Women and Korean planes crash; I bet you can’t guess the connection either.

. I love Malcolm Gladwell and his book ‘Outliers’. It all started with reading the investigations into why the Korean pilots crashed so many planes. You can imagine that they wanted to know . . . It was the black box AND a linguist that solved the mystery in a most unexpected way.

No crash here in NZ and I now know why it is not likely to happen either!

“The premise of Outliers is to have us think about the world differently and by digging down deeper to come up with another set of explanations that can have a profound effect on how we see and do things.

Hearing him say this is music to my ears!
I too am absolutely fascinated by finding new explanations that can make such a difference.

So what was it in the story in Outliers about Korean plane crashes that blew me away and showed me the extent of how this explanation can make to difference to us women. 

The linguist discovered when listening to the interaction in the cockpit that it was an astounding communication pattern that contributed to all those planes crashes.
You may find this very hard to believe but sure enough, he clearly explained that it was due to the way the Korean pilots interacted with each other and the control towers that caused so many passengers to perish.

Here’s the details on what the linguist found out.
In Korea people are conditioned to never contradict a superior or speak firmly to a person with authority. They always remain overly polite and even if it is a matter of emergency, they communicate it in an extremely ineffective way. 

Imagine this! 
You see somebody making a huge judgment error and all you could say is this; “Excuse me, humm . . . I might be wrong, sir . . . pardon me for bringing it up . . . but could the instruments be wrong that there is such a deviation from the course?”

Unbelievable right! 
No!
I am absolutely not lying or exaggerating here. That is what happened for real!
Those Korean pilots could NOT jump up and shout; “turn the blasted plane NOW, we will crash” or say to the intimidating New York control towers; “Let us land NOW, we are running out off fuel NOW!”.
Not even in the face of the biggest emergencies ever, could they ignore their conditioning to always remain  polite, they would rather crash.
The whole story is geared to give you a sense of how strong and how invisible conditioning can be. 

Once they uncovered this unexpected explanation about language and conditioning they banned the Korean language from the cockpit and only kept the pilots who could converse in reasonable English and then taught them specific commanding phrases.
By having the pilots unlearn their conditioning through expressing themselves in a different language and so losing the polite and subtle nuances of their mother tongue, they lost the connection to emotions they were so conditioned to in their own language.
 For a taste of how this feels, try swearing in another language, using unfamiliar words.
I bet it won’t call up the same emotions as when you swear in your mother tongue, because you are NOT conditioned to consider those foreign words bad. Those are just words.  
So the Koreans simply didn’t have the need to beat about the bush in a language that had no emotional attachment. Their talk became straight and their messages very clear and the problem disappeared.  
No need to say that fewer, barely any crashes happened once that was sorted. 

And what has all this got to do with women, you may well ask. 

Lets look at how some of us women crash and burn under the workload we take on, because we  communicate in a way that is very akin to the Korean way;

“Oh, no honey, you go ahead and play golf on your day off”, I’ll do the washing and the cleaning.
HUH? ? ?
So off he goes, politely encouraged NOT to share the workload so you crash and burn.

“Oh no, we can’t possibly afford to replace my old unreliable car, we are saving for that holiday remember”. So you carry on with letting everybody know you’re not worth a good car or anything else for that matter. 
No wonder you become everybody’s doormat and eventually crack.

“Yes, I’ll go and sort it” when all you really want to say is “NO, I am NOT doing it, why should it always be me. Sort your own mess out from now on.”

Here too, certain conditioned communication patterns take precedence and will eventually cause you to  crash and burn and have your relationships, health and family perish.

Here too, talking in a different way and referring to oneself, relationships and the family using different unfamiliar words that have no emotional conditioning is the key to preventing crashes and having a balanced life.

Here is an example; if you love your dishwasher you will have it repaired quick smart when it needs it. No emotional dithering about I couldn’t or I shouldn’t or I don’t deserve it. There is no emotional attachment there.

Now when some women are in need of some loving tender care because they need it, there IS emotional dithering.
However if we learn to put ourselves with our languaging into the same category as our dishwasher the emotional dithering will disappear and looking after ourselves will become a lot less complex and a lot more productive.
In later posts I will explain more.