Have you ever had the unsettling sensation of your pants pocket, or breast pocket, or purse, or other personal item seemingly vibrate and you assume it is your cell phone buzzing you; but after checking it you find out that the vibration sensation is not the phone? You discover that you might be imagining the vibration…
This is where you are absolutely certain that you felt the vibration and you immediately grab the cellphone to see the incoming number or text message only to find that the ubiquitous device is not actually buzzing or vibrating at all. When this happens you double and triple check to see if you were imagining things, but, still no caller or other message. The phone never vibrated. It was your imagination?!?!?
If you have never experienced this, it is most unsettling. It has happened to me so many time that I had to give the phenomenon a name.
I call it the Phantom Buzz. It seemingly appears and then is gone like a thief in the night.
The really weird part about it is that you are absolutely convinced that your phone is buzzing and you reach for it every time. I began asking people about this a few years ago after I felt the vibrating pants effect of my cell phone going off, then reached in my pocket to check it and the phone wasn’t even in my pocket. It wasn’t even in the same room. But my pants buzzed???
If you are thinking that I am crazy, just stop reading right now and go ask someone if this happens to them.
When I first asked my 20-year old son about it, he started laughing very hard because he thought that he was the only one that had experienced the mysterious vibrations. Then he started asking his friends about the Phantom Buzz and they too rejoiced in knowing that others were plagued by this haunting menace.
Just the other day, an associate and I were walking out of a business meeting luncheon and he took his iPhone out of his breast pocket to witness a non-buzzing phone that he was convinced just buzzed.
He, of course asked me if I too have had this experience. This is when I mentioned the “Phantom Buzz” name to help him put a handle on the ghostly mirage. He appreciated the thought and we laughed about the uncanniness of this happening so frequently.
And with this started a conversation about what else in our life is seemingly taking place that really isn’t happening at all. What else elicits our Pavlovian response in our daily lives that we aren’t even aware it happens to us.
Oh, No! We thought. We wondered what else has taken over our psyche and railroaded us into thinking that we are on track with our routine responses when we are actually just automatons plugging away through life. What might we be missing?
Later, I began to think of how the conditional responses that we all learn over time begin to dictate our behaviors. I started to think about people that I have previously worked with and how I set myself up to respond to them in specific and narrow ways. I would brace myself when a particular person entered into my field of vision because I expected something unpleasant was about to happen. On the other end of the spectrum, I would open myself up when another particular person was approaching because I knew that something good, or pleasant, or funny was potentially about to happen.
But what never really occurred to me was how I might have looked to an onlooker who might be observing me. What if they noticed my differing base-level responses and saw how I was prejudging people simply based on a habitual response that I had going on in my head.
How was this impacting my leadership? How was I losing credibility and influence because of conditioned responses?
It was as if I had a Phantom Buzz telling me to sour my attitude as a defence mechanism or to brighten my smile for another encounter. Was I smart for being prepared? Or was I ignorant and prejudiced? Or was i just simply thoughtless, lazy, or dumb?
I am not sure. Perhaps I have been a little of all of those things. Perhaps I have allowed thoughtless patterns of (seemingly) acceptable behaviors dictate the person that represent me. Perhaps I have been asleep at the wheel.
Even though I am now fully aware of the phenomenon, the Phantom Buzz from my cell phone still finds me. It happened last week. But now that I have given the vibrating pants some thought, I now use these experiences as a reminder to be thoughtful about my actions, my behavioral patterns and to be aware that others are watching and perhaps taking note.
Have you ever found yourself awakening from a behavior set and been unpleasantly surprised? Are you subject to responding to phantom stimuli that makes you look odd? If you get the Phantom Buzz, are you now considering taking your phone off of vibrate? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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Tom Schulte is Executive Director of Linked 2 Leadership &
CEO of Recalibrate Professional Development
He can be reached at [email protected]
Image Source: seashell.jutman.com
