It's Sunday, and I have a confession to make: everything I observe about others, leadership, and/or the world—every tip, suggestion, or "insight" I make highlights something I myself need to learn. In that way, I have to say I'm quite the serial hypocrite.
It can be an "ouch" to realize that whatever you notice, particularly if you feel strongly about it, says more about you than it does them.
For example, I did a post on the blog a while back about ego, and how it’s not an amigo. Then, when a few of my things were published recently, and … well … nothing happened, I found my own ego acting up. Like the Bobby Brady birthday party (other baby boomers will get that), I felt I had done “all that work” and no one showed up. Where’s the fanfare? Where’s the marching band? It wasn’t pretty as I got increasingly cranky and intense until I realized what had happened. It took a while as I cycled through denial, embarrassment, and finally, acceptance. Being human, I will likely have to repeat this lesson until I get it, and then it will be on to the next.
Likewise, if you are inspired by something you see or read, chances are it’s telling you something great about yourself—either actual, or potential.
Psychologists call this "projection." Our strong feeling (positive or negative) about a situation, boss, friend, colleague, team, or person reporting to us is a flag waving over an observation or lesson waiting to be learned about ourselves.
If you ignore that feeling, it will continue until you acknowledge it, and learn from it. Noticing and accepting it is a great way to get over a bad attitude about something or someone.
The little fig leaf here is that it’s usually not either your issue or theirs— it’s typically both. But since you can’t learn something on behalf of someone else, the take-away is for you to learn your own part of it.
Believe me, ego will justify it, say it’s “them, not me,” and try to paint itself as an objective observer. Not.
I experience it frequently and TRY to learn from it quickly. Unfortunately, repetition is often called for until the lesson is learned.
Continuing my ego week, for example—someone I mentored a while back used an idea we had discussed in passing as her primary branding. I don’t own the idea, and wasn’t even the one who thought of this particular application of it. Yet my annoyance was palpable, and I’m pretty sure it came out sideways in an email I sent her. Once again, my own ego was not my amigo, and she didn’t deserve my little dig. This came almost immediately after my big “insight” about ego on this blog.
So it being Sunday, I decided to share the lesson I’m learning about projection, and own it. I spot it, I got it. What bugs me hugs me. What I resist persists.
Amen.