Photo Credit: Flickr/ hobvias sudoneighm

My wife and I were in one of our favourite downtown coffee shops recently on a date. We were having  a wonderful time together. It had been a little while since we had had a chance to just put our busy lives on hold to go out for some time just for us. It was fantastic. I was one happy engineer.

The situation changed suddenly when someone in the table next to us started choking. She was gasping for air. There was a moment of confusion when everyone in the coffee stopped dead in their tracks and turned to look at the woman. Eventually, it became clear that this woman needed help. Someone sitting at the table with her started giving her the Heimlich manoeuvre and was able to dislodge whatever it was choking her.

Thankfully, after a few minutes the woman had recovered, and though she was clearly embarrassed about the situation, she was OK. Thank God.

It might go without saying that the situation stressed me out. I had never actually seen anyone choke in real life before. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what to do. I was concerned for the woman, and all I knew was that something had to be done. The whole even took less than 15 seconds, but it felt like an eternity. I was definitely shaken.

My wife on the other hand was cool as a cucumber. It didn’t phase her in the slightest. No big deal. You could have sworn she had missed the whole thing.

“How could she be so calm?!” I asked her. “That woman could have died!”

My wife looked up at me from her latte, smiled, and gave me the look that tells me I’m being a dumb man. Trust me. I know that look. I earn it quite often.

She went on to remind me of what she does for a living. She’s a doctor. An anesthesiologist, to be exact. That makes her an airway and breathing specialist, among other things. She was calm throughout the whole ordeal because in her line of work, she sees this kind of thing all the time. She knew how to read the situation and knew that we were not in a “red alert” situation. It’s her job to be able to read situations like this and to act in a moment’s notice if need be.

Where I thought she had missed everything, in reality she probably saw everything more clearly than anyone else in the room. Once I realized that, I felt both stressed out from the initial event and a bit dumb for misunderstanding my wife’s reaction to it. Pat Sweet fail.

Later that night, after we got home and settled in, it occurred to me that there was an important lesson to be learned from all this. For me, the lesson is is that you don’t always recognize what skills other people in other roles might have. In this example, I misjudged my own wife’s skills and abilities and failed to connect the dots in the heat of the moment. It didn’t occur to me that she knew exactly what was going on. It was me who didn’t have a clue.

I think this is a very important lesson for engineers in particular. You should pay close attention to what others do. Try and make sense of whether or not they could help you in your work and your career. You might be surprised to learn that something that stresses you right out its a cakewalk for someone else. Consider what people of different experience levels, disciplines, departments, or even different industries might know that you don’t. It could be that you’re underestimating, or even just misunderstanding others and what they do.

With this, I challenge you to be open, and to be curious. You never know what you might be able to learn and how others might be able to help you if you keep an open mind.

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