In the box

I discovered the meaning of life in my mid twenties, at a party at Milson's Point while staring up at the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I was so excited about my discovery. I rushed to interrupt my "special" friend who was engaged in depth with another group of people. She wasn't nearly as excited as I was, telling me to go away as she was busy having fun...

One of my favourite books has a boring title Leadership and Self Deception. I try to read this book every year. It is one of those books that the more you read it the more you find out. As with a lot of books I read, the more experience I have the more understanding I have of the content of the book. The more understanding I have of the content, the better I am able to execute on the ideas in the book.  

The meaning of life that the Sydney Harbour Bridge whispered to me on that balmy night many years ago pretty much aligns with the core message of Leadership and Self Deception - be really cool with everyone, take everyone as they are, and don't put your neurotic filters on them. The value that you bring to this planet is counted in the number of people that you help.

This is such a fundamental thing that we often forget it. We get tied up in he said, she said, we said, they said. We build justifications for our rightness and the others wrongness. It seems like the more we dislike the behaviour of another the more they do it.  We are caught in a trap by our suspicious minds.  In Leadership and Self Deception this is called "being in the box".

It doesn't have to be this way. If we see people as slices of humanity with wants and needs rather then objects in the way of our own self fulfilment we find that strange things happen. That person that was acting like a jerk is suddenly transformed into a dad with a sick kid and we want to help him. That person that pushed in at the coffee bar is a wife who's husband just died and we want to help her. Putting a person's story in front of that person's behaviour doesn't make it right, it makes it more understandable. The more understanding of a person's circumstances that we have, the more likely we are to want to help them. The more that we want to help them the more human they become and we start to put less weight into their behaviour, or proving that they are wrong. It just stops being an issue.

I am not very good at this, even though I knew about it from an early age. For me to get out of the box requires me to break down sometimes years of built up stories as to why I am right and someone else is wrong. For me the challenge is often to just see the person that is in front of me and try to understand their story.  Imagine if we could do this in our workplace, in our homes, in our community.  My challenge is to be considerate to everyone that I meet. To treat them as a person rather than an object. To see them as an ally rather than an enemy.  My challenge is to climb out of the box and try and stay out as long as I can.

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