I have recently read Leadership and Self Deception, by the Arbinger Institute. It’s a fable about leadership which discusses two concepts – “In the Box” and “Out of the Box”. To summarily explain the difference, when a person is in the box, they see other people as mere objects whose needs are secondary to their own and tend to blame that other person for their problems. When a person is out of the box, they see others as people and places their needs and those of others on the same level. The book then goes on to talk about how your relationship with that other person, personal or professional, can be dramatically different based on whether you are out or in the box with that other person. It also points out that you can be in the box on one person and out of the box with another person. That makes sense to me as that is a consequence of how you feel about that person.
When thinking about this book I took away that in its purest form, the message is to treat people with consideration and compassion. And then I think how profoundly familiar this sounds.
The Dalai Lama has written a number of books about compassion and destructive feelings/emotions. And essentially, this is what we are talking about here. In How to be Compassionate, he wrote:
“if you feel angry or afraid, but you investigate what it is about the object you are angry about or afraid of, you’ll mostly find that your feelings are mental projections”.
Another book is The Laws on Human Nature by Robert Greene, with one of the laws being “Change your circumstances by changing your attitude – the law of self-sabotage’. This is around each of us having a particular way of looking at the world, of interpreting events and the actions of people around us. This is our attitude, and it determines much of what happens to us in life. It goes on to say that “human attitude is malleable, and by making our attitude more positive, open and tolerant of other people – we can spark a different dynamic’’.
These are the first two that spring to mind in a long list of books. There is a common theme, although it may be prefaced differently, which is all about changing the way you view other people. It is also about understanding where the other person is coming from. Once we lay down our swords we are much more able to receive and understand the other person’s messages about their perspective.
I don’t know why I feel enlightened every time I read it as if I have never learnt this before. Perhaps because we are constantly being thrown new challenges in the modern world, from tasks at work to the one big challenge that has faced the entire world this year. The easy route is to blame others and project our emotions onto them, which is evidenced by the number of books touching on this topic. It is much harder to stop, breathe and add someone’s else’s emotions into our already overbrimming emotional centres. So to that end, I will end with a very simple statement I recently read on a post on LinkedIn authored by Niccolo Scelfo which said: ‘normalise kindness, politeness, good manners, civility and care at work!’.
About the Author
Kym Bell
Kym has over 15+ years’ experience delivering capital projects and establishing environments of operational excellence. After commencing her career in the management of scoping, planning, and delivery of capital projects, she moved into oil and gas, where she delivered the operational readiness project for QGC’s LNG Plant on Curtis Island. Kym creates environments of operational excellence through the delivery of sizeable business transformation programs. Skilled in both strategy and execution, her value rests on a broad understanding of business dynamics and the ability to engage and influence stakeholders. Kym works effectively across multifaceted organisations to collect the evidence, question the disparities and bring everything together into a conclusive strategic plan, inspiring critical thinking, excellence and customer-focused culture.
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