The summer air crackled with a strange energy as I sat on the deck with coffee. Nature has a lot to say if you know how to listen. She expresses her moods and emotions openly, like a nonverbal live stream of what she is doing and feeling.

That subtle vibration in the morning quiet said she was feeling tension, a call for alertness and vigilance. Nature’s message was “Watch out! There’s danger.”

Alarm Bells

Nature said this through the rhythmic cluck-cluck-cluck of the little eastern chipmunks, notorious excavators of flowerbeds throughout the right half of the United States. Their soft warning calls mean “aerial threat.”

The songbirds had vanished into the densest tangles of brush, repeating the warning with their nervous chip calls, their conspicuous absence signaling another presence.

I am sufficiently fluent in the language of the wild to understand this particular message, and to believe it.

And thus I wondered, where is the predator?

I began to search, and soon found the subject of the warning. There, motionless on a low branch, a Cooper’s hawk. It watched the backyard like a lioness stalking a watering hole, calmly scanning for the slow, the weak, the inattentive, and the unlucky.

The chipmunks and the songbirds will sound the alarm for any bird of prey, but the Cooper’s hawk gets special attention. Songbirds, after all, are the favorite food of the Cooper’s hawk, and this particular Cooper’s was checking out my feeders like a diner holding an empty plate at the buffet line.

An Unlikely Defender

The Cooper’s hawk had been terrorizing our little backyard for a few minutes when a fast-moving projectile narrowly missed its head. An instant later the little green blur made another fly-by, then another.

It was a ruby-throated hummingbird, and it was on the attack at ballistic velocity.

The little hummer repeatedly dive-bombed the hawk, whose irritation was palpable. After half a dozen perilously close range strafing runs, the hungry Cooper’s hawk had had enough. With a few defeated flaps, it took flight and disappeared into the woods.

The bubble of tension burst, the threat-induced pressure was released, the songbirds emerged from their hiding spots, and nature exhaled.

David and Goliath

Cooper’s are smallish as hawks go, weighing about a pound, with a wingspan of just over thirty inches, but they are behemoths relative to the little ruby-throated hummingbird.

The hummingbird tips the scales at about a tenth of an ounce, just a little less than a penny, with their impossibly fast wings stretching just four or five inches.

Taking on the Cooper’s is like a 150 pound human challenging an adult male orca.

Somehow the intrepid little ruby-throat is able to summon immense courage to go on the offensive when every instinct tells them to flee the sharp beak and deadly talons of the Cooper’s hawk.

It’s an amazing story, except I don’t think that’s how it actually works.

A Better Explanation

Of course, we can’t know what it’s like to be a hummingbird, just as we can’t really know what it’s like to be anyone other than ourselves, but I suspect these little David’s don’t have to overcome anything to go after the Goliath hawk.

They don’t need courage, because they are not experiencing fear in the first place. They have no reason to, and they know it.

You see, a ruby-throated hummingbird can fly thirty miles per hour in a straight line, and can hit sixty in a dive.

While the Cooper’s hawk is a fast and agile flier, it is no match for the mind-bending acceleration and cornering ability of the hummer, who can even do all this upside down and backwards.

Hummingbirds attack Cooper’s hawks without fear partly because they are just aggressive little buggers by nature, but mostly because they are well aware that the much larger hawks have zero chance of catching them.

We misattribute their behavior to the thoughts and feelings we would in their situation, not realizing that their experience is actually very different.

Not Just for the Birds

We do not limit this tendency toward misattribution to our observations of non-human animal behavior. We do it with people, too.

When we see others do things that would, for us, be scary, difficult, confusing, stressful or otherwise difficult, we tend to imagine they are somehow better than us at overcoming fear, managing stress, or pushing through difficulty.

Often the truth is really that they simply do not find the situation scary, stressful, or difficult.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds attack Cooper’s hawks when mourning doves flee not because hummingbirds are brave and doves aren’t, but because the hummingbird is not at risk and the dove is.

I Could Never Sell Girl Scout Cookies

As a child, my wife and partner in Retexo, Martha, happily—and very effectively—went door to door selling Girl Scout cookies not because she overcame her fear of engaging strangers, but because for her that is natural and easy, whereas for me it is hard.

I would experience fear and anxiety in that situation, but assuming she would have the same response is a mistake.

Likewise, I can focus intensely to analyze my way through piles of data to solve complex problems that would make Martha pull her hair out, not because I am more determined, but because for me it is easy and rewarding, and for her it is maddening and difficult.

Different people experience life very differently, and as a result things that are scary and hard for one are fun and easy for another.

Accept Yourself As You Are…

Organizations work much better when we recognize this and align the work with individual strengths, and quit trying to force people to swim upstream because we think they should be different (or like us).

But before we blame the organization, we should all take a good hard look in the mirror. Usually we impose the decision to struggle our way up river against the current on ourselves.

It is us who most often decides we should be different instead of accepting that none of us are great at everything. It is us who struggles to say, “Hey, I’m just not great at this. Can you help?”

Even that asking for help bit is tricky because it follows the exact same rules. For Martha, seeking help is easy. For me, well, not so much.

She’s not better than me at overcoming her inner resistance to seeking help. She doesn’t have any inner resistance.

…But Recognize the Need to Change

Of course, there is another side to this coin, and it represents one of the most fundamental dialectics we humans must navigate. That’s what a dialectic is, after all, two apparent opposites that are really just different sides of the same coin.

In this case, that dialectic is the tension between the need to accept ourselves as we are, and the need to grow and change. Ultimately, we have to do both.

I have to stretch and work to get more comfortable engaging with strangers. Martha has to push herself a little to crunch through the details of using our website’s back end. But overall, Retexo works a lot better if she takes the lead on customer engagement, and I take the lead on analytical work.

We Must Do Both

If you are a dove, don’t try to be a hummingbird the next time a Cooper’s hawk shows up. Accept your strengths and your weaknesses, and work with them, not against them. Find people who compliment you, and divide the work accordingly.

And at the same time, ask yourself if you can stretch just a little farther the next time something scary or difficult lands on your desk. Recognize and embrace your need to change and grow.

We can’t all be hummingbirds, nor do we need to be, but we can all work to fly a little faster and be a little more agile.

Until next time,

Greg