Storytelling

It’s over. But not entirely.

The United States just completed a very difficult election season. I hear from our friends overseas; they are just as drained as we are as this election impacts them as well. This, on top of the pandemic has left many of us exhausted with politics and feeling “over” people that we are pretty certain are wrong about a lot.

Hard politics, demonization of political opponents, and claims that the world will pretty much cease if “our” side loses is not new. In the recent era, however, the doomsday rhetoric does seem to increase with each election cycle.

How can the S Curve of Learning? help us through this time? I think guardrail #5, Step Back to Grow, is really important right now.

There is a common thread in at least four major world religions of Hindu, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam— we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. If it wasn’t important, and wasn’t difficult, I doubt that it would be such a common teaching.

What does it mean? I’m not a religious scholar, but I think it is safe to assume we are supposed to have empathy for people, to understand where they are coming from and to try to see the world through their eyes. To do this, we have to Step Back to Grow.

On my Disrupt Yourself podcast, I talked to Brené Brown, university professor, researcher, and five time #1 New York Times best-selling author. She studies human behavior including vulnerability, shame, empathy, courage and leadership. 

During our conversation, Brené shared an observation from her research, “We are a meaning-making species. It is tied all the way back to the limbic system; we make up stories, as stories help our brain understand how to protect us, how to take care of us, which is the brain's number one [priority].”

When someone has to be let go from Brené’s organization, they will let people gather and discuss the stories people are making about the situation. They do this, because there has been a big change to the system, “[A]nd you either address that, or the system will self-regulate with a false narrative. That will be costly. To performance, to culture, and to people.”

Revisiting my discussion with Brené made me consider this story-making bent we have and ask myself:

What stories – absent of facts – have I made about the people, politicians, family members, and others I encounter?

The fact is, we make up stories all the time. This isn’t bad, it’s in our hard wiring. It helps us survive. The challenge is, most of the time we consider the stories true without first checking to see if they are accurate.

Often, we conflate facts of what happened with our interpretation of what happened. “She didn’t call me back. She must not like me.” When actually, the person just didn’t call you back and you have no idea why. The rest is made up. There could be a hundred reasons why that person didn’t call you back, but you are convinced your story is correct.

It is part of our DNA to make up stories about the “other,” those people that are not part of our tribe, our professional competitors, our political opponents. But, if we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, or even just be good leaders that seek to understand our colleagues and employees, we have to challenge those stories. In doing so it can help make us better leaders and better citizens, no matter where we call home.

Where can you begin to have empathy for those you might disagree with? How can you see their point of view? How can you separate facts from an interpretation of the facts that you relate to as correct? How your work and home life be impacted if you sought to love your neighbor as yourself?

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Whitney Johnson is the CEO of human capital consultancy WLJ Advisors, an Inc. 5000 2020 fastest-growing private company in America. One of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50, Whitney and her team are experts at helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals. She is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning and an executive coach and advisor to CEOs. She is a popular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn, where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2018, and her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times. In 2017, she was selected from more than 16,000 candidates as a “Top 15 Coach” by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith.