Tag: Cognitive Dissonance

Creating Monsters and Utopias

Creating Monsters and Utopias

by and | God, People
I’m not the bad guy. Right??

There’s a relatively simple list of things that most people want. We want to feel important to our world. We want to be good, kind people – people who aren’t the bad guy, people who deserve good.

We want the freedom to choose what makes us happy, and to find things that make us feel fulfilled. We want to be able to choose the things that fill our souls to the brim.

Conflict

But the people around us don’t always want those things for us. They want us to work in their best interests, and they sometimes get hurt when we instead do what we want or need. When they get hurt, they try to control us into changing. They try to make us feel bad (or good) until we do change, until we do things that don’t make us happy or things that will hurt us – and if that doesn’t work, they decide that we must be an enemy and they begin to treat us accordingly.

Resolution

False Realities

I (Josh) didn’t like reality. Reality kept showing me that people may not always react favorably to the things I want or need – and I was scared of what might happen if I continued to fight for my right to those things. Ultimately, I was scared that they might leave if I continued to take care of myself.

I didn’t value my own soul enough to believe that it was worth taking care of, except…I kind of did. So in response, as a way to feel justified in fighting for my soul, I created alternate versions of people. I made people into monsters – monsters who manipulated me for their own selfish purposes. I saw them as willing to destroy me in order to get what they wanted. And since they were evil, I didn’t have to do what they said – I had the right to take care of myself, and I also had the right to control them into being not evil.

False Realities Believe in the Right to Protect Myself

Some of these people were not trying to manipulate me. I would see people as evil who were just trying to help me face my fears – deeply hidden, pressed down, and blocked away – and I would see people as evil who would shove me at God when I didn’t want to do that.

But…some of the people I turned into monsters were trying to manipulate me. These people weren’t evil though, they were just…afraid. They were afraid of the same thing I was, actually, that if they couldn’t control me or our relationship, I would leave. In their fear, they were trying to destroy me, but sort of as a…byproduct. They tried to destroy me to make me safe for them to love.

What I struggled with was the simple fact that I’m supposed to do what protects my soul, what nourishes and cares for it, and what keeps it whole so that it can serve God to the best of its ability. I don’t actually need to see evil motives in other people in order to do so.

I don’t need to see evil motives in other people in order to protect my soul.

Three Realities

“Hopeless.”

I realized that I believed in at least three realities:

  1. the utopia, a perfect place, without fear or risk, that I had long ago lost all hope of getting to. I was angry at God, because I assumed he was choosing to keep me away- so really it was his fault that I couldn’t get there.
  2. the horror, where the people I loved were evil and trying to destroy me, and where nothing would ever ever be good – where not even God could fix things.
  3. actual reality, where things were mostly good, but not my previous understanding of ideal.

If life was intended to be the utopia, then I had seriously messed something up at some point, despite always trying as hard I could to do and be what God wanted from me. If life was the horror, I thought I could (and should) seize control from God and set my own destiny – but it turns out that seizing control from God never works. I tried, and tried, and tried with all my soul and strength to take control and make the horror world less awful. It was a terrible process, but I realized, eventually, that it was impossible. Also, thankfully, that it wasn’t even reality.

That left only actual reality – and if actual reality was all that was available for me to work with, I was really scared that my life would never be what I wanted it to be.

Oh good, not just me then…

We realized that other people do this too – we saw it happening, we had it happen to us as the objects, and we were confused and hurt when people saw us as demons or monsters out to destroy them. But…then we realized that these people were just really scared. They wanted to control us into doing the things that would make them feel less scared – which we weren’t willing to do. The inability to control us made them more scared, which led to more attempts at control, and…

Scared people do crazy things.

It gave us a lot of new empathy actually. We realized that most of the people who ever did a bad thing to another person…they probably just created a false reality. Every mugger was just keeping himself fed and giving himself the life he deserved – it was only fair, only what he deserved from the people and world around him. Every despot was just preserving freedom or safety for his people – whatever meager amount could be eked out from this cold, dark world. “Because even meager safety in my kingdom is better than the horror of living under their regime.”

At this point, we’re pretty sure that even truly evil people create their own moral justification via false realities. Hitler believed in what he was doing so hard that he convinced thousands of people that he was right – his opinions were awful, and fueled by fear. But he was convincing. He was sure.

Scared people do crazy things.

What’s the answer?

What’s always the answer?

Faith. Trust.

I had to learn all over again how to trust. I had to trust that God loves me – and while he disciplines, he does not punish. I have already been forgiven, so…there isn’t anything to punish.

I had to be willing to see the people I loved, which I had been avoiding in case I was about to see them walk away from me. Once I saw them, I knew that they were not trying to destroy me – or if they were, I didn’t have to let them.

Once I could trust God, and remember that he loves me and wasn’t trying to punish me, it was clear(er) that the utopia probably didn’t exist. And once I could see the people I loved again, and I trusted that they were not trying to destroy me, it was clear(er) that the horror probably didn’t exist either. That left learning how to exist in actual reality, which…is an entirely other blog post.

