Tag: relationships

You stay

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When you are in a bad mood, your productivity goes down. The quality of your work is not as good as usual, even getting started feels painful. You are cranky, you put negative narratives first, you fail to appreciate what good there is.

Being in a bad mood also poisons everything around you. And most importantly, it makes people in your life be in a bad mood to.

There is no remedy to being in a bad mood. It just happens.

The only sensible thing to do is put all the residual resources into breaking the direct link between the mood and yourself. Indeed, often when you are in a bad mood, you look at yourself as a bad person too. That’s dangerous.

Moods come and go. You stay, often improved. If you can appreciate this difference more, nothing will stop you.

To meet an emotion is first to acknowledge it and then to feel it enough to get the message it carries. The feeling carries the message but it isn’t the message, and we won’t get the message without feeling at least some of the emotion. The message, of course, is very likely to be a form of emerging self-knowledge.

Dan Oestreich, How To Meet A Strong Emotion

The stranger

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Every group has its own rules. And when you belong to the group, there are two things you have to do.

First, you need to figure out what the rules are. This might seem trivial and simple, but actually it often takes time to dive deep into what the group cares about and how stuff gets done. Tension and crisis accelerate the process of understanding, as there is no better time to appreciate the set of values of a group than when shit hits the fan.

Figuring out the rules happens over time, it is a continuous effort. And you can’t wait for it to be over before asking yourself if what the group believes in aligns with what you believe in. Are you at home, or are you a stranger?

Now, if the answer is that you are a stranger, you need to be able to appreciate the fact that setting out to change the rules is only one option. It is often easier and possible to go and find a group whose rules better align with yours.

One way or the other, staying in the group that makes of you the stranger is probably not something you want to consider. But you know that already, don’t you?

Gold

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If you can build relationships across groups, you are worth your weight in gold.

When you are given a task, when you are assigned a responsibility, when you have work to do, it is easy to forget about others. Yet what you do impacts them, and what they do might be significant for what you want to achieve.

Establishing and maintaining relationships with people who work in other departments, in different industries, in rival companies, in apparently antithetical roles is one of the most critical skill for success.

And that is true even if you are working on your own. Particularly if you are working on your own.

Recognition

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You can’t heal if you do not recognize you are hurt.

And of course, this is valid for teams, groups, and communities as well. The more people involved, the more challenging and long the process of recognition is going to be.

Have you told everyone how you feel? Have you shared with them what has happened? Have you signaled you are committed to a different future? Have you shown your own vulnerability and accepted the vulnerability of others?

Even a deep crisis can be an opportunity to build something better and stronger.

But if you approach it hoping that things will turn around because of luck, because of a new year, because what is not working will suddenly start to work. That is just wishful thinking.

The third reason

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What is the third reason why someone does something?

The first reason is almost instinctive. It is generally about us.

The second reason is a mirror. We often make it about them.

The third reason might open up some empathy, as it has the power to be about the context.

This is how it goes.

A colleague does not answer your email requesting help.

The first reason: they do not want to help me.

The second reason: they are selfish and only care about their work.

The third reason: it is the end of the quarter, they might be busy.

Another example.

A company is not coming back to you regarding your application.

The first reason: they have rejected me.

The second reason: their HR is lazy and unprofessional.

The third reason: they have a recruitment policy in place and they are simply following it.

Thinking through the third reason makes two things possible: it moves us from a natural tendency to look at the world as if we were at the centre of it, and it builds some rules that are actually applicable to everyone. It allows more compassion for others and for ourselves. It unloads us of a burden.

Make an effort to get to the third reason. After a while, that will become your new nature.