A Little Requiem

No, despite the picture this is not an article about dogs. But this wonderful mother has a point to make here so let me introduce her to you first before I go on. Meet Stella and her 9 pups, thrown away at a rubbish tip in Calabrian because she had contracted Leischmaniose (an incurable but manageable disease passed on to dogs by sandflies) and had mated with a bloodhound instead of another pitbull. Her pups were therefore not purebreds and the owners couldn't sell them to be trained to fight as their mother had been. So they were tossed away, left like refuse at the rubbish tip to die. Somehow this beautiful girl kept herself and her pups alive for some days and was then miraculously saved by a protector who chanced her way. She was brought to SOS-animali-international, an extraordinary animal sanctuary in Tuscany where I am a proud and active supporter. Slowly and carefully the family was medically treated and 8 of 9 pups were saved. The four which looked nothing like a pitbull were quickly adopted and lead good family lives. Those who had recognisable pitbull features but are the gentlest creatures imaginable are still at the sanctuary, well treated but with little chance of a forever-family. They are victims of silent rules, and it is silent rules I want to talk about today.

We all have silent rules operating in our lives. (I coined the expression 'silent rules' for a keynote on exactly this theme and it has stuck). These are rules that you took on as a child from your parents, friends, community, kindergarten or primary school teachers, local priest, neighbours. Unspoken, unwritten, we all sucked up such rules as if by osmosis, not realising their impact. Or we created them silently for ourselves for survival purposes. 'What's the problem with that?' you may ask. Well, just this. In the majority of cases such rules continue to operate in our later lives without recognition. And the problem is that others have different rules to ours and when these clash it can lead to the end of friendships, marriages, workplace collaboration and the sabotage of our professional success and personal happiness. Contrary sets of silent rules can easily destroy professional endeavour.

Silent rules nearly cost my mother her life. This brilliant woman, one of Australia's first female university professors, a scientist with a soft core, was mobbed mercilessly by male 'colleagues' who were jealous beyond words of her appointment. She could have asked for help, at least from her wonderful husband. But an insidious silent rule was operating in her life and it said: 'You must be strong to survive. You must not ask for help.' Familiar, anyone? As a child growing up in colonial Fiji, she had been wrongly interred in a children's hospital on suspicion of being a carrier of tuberculosis. At the age of just 5, she was forced to remain there with some other children for 7 months. Her mother was allowed to visit her once a week, standing ouside and speaking to her through a wire-screen door. Some of the children died, not of tuberculosis but of loneliness and despair. Not my mother. She created her own silent rule, born of her wish to survive this ordeal. 'I will depend only on me. I will not ask for help.' That rule had survival value and she got through. But years later it was still operating even when she knew she could not manage alone. She made a good attempt to take her own life and was found just in time to avoid her three young daughters becoming half-orphans aged 4-8.

During my team trainings for companies like UBS, FIFA, Ringier, Biogen and others, I have seen repeatedly the power of silent rules to destroy or enhance. You see, private rules may also be good, and if they are, please keep them. It's the destructive ones which cause such chaos. In my seminars, we carry out an exercise in which participants share a silent rule from their lives with another participant. As this takes courage, I often start by sharing one of mine. And here we're back to Stella. Growing up in the suburbs of Australia's Sydney, our next door neighbours - father, mother and daughter - had a large black dog called Sparky. Knowng what I know about dogs today, and that's a ton after bringing 16 dogs from Ethiopia to Europe and getting them well adopted, I would say the very strict family father broke every rule you could name for animal protection. But his silent rule was in place. 'Keep the dog on a chain. Never take him out of the garden on a walk. Hit him if he barks too much.' Sparky barked loudly throughout the day, the females in the household were scared of him, and I set up my rule. 'Don't trust dogs, especially black dogs. Keep away from dogs, they are vicious.' I became a cat woman, avoiding dogs completely. Oh I pretended not to be scared but I know I was. And that rule operated for half a century until September 2021 when I met a street dog I named Grace on the streets of Addis Ababa, and changed my rule and my life forever. It's hard to believe that changing that rule has had such consequences for me and many other humans and animals.

Now I can understand that some of you may have fears and your own silent rules about dogs as well, particularly about race. But please consider this: Dogs can be raised to be almost anything. It's not their race which decides who they become. It's us, my friends, it's us.

One of my favourite tales of a silent rule was this. A client of mine was responsible for hiring a new writer for his company. He interviewed and tested but couldn't find the talent he was seeking. Then a young woman appeared. She was dressed 'like a hippy', no business suit. She clearly had the talent he wanted but his silent rule said to him: 'Appearance is important and hers is not business-like.' (This was not an official company rule at all). He rejected her. A few weeks later this woman was hired by a competitor and their sales rocketed with her help. The man told me and other participants ruefully: 'That rule I had cost our company a horrible price. But I just couldn't hire her!'

Have a think about your own silent rules. If they're good, keep them. I have a good one which has helped me so so much in my life. It tells me to give people who have not performed well, who have behaved badly, hurt me, cheated me, lied to me, mobbed me, stolen from me, etc, a second chance whenever possible. It has often born fruit. But if you ask yourselves about your rules, and one pops up which you no longer want because it's sabotaging your progress and happiness, let it go today. Just say thank you for the help it gave you once upon a time, and then let it go. You can say a little Requiem.