Building Reliability

Building Reliability

by and | Organizations, People

The definition of reliability for the purposes of this post: other people believing that you (or your team) will:

  1. do what you say you’ll do, and
  2. do what they expect you to do.

Reliability is other people believing that you will do what you say you will do and also what they expect you to do.

Why Reliability?

Reliability is vital to several areas of organizational success:

  1. Successful delegation
  2. Independent execution by teams
  3. Independent execution by individuals

Delegation

When you hand off a task, it’s ideal if you no longer need to think about it – and the more you reliable the person you’re handing the task to, the more likely this is. With reliable people and teams, the default assumption is that any delegated task will be completed. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Delegation backed by a perception of reliability actually clears brains of stress and cognitive dissonance. Basically, people can stop worrying and focus on the work they need to do.

This magical theory applies to teams as well – if a team does the work they own, and they believe other teams will do the work they own, then all teams can focus on their own work. Ultimately this eliminates time spent on “following up” (pestering), and lowers everyone’s stress.

Execution

Individuals and teams who are allowed to execute without being required to explain every step and justify every decision can focus more on doing actual things. Even in the awesome Utopian Land of Reliability, some checking in is necessary, for a lot of reasons – one of the best is to give the leader the opportunity to teach and to reinforce good judgement. However, guidance shouldn’t be a nuisance – it shouldn’t turn into oversight to the point of preventing productivity.

If brains are calm and hearts aren’t worried, people can more easily focus on their work, objectives, and goals – and they execute their tasks more cleanly. When each person or team believes that they can focus on their responsibilities rather than worrying about other people’s execution, this leads to overall organizational success.

Reliability seems awesome! Uh…now what?

Cool, you want to be thought of as reliable so you can do stuff. A key question now becomes: how do you build a reputation for reliability? Or maybe the question should be, can this be deliberately built? Nope! Blog post ends here. Thanks for reading!

Kidding.

Building a reputation for reliability is surprisingly simple. In any relationship, you start at the ground floor, with basically zero reliability. To increase the number of reliability points, it’s like a ramp – a slow and steady upward movement.

The super secrety secret to building a reputation for reliability: make a commitment. Fulfill the commitment. Repeat.

Reliability for Newbs

Start a meeting by saying, “I’ll make a recap.” End the meeting, re-iterating that you’ll make the recap. Then make the recap. Tada! You’ve done a useful thing that you promised to do. Congratulations, you now seem more reliable! People now know that you kept that commitment.

You can do this by doing anything useful – say you’ll do it, and then follow through. For bonus trust points, promise to do it by a certain date and then deliver on or before your deadline.

Reliability Level Up

To continue to build your new reputation for being reliable, continue to keep your commitments. Small commitments can build reliability only to a certain level –  but after keeping enough smaller commitments, people will begin to give you opportunities to keep larger commitments.

These larger commitments, once kept, will give you more reliability points – but they’ll also be more complicated, and take longer to complete. However, in order to build to a high level of reliability, the pattern is exactly the same: steadily fulfill commitments over time.

Team Reliability

Teams can do the same thing, for themselves and for the teams and people they work with. At any time, an individual on the team can step up and start keeping commitments on behalf of the team. This results in a team’s reliability points increasing. The individual can then teach the other team members to keep commitments on behalf of the team. Every commitment kept adds to the team’s reliability point total – and also helps boost overall team morale.

There’s also the team’s perception of the team’s reliability – when this is working correctly, it’s usually when people say things like, “it’s a good team to work on.” Goals are a great way to help build this – committing to goals has the added bonus of building unity, and then following through on those commitments builds reliability. Even if a goal is not achieved, the tasks necessary to attempt to fulfill the goal are completed, and those commitments are kept.

Uh…Whoops. I Broke It.

A reputation for being reliable can be broken. To break it, don’t keep your commitments. Promise things that you can’t or won’t do. You could also just stop doing the things already expected of you – because reliability is both the things you say you’ll do and the things people expect you to do.

Let’s say you fail to fulfill a commitment and you lose reliability points. It happens. People aren’t perfect – but that’s okay, because perfection isn’t necessary here. There are two things that can help repair this break and then allow you to go back to building reliability:

  1. Accept responsibility. Clearly. Be obvious that you accept responsibility for the failure. Hiding from a commitment, hoping no one notices it wasn’t fulfilled, does even more damage.
  2. Renegotiate the commitment. Make a reasonable judgment about re-committing to the task. Does the task still make sense to do? If so, what is a reasonable deadline for the commitment? If the commitment should still be fulfilled, fulfill it.

Ultimate Value

Being perceived as reliable lets people and teams believe that they can do increasingly harder and more awesome things. If we don’t truly believe that we can succeed, we don’t try. When we do believe that we can succeed, we start to watch for opportunities to do increasingly more awesome things.

Reliability lets teams believe in themselves.

Reliability also lets us focus on execution instead of worrying. We can focus more on tailored challenges and working hard, and less on trying to split our focus to all details of all things.

Basically…when we believe that we can succeed (more awesome things), and we can focus on execution (get things done), more awesome things get done. Reliability helps fulfills both of those requirements.

Reliability makes more awesome things get done.

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