Being polite at work always involves suppressing something.Politeness is doing what's considered reasonable and appropriate rather than talking about what's true.Politeness calls on us to say what will be acceptable rather than what will help.Politeness has us be liked (although in a shallow way) rather than be trusted.When politeness dominates we force our concerns underground, hiding them from the light, and from each another. There in the dark where they cannot be acted upon directly our difficulties fester, becoming resignation and resentment. Many a polite organisational culture - in which people are outwardly friendly - masks a deep vein of frustration and despair that can find no useful expression.The opposite of politeness is not cruelty, or unkindness, or wilful injury to others - unless in your pursuit of truth you also abandon your capacity for compassion.No, the opposite of politeness is - perhaps surprisingly - respect. Respect for oneself, respect for others, respect for action that matters, and respect for the important work that you are here to do.
On the background
Behind any life, and any society, are numerous background narratives that give us a sense of who we are, who other people are, and what’s possible for us. They tell us how we can live, what’s of value, and how to relate to one another. And they tell us what’s important to pay attention to, and what’s marginal.Sometimes the background narratives are visible and explicit in a family or community, such as the way in which biblical narratives give a sense of belonging and orientation to people who are part of some religious communities. But most often – even when there are visible and explicit narratives available – the narratives we actually live by are invisible, and we see them clearly only as an outsider entering a society for the first time, or when the narrative runs into trouble and starts producing unintended consequences.For the last century or so in the West, we’ve lived in a background narrative that’s directed our attention most strongly towards what’s measurable, particularly what’s financially measurable, and has discounted almost everything else. The bottom line, financial return on investment, this quarter’s results – all have been taken for what’s ‘real’.And at the same time, we’ve considered what’s not measurable largely ‘unreal’ – the quality of our inner lives, our relationships with others, supportive and close-knit communities, the care we give and receive, our capacity to nurture and appreciate beauty. We can’t pay much attention to these, we say, because in the ‘real world’ there are tough business decisions to make. There are profits to be made.I’m not arguing that profit is somehow unreal, while beauty and care are real. That would be an equally narrow way of looking at the world. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer how our narrowness – our failure to appreciate and include all dimensions of human life in our businesses, institutions, and in our public discourse – is wreaking havoc in our present and seriously limiting our capacity to respond to the complexity of the future we’re creating. The shocking rise of inequality in even the richest of the worlds societies, the shaking of our financial systems, our seeming inability to respond creatively to climate change – all ought to have ourselves asking whether what we take to be unquestionably true about how to live is, really, deeply questionable.We urgently need to expand our horizons – to start to take seriously that which we’ve marginalised in the relentless colonisation of all aspects of human life by the narrative of economics.
Waste
It's easy to think of waste in material terms - waste of money, or waste of resources.But our busyness - which keeps us feeling involved and engaged even when we're not doing what matters to us - covers up many other kinds of waste, equally significant.Here are five that are addressable by shifting your requests and your responses to requests:
- Not asking: The waste that comes from expecting that other people will know what you want and all the waiting, resentment, and frustration that comes when it turns out that they don't.
- Imagining you've been asked, when you haven't: The endless waste of projects and tasks duplicated and not needed, in your eagerness to be seen to deliver and be productive.
- Not checking that what you asked is possible: Skipping the necessary to-and-fro of conversation which checks that the person that you asked understood and had the time, capacity and skilfulness to respond. Without all of these, your requests are, often, as good as nothing.
- Not saying no: moving into action without checking your own capacity. This one leads to the endless waste of time and commitment that comes from being overstretched, or being unable to fulfil the promises you've made.
- Not paying attention to your own changing circumstance: Saying, and meaning, a genuine yes to a request but later finding yourself unable to deliver, and pretending nothing changed... leading to both damaged trust and delays.
If you worked on becoming more skilful at these five, you'd make huge strides in your capacity to do what matters without so readily wasting your own, and others', time, resources, commitment and good will.
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Please, tell me
Please, tell me - why is it that you are so sure that your inner voice is telling you the truth about you?Do you believe everything that others tell you in this way?Do you give your inner conversations credence simply because they are so close in (so close that only you can hear them)?Is distance reason enough to give up your questioning? your capacity to seek truth?What would you do, do you think, if you found out how many inner inaccuracies about yourself you were in the midst of believing - and acting upon - every day?
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Bracing
How much of your energy, do you think, do you dedicate to bracing yourself against the world?
You may have to look closely and quietly for a while to find this out.
It may not be at all obvious.
We all learn to brace, in one way or another, from when we’re very young, to protect ourselves from experiences that are overwhelming. Later, our bracing continues, long after it has ceased to be a useful or necessary protection. And in our bracing is much of our stuckness, much of our tuning out, and many of our habitual, automatic, numbing reactions to the world and to people.
