Get out of the box!

🌞

What if nothing you thought about the people in your life was true? What if everything you currently believe about your partner/colleague/family member, was just a story you’ve made up in order to neatly fit them into the world you’ve constructed, where you and your needs are at the centre? What would you say if I told you that this is true, for most of us, in relation to most of the people we interact with, most of the time?

Does reading that annoy you? Does it bring up some other emotional response? You might be getting hung up on the ‘most’ qualifier, but I would contend that there’s a particular way our brains choose to function that is insidious, in that it not only deliberately aims to avoid applying the same rules to others as we apply to ourselves, but also attempts to hide that truth from your conscious experience. So, it doesn’t make you a bad person, it just makes you human 😊

There’s a great book (in fact a series of books) on this oddity of our human condition, if you want to read something that may be more believable than me – ‘Leadership and Self-deception’ by The Arbinger Institute. I highly recommend it!

The essential premise here, in case you don’t want to rush off and read the book, is that our ego wants us to feel good about ourselves (note that I’m avoiding getting side-tracked on the numerous ways and reasons why we sometimes attack ourselves mentally). So, to achieve this goal, our brains tend to approach conflict from the perspective that we are in the ‘right’. In order that we don’t feel bad for failing to recognize that the needs of others may be just as important, we employ a fantastically adaptable tool – justification, and this is the mechanism by which we practice self-deception.

My title borrows from the book, which proposes a virtual box in which we choose to exist, that walls us off from the true nature of others and encourages us to treat them more transactionally, more as objects. When you figure out that you’re in the box and manage to get out (plenty of good tips in the book – or just ask me sometime), you can then see how similar we all are; you can appreciate the equal value that the needs/objectives/challenges of others represent (to them) and also understand how they may fail to see the validity of your own needs/objectives/challenges.

Have you ever been in conflict with someone who thought they were wrong at the time? It’s rhetorical of course, because no one gets into conflict unless they believe they have the right (or at least less-wrong) answer. Here’s a thought experiment: assuming you can accept that not everyone in a given area of conflict can be right, then what would be the outcome if everyone was wrong? What would conflict look like if everyone entered the arena assuming that they didn’t have the answer? The only necessary context to add would be that everyone involved remained passionate about discovering the answer. In that way all would be curious, all would be respectful.

Of course, you can’t make everyone else show up that way. And maybe that would be a nightmare practically, promoting death-by-consensus, trying to make everyone happy all of the time. But you could accept that everyone in the arena believes in what they bring and has real needs/objectives/challenges driving that; you could choose to lead the way!

Here are some things I’m reading that help me get out/stay out of the box:

“So if we are going to find lasting solutions to difficult conflicts or external wars we find ourselves in, we first need to find our way out of the internal wars that are poisoning our thoughts, feelings, and attitudes toward others. If we can't put an end to the violence within us, there is no hope for putting an end to the violence without.” – Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict

“In every moment...we choose to see others either as people like ourselves or as objects. They either count like we do or they don't.” – Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict

"It's remarkable how often the real problem is not what happened, but how it was communicated." – James Clear, Atomic Habits

"When you get the impression that someone has done wrong, ask yourself: “How can I actually know that it was a wrong?” And if it really was a wrong, remember that he was thereby passing sentence on himself, and that his wrongdoing was therefore the equivalent of poking himself in the eye. Remember that anyone who wants a bad man not to do wrong is like someone wanting a fig tree not to produce sap, or babies not to cry, or horses not to neigh, or anything else not to do what it’s bound to do. I mean, if that’s his disposition, what else can he do? So, if you feel strongly about it, change his disposition for the better." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12.16

Finally, I hope that you remember to make time for yourself, try to take care of others, and search for joy in whatever you’re doing. Don’t worry if you don’t find it every day; just keep looking, just do the work – it’ll come.

Cheers,

Kyle

Trapped in a box, courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood AI

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