Don't break people and then reprimand them for being broken
In any relationship, personal or professional, don’t break people and then reprimand them for being broken.
Most challenges in life invite us to look inward first, but the human tendency is to project our concerns outward and blame the people around us for not being better.
We don’t usually do this to be evil, we do this because our brain perceives stress and worry as dangerous and it does whatever necessary to make us survive and feel safe.
Blaming others for our shortcomings definitely makes us feel safe. Powerful even. Combine that with *actually* having power over someone (e.g. authority, money, title) and you have an addictive recipe for never looking inward. Worse — have that power for too long and eventually you’ll forget life without it. Your perspective of the world and the people around you gets permanently skewed and you develop a blind spot that you don’t even know to check anymore.
It wasn’t until my 20s that I better understood the concepts of gaslighting and projecting onto others. The older I get, the clearer I see that those terms aren’t just present in personal and romantic relationships. They’re ever-present in ALL types of relationships. Outside of romantic relationships, it's perhaps most prominent in corporate settings where we’re all so busy separating work from “life” that we forget that we’re still human beings during business hours.
During business hours, we prefer to think of you as a “resource” that can be “utilized” to meet our “strategic objectives.” We move you around as we wish, reassigning you like you’re just a cell in an Excel document (fun fact: sometimes you really are just a cell — take a look at how companies talk to investors every quarter! Or how your company’s business analyst talks about growth!). Doing things this way makes it easier on the human psyche when we have to “terminate your role” because “our business needs have changed.”
Like most people that’ll read this, I’ve been on both sides. The resource manager and the resource. The one breaking people, and the one being broken. I think the more honest we are with ourselves, the more honest we can be with others. And the more honest we can be with others, the safer we *actually* become.
Funny how that works right? I like to say the Universe has a great sense of humor.
We all need to *be* better, we all need to *do* better. For our own sake and the sake of everyone around us.
With sonder 🤟🏽
Ruben
#people #power #life #business #learninglavida