Tag: relationships

The duality of change

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Change is natural, and yet we repeatedly fail to accept its nature.

We fail when we are the passive recipient of change, as we cling to what was before and find increasingly intricate ways to justify a position we often did not support before realising change was upon us. And we fail when we are the active agent of change, as we seem not capable to appreciate the difficulties change brings in others lives and allocate enough space for discussion and venting.

Change brings resistance and opportunities, dialogue and self-absorption, evolution and involution. It is a continuum of statuses, and where the people affected will eventually land highly depends on how deeply we appreciate the duality of it.

This is something to consider if we are interested in deep change. The alternative is to continue approaching change as a one-sided decision, hoping others will quietly resign to it.

DID marketers

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Marketers (but to be honest, this is valid for most business people) suffer from a clear case of dissociative identity disorder, what was once called multiple personality disorder.

On one hand, they are customers. And as such, they are for the most part frustrated and unsatisfied with companies and their services (and I mean services at large, including things such as content, information, knowledge, advertisements, etc.).

On the other hand, though, as soon as they step into their offices, they seem to forget about frustration and unsatisfaction, and they ask their own customers (both internal and external) to navigate through the same pointless odissey they so much hated up until few minutes earlier.

If we would cure this, if we would start concepting, designing, producing and distributing only the type of marketing we would ourselves be happy to consume in our free time, many of the problems of modern marketing would be overcome. And we could focus into winning people’s hearts and minds.

The things you did today

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The things you did today, the meetings you attented to, the people you have exchanged ideas with, the tasks you have dedicated your attention to, the distractions that took you on a tangent, the breaks to recharge the batteries.

What place do they have in the long term picture?

It’s great when things flow effortlessly into the right place, when all we do seems light and serving the right purpose, and yet more often than not our daily routines feel like a start and stop, two steps in the right direction and three in the wrong one.

We do not dedicate enough time to understanding what our long term looks like, what are the reasons why do what we do, and what we will from now on accept and what not.

It’s only by raising our heads up from the narrowness of the short term that we can figure this out. And when we have done that, let’s go and pursue it with relentless discipline.

Discipline

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Often, the word discipline is used in a negative sense.

We associate it with control, rule, restriction, and this is because for a long time now (about 800 years) we have used it to described an almost monastic situation in which somebody punishes themselves for something done that is against what their environment believes is the right, appropriate way.

Originally, though, the Latin word from which discipline comes (discipulus) meant pupil. The link with learning and studying is deep, as it is the idea that to learn something you need to put in the work, day after day, in a disciplined way. In a sense, this is a form of control that is not imposed from the outside, but rather comes from within, from the desire to know and apply the knowledge. It is a way of life, a moral way, a way according to which one knows what needs to be done to achieve something and therefore, relentlessly, they commit to doing just that.

According to Buddhism, discipline is one of the six perfections (paramitas). And it is threefold.

  • First, discipline means understanding what needs to be done, giving up all malicious deeds, all selfish and harmful actions.
  • Second, discipline means applying what is being learned to all circumstances of life, committing to the disciplined way, without cutting corners, looking for shortcuts, or forgetting the principle when a favorable situation appears.
  • Third, discipline means benefiting others, with the understanding and the actions, thinking of others as in terms of “how I can benefit them”.

Discipline is not as scary or restrictive as we are used to think. When it sparks from a deep awareness of who we are and what part we ought to have in the world, it is actually the only way to achieve what we set out to achieve.

It’s not you asking

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You need to establish a relationship with the people you are serving, and ask them how you are doing often.

Of course, this means you might not like what they have to say, your customer satisfaction score might be low, you will have to work harder, and perhaps eventually you will have to change quite a lot of your product or service, or even get out of business.

But it’s not you asking that makes these things true.

Things are what they are, and even when we refrain from finding out – because we don’t want to know we are not liked, or find out our hard work is not hard enough, or realize we won’t get that bonus or promotion -, they will continue on their course with no regard for our preoccupation.

At least, with knowledge, we might be able to adjust just in time.