You’re in a meeting. You’ve laid out the vision. You know exactly where you want to go and why it matters. And somewhere across the table, someone raises their hand to ask about the color of the button on the website.
You take a breath. You smile. You table it.
But on the inside, there’s that quiet friction. The one that makes you wonder if you’re just not communicating clearly, or if other people genuinely think differently than you do.
They do. And once you understand how, everything changes.
Your Brain Is a Filter, Not a Camera
Here’s something worth sitting with. Your unconscious mind processes over two million bits of information per second. Your conscious mind? It can hold about 126 bits at a time.
That’s not a flaw. That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do — deleting, distorting, and generalizing incoming information based on what it has learned to prioritize. Your beliefs. Your values. Your past experiences. All of it quietly decides, in real time, what matters and what gets filtered out.
Which means you and the person sitting across from you in that meeting room could be looking at the exact same situation and experiencing it completely differently. Not because one of you is wrong. Because your filters are different.
This is the foundation of emotional intelligence. And it’s also the foundation of what I want to talk about today.
Big Picture Thinkers vs. Detail-First Thinkers
One of the most useful things I’ve ever learned about communication is the concept of chunking — specifically, chunking up versus chunking down.
Chunking up is big-picture, abstract thinking. The vision. The “why.” The altitude where strategy lives.
Chunking down is detail-oriented, specific thinking. The how. The steps. The color of the button.
Most people, the majority, are what you’d call big-picture-first thinkers. They need to understand the vision before the details can land. If you jump straight to the specifics without giving them a frame to hang it on, something in their brain literally tunes out. It’s not a choice. It’s a pattern.
But a meaningful portion of people are the opposite. They need the specifics first. Show them the steps, the tangible details, the how, and then they can orient themselves toward the bigger picture. Talk vision to them first, and they glaze over.
Neither type is better. But if you don’t know which type you are, and you don’t know which type the people you’re communicating with are, you’re essentially having two different conversations at once.
The Person Who Asks About the Website Button
They’re not trying to derail the meeting. They’re not being difficult. They’re operating from a filter that runs on specifics first. And your beautiful vision-level opening? It genuinely didn’t have a hook to hang on for them. Not because they’re not smart. Because the information wasn’t delivered in the order their mind was ready to receive it.
Once I understood this, I stopped feeling frustrated by those moments and started getting curious instead. What does this person need to hear what I’m saying? And am I willing to meet them there?
Because here’s what I know about influence: the person who is most flexible is the one who has the most power in a conversation. Flexibility isn’t weakness. It’s precision.
How to Shift the Level of a Conversation
This is where it gets practical.
When someone is in the weeds and you need to bring them up to altitude, ask: “For what purpose?” or “What is this an example of?” Those questions pull the mind upward toward meaning and context.
When someone is stuck in the clouds and you need them to get specific, ask: “What specifically?” That one question alone starts to ground the conversation into actionable reality.
And when you need to shift topics entirely — what NLP calls lateral chunking — you ask: “What’s another example of this?” It moves the conversation sideways without disrupting the flow.
You can use these externally in a meeting. You can use them internally when you notice your own mind drifting in the wrong direction for the conversation you’re in.
What This Has to Do with Your Leadership (And Your Inner Work)
Here’s what I want you to take away from this.
The reason communication breaks down so often in high-performing teams — and in relationships, for that matter — isn’t intelligence. It isn’t even effort. It’s a mismatch in how people are filtering the same information.
And the same thing is true inside you.
The patterns running underneath your behavior aren’t conscious decisions. They are filters built early, operating quietly, shaping what you notice and what you don’t — what you prioritize and what you let fall through. You can’t manage your way out of a filter with willpower. You must understand it first.
That’s where the real work lives. Not in doing more, communicating harder, or pushing through. In understanding what’s running underneath and learning how to work with it.
If that feels relevant to where you are right now, The Biggest Domino Assessment was built for this moment. Five questions. A real starting point. A specific lens on what’s most likely running your results right now so you know where to focus instead of trying to work on everything at once.