Your Relationship to Life
Me: “I think this person is too junior for this role.”
My manager: “You’re throwing your teammate under the bus.”
Me: Wait, what?
One of my worst - and most educational - work experiences happened when I learned about a reorg where a teammate was taking on a role I thought they were too inexperienced to handle. My manager, who was new and didn’t know the team, was assigning my teammate a major project that many customers and teams across the company heavily depended on. As a senior team member, I thought it was my responsibility to flag the massive problem I saw coming (and eventually did materialize). I never dreamed it would result in my integrity being questioned.
Since integrity is a core part of my identity, to say I was badly hurt is an understatement. “How could my manager possibly think that?” - I stewed. When I recovered from the shock I thought of all the ways in which I screwed up and should have said things more diplomatically. That’s productive, right? Well, not quite.
A big milestone on my path to developing a healthier mindset was looking at my reaction to life’s challenges. Think about something meaningful that didn’t go well for you recently. Whom do you look to first - yourself, or others?
Do you find ways to make others responsible - your boss who doesn’t understand, your team that is too slow, circumstances that were outside of your control? Regardless of how true and justified your assessment of others is, are most issues in your life due to others? If so, you may be operating under a victim mentality. It implies that the responsibility for your life is in other people’s hands. Life is happening to you. My initial reaction was exactly that - “this is unfair, my boss is wrong”. I do think a manager should talk to an employee before accusing them of having terrible intentions, but blaming other people for my situation isn’t helpful.
A clear sign of victim behavior is gossiping or complaining. It comes from a disempowering place and implies that you only have the agency to passively criticize rather than make a change (including leaving a bad situation). It’s accepting your reality as given rather than being the creator of it.
If you don’t blame others but first look to yourself, do you tend to beat yourself up for mistakes? Do you repeatedly recite in your head all the ways in which you screwed up or could have done better and feel bad about your conduct? If so you may have a striver mentality, where you expect perfection from yourself and measure your self worth by external feedback such as the outcome of a project or someone else’s opinion. That was me - I was beating myself up for not raising the issue with my manager more diplomatically.
Strivers believe they need to control life and fully direct it. That leaves little room for spontaneity or flow, and the inevitable obstacles or divergence from the plan cause frustration and need to be “fixed”. A striver holds life tightly and is attached to outcomes. Life is happening for you to manage.
If you look at your conduct from a deep, calm and quiet place and try to see why things didn’t go as planned and how you could learn from that, you are showing an empowered adult mentality. You realize that you can make mistakes, but look to learn and grow from them rather than casting blame. You try to see why even things you perceive as negative can help you. You accept that many things are outside your control and your only recourse is to learn from the past and be better prepared in the future. Most importantly, you measure your success by your degree of alignment with who you are - or aspire to be, not by external results or the opinions of others. You have deep conviction in your way and a trust in your ability to face any challenge, so you can enjoy the way rather than worry about the destination or any obstacles on the way. There is an ease and a flow to the way you live. Life is happening through you.
For any given situation, going through a short victim and striver stage is only human. The question is how quickly we catch ourselves and shift to an empowered adult perspective. In my case, that could have meant curiosity about how my behavior contributed to the situation and what I could have done better from a place of inquiry, rather than judgment of myself and my manager. In an empowered state I could have asked myself whether my circumstances - a manager who assumed a lack of integrity before asking about my intentions - were right for me or needed to change. My less-than-evolved-self at the time took a while to ask these questions.
In which area of your life are you not living as an empowered adult?
Note: I fully recognize that people can be victims of horrible trauma such as abuse, discrimination, violence, poverty, bullying etc. By no means do I mean to take away from the difficulty or unfairness of these experiences, or the validity of any resulting emotions. All I am saying is that when bad things happen, we can decide how to deal with them and some ways are more helpful to our well being than others. As Viktor Frankl, the famous psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, said: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Found this post interesting? Subscribe at the bottom of this page to receive new posts by email.
