I Don’t Have Time for Your Worldview
Why resisting is so much easier
I do most of my best thinking when I’m moving. The rhythm of running, hiking, biking, Nordic-skiing or even swimming is like a piston engine that powers focus and purpose into my otherwise wayward noggin. That’s why many of my articles start with “I was on a run the other day…”. I should probably write more about that someday.
Anyways, I was on a run the other day and a thought emerged. I don’t remember what started it but it had something to do with the realization that I had been resisting. Resisting is something I do quite regularly. I have strong and often subconscious loyalties to my view of the world, from how a client should address a particular challenge or how my children should respond in a given situation, to what I’d rather be doing when my wife wants help cleaning the basement and in which hand I hold my toothbrush. Resisting is what happens when, without really being aware of my actions, I simply don’t accept someone else’s expectation or viewpoint. It’s not unlike having a fit when the sky decides to rain and I don’t want it to, but the difference is that with people I have the illusion that they will bend to my worldview when they see how right I am.
I think it was a client interaction that had me thinking during this particular run but I was suddenly aware that rather than resist their thinking (manifested by ignoring, saying “no” or, my favorite, talking louder), it might make better business sense to accept, acknowledge and then partner with them to expand their ideas into something that works better. If you’re familiar with the art of Improv, it’s the concept of ‘Yes, and’ as opposed to ‘No, instead’. I suspect that, at this point, some of you are laughing at how obvious this suggestion is, but know that in the time it took my body to breathe twice (out three and in two, out three and in two) that awareness had expanded to how I respond when my kids or my wife aren’t doing things ‘my way’. Still laughing?
So, I immediately brought to mind people who I perceive to be better parents than I (this includes my wife) and imagined them saying ‘Yes, and’ when their kid tried to engage them in negotiation warfare. (If you have teenagers, you’re familiar with the practice of negotiation warfare. NW 101, or “Neg Wa” in street talk, is part of a nationwide underground middle-school curriculum that’s updated each year and taught to incoming students by graduating 8th graders).
In that mental image, I saw these better parents ‘encouraging’ my kid instead of discouraging them, as I often do. I saw them listening and being patient. And then I had a crazy realization. It would require courage from me to patiently say ‘Yes, and’. The instant I accept that my preconceived idea of how things should play out is not the course that will be taken, I’ve relinquished control. I’ve opened the door to an endless number of possibilities, many of which could have catastrophic consequences. Yes, indeed- to encourage another human to participate in, or completely take responsibility for, creating the future requires… courage. In short, it takes courage, to encourage.
If the connection between those two words has been common knowledge for the last 5 centuries please don’t let me know. I’m over half-a-century in and it had never occurred to me until that moment. But don’t think I’m done either. My run wasn’t over. In fact, I hadn’t hit my turnaround point yet.
So, there in my mind, as I’m running still, are my imagined wife and friends, all better parents than I, being courageous and encouraging my kids. And, in doing so, I thought, “They’re creating an opening. They’re enabling critical thinking, and new ideas, and growth, and ..and they’re saving the world!!”. Fortunately, just before my imagined friends died in a stampede of rainbow-colored unicorns it occurred to me that, in reality, instead of creating an opening, many of us often create a sense of closing instead. With our kids, with our spouses, with our neighbors and with our clients even, we get busy and we close instead of open. It’s easier. We often disregard or scoff at their suggestions, consider them young or naive, or simply don’t take the time to really listen. I further realized that if encouragement requires courage, then the sense of closing must be caused by the opposite of courage. Fear.
Still running, pistons still pumping, it didn’t take long for me to corroborate this latest hunch for myself by taking an honest look at what motivates my preconceived ideas of how things should be. I realized my fears include fear of not being a good father, fear of seeing my kids hurt or disappointed when they fail, fear of other parents’ judgement and, the occasional, crippling fear of having to get off the sofa. For me, it’s easy to see that fear does, in fact, have a hand in creating those preconceived ideas of how things ‘should’ be and that the same fear drives me to stop any attempt to change my mind. And that’s when I had my second crazy realization. In short, my fear causes me to interfere. Ok — the ‘feers’ aren’t spelled the same but it’s still impressively coincidental.
It would have been magical if my run ended right then, but it didn’t. I had another ten minutes or so. Not wanting to overthink my newfound bounty of wisdom I spent the rest of the run wrestling an ear-worm. If you’re a runner you know it happens sometimes.
So. It takes courage to encourage. Courage takes effort. Fear is automatic, and fear makes me interfere. The more I think about it the more it feels like a mantra to live by. Perhaps even to run a country by.
Be courageous. Accept the reality that I can’t control events, that I will fail, that people will judge me, that learning can be painful to people I love, and that the best thing that I can do is be patient and encourage them. And when the urge to interfere kicks in, recognize it for what it is, identify the fear, or don’t, and think “What would my friends and their Unicorns do?”. Or maybe just go for another run.
