Honesty. Mirroring. Coworkers. Love.
This blog post has been years in the making. Some lessons take that long. And like many lessons, this one is ongoing.
I will describe the evolution of my own understanding by describing each piece of my learning puzzle designated by each new paragraph.
STARTING WITH THE PDF INSERTED BELOW: I was listening to a recent Brene Brown podcast and she suggested an exercise of selecting your two top values. Since I was listening on the podcast, I wasn’t able to access the list of suggested words or values but as Brene continued on her podcast, I knew what my first value would be even though it was not one being discussed. Honesty. For whatever reason has always been so core to my personality. I remember trying to lie as a child and later as a teen and I just could not do it! I was bad at it and it went against every part of me. I have been told that I may even be too honest for my own good. Is that a thing??
TRAIL RUN CLOSE TO TWO YEARS AGO: I was listening to Jody Moore coach on parenting. She was taking calls and coaching mothers. As often seems to happen a theme began to appear that threaded throughout most of the calls and that was the idea of “mirroring”. The concept being that we have a tendency to mirror behavior of others; this can be positive or negative. I had heard the concept before but I hadn’t ever really experienced its application in the way I did as I listened to the call. One woman was complaining that her teenager was really rude. She gave a few examples which really did show rude behavior but as Jody proceeded with the call she was able to show the mom that she, in fact, was being rude to her daughter. I can’t remember all of the examples but it was amazing to me that every one of the callers had been mirroring. I believe this is where the seed was planted in my brain to think about areas in my life where I might be mirroring behaviors.
PAST EMPLOYMENT EXPERIENCE: I worked with a woman who I had a very hard time with. I won’t go into all of the things that daily drove me crazy about her but the one that kept coming into my mind over. and over. again was once when we asked her to perform a certain task she said she didn’t know how and that we would need to train her how to complete the desired task. I questioned her and said, “But in your interview you said that you were comfortable completing {said task}?” She responded with, “Oh, everyone lies in interviews. Of course I said whatever needed to get the job.” Whaaaaaaat?????? I was floored! I could not imagine ever lying in an interview. From that moment on, I had evidence of why I couldn’t like this woman. And I collected so much more evidence.
DURING COACH CERTIFICATION: I decided that my number one goal was to figure out how to love all of the humans. I know it sounds lofty but I really wanted to and felt capable. But then…I considered the aforementioned coworker and thought, “How! am I going to love her?” I set out to change my thoughts about the things she was doing. I REALLY worked on this. I was aware of my actions and soon I did start feeling better about her and was able to act in a way that was genuine for me and polite and kind.
SELF COACHING: After leaving the employment setting mentioned above I was considering the understanding that situations where we have a strong defensive type reaction to someone else’s behavior, is almost always the case that we struggle similarly with the same type of behavior ourselves. {Back to mirroring}. My thoughts were drawn to the coworker I had a difficult time with and I thought, How could that be? After all, the thing I most struggled with her about was her flippant thoughts around honesty. And, I am an honest person. I mean it is my number one.
THEN IT OCCURED TO ME: That particular job I had taken without being in complete honesty with myself. The position was offered and I was looking for a part time similar position but they were only offering it as a full time position. I KNEW I did not want to work full time and yet I took the position. I was actually very honest with HR when they offered the position. I told them I wanted part time. I also decided to take the position. I did work there for over three years. But, I have to say that while I enjoyed a lot of things about the job, I never felt completely honest with myself working there. When I uncovered this belief, it was so easy for me to understand why I had such a tough time loving that coworker. HER BEHAVIORS WERE LIKE LOOKING IN THE MIRROR AND SEEING SOMETHING I DID NOT WANT TO SEE.
So, go pick your values. {My #2 is Faith}. And be prepared to evolve because living by said values is not as easy as you may first think.
xoKathleen
This is available to anyone off of Brene’s website.
