The Right Signal!

When Fear Mislabeled Kindness (and What AI Can Teach Us About It)

A question from a 7-year-old that I couldn’t answer immediately.

“I tried to be nice to my friend, and they yelled at me. Why would they do that? I don’t want to help anymore.”

As a loving and responsible parent, what would you say?

I took a moment. And then a memory surfaced.

🕒 9:30 a.m. — Chennai, Anna Nagar. 2007

On my way to the office.

As usual, heavy traffic.

When people race with time,

“Heyyyy heyyyyi”

A bike hit a scooter.

An old man flew backward, his things scattering all over the road.

I stopped. I ran.

Before I could hold him, he was shouting:

“Don’t you have eyes? You hit me!”

And in that second — I froze.

From realization.

Oh God. The old man got the wrong signal.

I was — heart pounding, rushing to help — and he saw me as the threat.

“Periyavarea , it’s not me…”

But he couldn’t hear me.

His pain was speaking louder than my words.

He was terrified. His body hurt.

And pain had blurred his perception.

I stood quietly for a moment, watching others move him to a safe spot while I began collecting his scattered belongings.

This is what pain does to people.

Confusion makes us read signals differently

The old man got hit by a bike and thought I did it. That’s one pain.

But there’s another pain — deeper. A pain that teaches.

I got scolded while trying to help. Blamed for something I didn’t do. Rejected when I was offering care.

That hurt.

But that hurt was a signal — showing me that when people are scared, they misread everything.

When people are in crisis, facts doesn’t matter.

What that moment taught me,

I could’ve stayed hurt.

I could’ve said, “The world is unfair.”

But the old man taught me something I didn’t know I needed to learn:

When someone is scared or deep in shock, they’re not really hearing your words — they’re only reacting to their pain.

It taught me that Fear or Pain blinds.

That helping people — in business, life, or anywhere — requires patience with their confusion.

Sometimes people reject you not because you’re wrong, but because they’re scared. That moment, instead of: “How do I make them understand?”

Ask “Am I brave enough to stand there, quiet, while they figure it out?”

And I think that’s where wisdom begins —

18 years since, I’m still learning to send clearer signals🚦

P.S: This pattern exists in AI too.

In machine learning, AI models get noisy training data. when the signal is distorted or mislabelled, like when fear labels a ‘helper’ as a ‘threat’.

AI corrects this gap using something called the ‘loss function’ — it measures the difference between prediction and reality; then learns to adjust.

But humans?

We carry mislabeled data for years.

The difference?

AI gets thousands of training examples to correct the pattern. We sometimes get just one moment — and we choose whether to update our model or harden our bias. 😉

That’s what I told the 7-year-old:

‘Your friend might be scared of something. Give them time. Keep being kind.’ 💖

#SimpleSecrets #Leadership #EmotionalIntelligence #AI | Ei4AiBooks | Edited with AI Assistants

Smiles,

Senthil Chidambaram