Is it this or that?

 “Ma, if you shout at me like this, I won’t be able to finish my homework” retorted my youngest. It was 11.30 p.m.. I was annoyed at her tendency to leave everything to the last minute. Angrily she looked up.“I am writing an essay on the 'five best qualities of my mother'. If you shout like this, I can’t think of anything nice about you”  

“You can’t think of anything nice? Just, because I have been shouting for the past 7 minutes?”. I was livid now. It was like my entire motherhood journey of 11 years had been shrunk to these last 7 minutes!! I felt terrible about this child’s shortsightedness, audacity, immaturity. “Children, I tell you!!”

Later, the anger settled, and I reflected. Don’t I display similar behavior? In the appraisal discussions, irrespective of how great a year it has been, how much I learnt, received recognition, got time for holiday breaks, attended to family matters, worked in a stress-free atmosphere…what mattered ultimately was that performance rating. And if the rating was not in line with what I expected, all the goodness disappeared! At appraisal time, my view is as myopic as that of the child. And yet, this is the most important conversation in the year!

Why do we do this? One possible reason is explained by prof Clifford Nash at Stanford. He says - negative emotions generally involve more thinking, and the information is processed more thoroughly than positive ones. Thus, we tend to ruminate more about unpleasant events, use stronger words to describe them.

It's time we changed the script. It’s time we asked ourselves what is important? The experience or the outcome. As a society we are obsessed with uni-dimensional answers. ‘Do you support this political party or that’? ‘Do you work for money or not?’ We can’t seem to appreciate the ‘center’ view anymore!

 Shakespeare famously wrote- ‘Alls well, that ends well’….sometime all may not be well, but it may still end well. We will see that possibility, if we have that perspective. In life, like in performance appraisals, it doesn't have to be this or that. It can be this and that!