I still feel good about what she did.

Obliviously I feel that way because I can empathize with her. People without kids would probably have a different reaction. Everyone has something like that. A personal bias that allows you to accept behaviour that you normally wouldn't. It also goes the other way. People will go out of their way to help people who share the same biases. I have example of this. I was taking a week long on-line class that had an instructor leading us through the material for 6 hours each day. On one of those days I had to attend a 5th grade award ceremony for my son. I told the instructor I would be out for about ninety minutes. When I got back they were in the middle of one of the 15 minute breaks during the day. I let her know I was back and told her about the award. That started a conversation about her kids. I didn't think much of it until she offered to help me catch up after the class ended. No big deal right, but then she also said she would help me with some stuff at work on her own time the next week after class which she did. She didn't offer that to any of the other class participants. I could tell the difference in how she interacted with me after we talked about our kids. One of the people at my Job has claimed for years that I had a bias for people with kids. I always laughed it off, but there may be a little truth in that. It's strange how a conference call would cause me to think about this. I wonder what decisions I have made based on unconscious biases I have. I can even look back at the post I wrote about charity, and see that my biases showed up their as well.

I chose Sharehouse as my charity of choice because it deals with kids as one of it's primary missions. As I write this I'm starting to think that biases aren't always a bad thing, I just need to recognize that I have them and make sure I don't let them completely control my decisions. Being able to use this blog to think this out and write it was definitely helpful. Thanks to the Patch guys for allowing me to be able to do this. Hopefully some of you will think about your biases, good or bad, and recognize them. Let me know how your biases have effected your decision making. It will be nice to see other's that have similar thoughts.