Tag: empathy

Contagious

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you decide to help someone, it might not go exactly as you anticipated.

They might not get what you wanted to help them achieve.

They might end up worse off.

They might not even use your help and go their own way.

They might take your help and use it with other people.

They might realize your help is not applicable.

They might feel as if they owe you and get stuck.

They might not be grateful.

They might not want help at all.

Yet, just by making the decision to help someone, you have put kindness out there. Kindness is contagious, and it is always worth it.

Give it context

Fabrizio1 Comment

When we make a mistake, that immediately becomes the center of our life. Who we are. What we can achieve. How far we can go.

We should instead put the mistake at the same level of our wins and successes. If we manage to give it context, the mistake will look much less threatening. How many times did we do it right? How often are we proud of our work? How much have we achieved so far? And if we are way down into failure mode, a friend or a partner can help us get out and see.

Mistakes are inevitable, the same way as successes are.

In search of meaning

FabrizioLeave a comment

I talk about this a lot, and for as much as it is a difficult practice, it is one I am committed to.

You can have an impact today. You can give others what you want others to give you. You can show a different way. You don’t have to fall into despair if the world around you is not the way you’d like it to be. You can be present, here and now, learn, grow, and take others with you along the way.

[…] people who are preoccupied with success ask the wrong question. They ask, “What is the secret of success?” when they should be asking, “What prevents me from learning here and now?” To be overly preoccupied with the future is to be inattentive toward the present where learning and growth takes place. To walk around asking, “Am I a success or a failure?” is a silly question in the sense that the closest you can come to an answer is to say that everyone is both a success and a failure.

One way to renew an obsessive preoccupation with success is to alter the idea that the present is a means and the future is an end. The problem with this way of thinking is that, when the future comes, then it too becomes just another present that is yet another means to yet another future.

Karl Weick, How Projects Lose Meaning: The Dynamics of Renewal

P.S.: thanks to Ed Batista for this fantastic article about the topic.

Concerted

FabrizioLeave a comment

Imagine you meet with some peers. The purpose of the meeting is to decide on changes that will impact many. You keep the meeting secret, and secret are also the follow up conversations that aim at defining the details. You go about it for a while, and then you and your peers go public with a big reveal. Now that the change is public, you go back minding your own business, expecting that everyone else will adapt and adjust accordingly.

I wonder how it would end.

I also wonder how common this situation is in organisations all over the world.

Your effort to promote change is failing because you want change imposed rather than concerted.

What makes us miserable

FabrizioLeave a comment

Acceptance is not about taking what makes us miserable, shutting it in the closet, throwing away the keys, numbing the feelings that inevitably it will keep us giving, and pretending as if that does not exist.

Acceptance is taking what makes us miserable, understanding it, putting it front and center for a while, making friend with it, finding a way to go about our days despite it. Until eventually it will go shut itself in the closet by itself.

The former approach will make misery expand and take new forms. The latter will make it go away once and for all.

Two different ways. Two very different outcomes.