Where to look for all this? In the tightness of your jaw, the scrunching of your eyes and cheeks, the contraction in your chest or in your belly, the crossing of your arms, that slight but definite collapse in the middle that hunches your back, in the way you raise the angle of your head so you look - at some distance - down your nose at the world, in the constriction in your throat when you speak.
All of these bodily responses - and there are many more - are subtle but powerful ways of holding your experience of the world at bay. Most of us are hardly in contact with what’s around us and we’ve barely seen how much effort we’re putting in to not being hurt, or upset, or worried, or afraid, or seen.
If you want to relate deeply to others and to your own life there can be fewer more immediate steps than discovering the bracing holds you live in day to day and gradually working to release them.
For its own sake
To be a consumer (as we're all told we are these days) is to look at the world with ever-judging eyes. Too hot, or too cold, not fast enough, or productive enough, helpful enough, entertaining enough, loving enough, committed enough, or rewarding enough... We come to look at our relationships, our employees, our colleagues, our every experience of life as if framed always by potential disappointment. This is what a consumer, in the end, is - the one who reserves the right to complain or withdraw at any moment.It only takes a little thought about this to see how inappropriate a consumer orientation is for most of what's important in life. In friendship, in intimate relationships, in a marriage and in a family being 'consumer' reduces us to an endless stream of demands and the thinly disguised threat that if we're not pleased any more we'll leave and look for something better. It's perhaps harder to see that a consumer orientation to the people who work with us (in which they are only ever really ok if delivering to the targets and standards upon which we've insisted) is equally limited. The problem in all these cases is that being a consumer means replacing commitment with a demand. We stay in relationship only as long as we feel satisfied, a stand which seriously undermines the very trust upon which all meaningful relationship rests.Our encounter with just about everything else in the world can be similarly compromised by being a consumer. We stop experiencing the inherent wonders of nature, technology, art and relate not to the thing in itself but to our own momentary like or dislike of what we're experiencing.What possibilities we can open when we look at life, and all it brings, with much bigger eyes than this. And what would we discover if we were willing to see beyond our like and dislike, our demand that every experience and every person do something for us, and appreciate each part of our lives - people, objects and all - simply for its own sake?
Idiots and Monsters
The problem with all of our judgements about others
‘He’s an idiot’
‘She’s a monster’
‘He’s useless’
is that they turn the other person into a non-person, a label, an object upon which we can project all of our frustration, all of our disappointment, all of our despair.
Fantastically powerful in maintaining our own self-esteem, judgements give us a sense of self only because they strip the other person of most of their self-hood. How much love, care, dignity, integrity can we see in another - however angry or frustrated we are - while we have them be an idiot, a charlatan, a waster?
Our judgements conveniently blind us to our own contribution to the very situation which matters to us so much. As long as 'he’s a crook' we're freed from our capacity - and our responsibility - to speak up, to make requests, to listen, and to break out of the patterns that are our own part in keeping the difficulty going.
And, most of all, our judgements absolve us of the responsibility to understand the other in their fullness, stifling our interest in what about them and their lives has them behave in this way. And they stop us bringing the necessary compassion and wisdom that’s always required to find if we want to find our way out of the prison of our frustration, resentment, disappointment and anger.
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Applause
Our workplaces are riddled with mechanisms, procedures, evaluations and assessments that are designed around generating approval rather than taking action of consequence.Can you see this in your own work? And can you see the cost?And what would become possible if you were willing to do what you do, bring what you bring, not because of other people's applause but because it matters?
What to take on
We necessarily spend the first part of our lives learning to hold back so we can fit in with the family and culture into which we're born.Even our rebellions are usually, in one way or another, defined by this (a reaction against what's around us rather than something truly new).So our responsibility in adulthood is to work out how to give up holding ourselves back so that the life that we are - creative, flowing, responsive - can be expressed and so that we can make the contribution that is ours to bring.And this perhaps is the biggest and most important work any adult, and anyone who wants to lead or touch the lives of others, can take on.
I'd never be like that
When you’re irritated or annoyed with someone for the way they’re being, you may think “I would never be like that”.But the intensity of your irritation could be a sign that you’re experiencing a shadow side ofyourself – a part of you, seen reflected in them, that you deny and which you do your best to keep out of view.Pushing the other person away is an attempt to push away the part of yourself you’d rather not see.And instead of believing all your judgements, you could start to recognise that what you’re seeing in them is, indeed, just like you. And then you have the possibility of reaching out to them with compassion rather than hostility, learning more about yourself, and healing what’s pushing the two of you apart.