Are People Really the Problem?
Posted: Friday, July 22, 2011
by Douglas Cartwright
Living Words Coaching and Training
People are people so why should it be: that you and I should get along so awfully?
Depeche Mode
I've worked in high end retail and I'm sure at some point I've muttered: “This job would be great if it wasn't for the customers!” They were rude, arrogant, intolerant, and demanding according to me and I assumed it was because they were rich.
Then I found others who claimed I could only reject in someone else something I was rejecting in myself. Freud called it projection, cognitive and behavioural scientists call it a blind spot.
Recently, I re-read Loving What Is with it's amazing eye-opening questions about your beliefs:
- Is that true?
- Can you really know that is true?
- How do you react when you believe that thought?
- Who would you be without that thought?
- What is the opposite of that thought?
Doing what Katie Byron calls 'the work' you discover that you really are the source of most of your illusions. Yes, that's right, the source of your trouble with other people is to a great degree – you.
So you need to deal with your issues.
It's a truism that you can get away from people but you can't get away from yourself. In fact, you can't really get away from people unless you are disgustingly rich and can afford to live miles away from anyway, and order all your pizza via the internet.
You probably don't anyone to tell you if you have a problem being around people because you will know it. It will manifest in a bodily tension that you've grown so used to you can almost forget it but it's still there. You feel a sense of relief when you come out of certain situations. You plan big but when it comes to acting big you don't do it. You know that your success depends on teamwork but you try and do everything alone.
If you have a problem getting along with people that isn’t changing despite your efforts to learn communication skills (!), I strongly encourage you to examine your assumptions about human nature. Your assumptions about human nature. You know – what you think people are really like when the chips are down, the knives are out and zombies are roaming the streets.
Our assumptions about what people are like affects almost every level of our interactions with them. We all know of someone whose heart was broken and now can't trust men/women but what about when you can't (won't) trust anyone?
For many of us, we have a least some prejudice against someone or some people in some context. This may be due to an experience we had with a representative of that group.
For others, the problem is more extensive: What about when your core view of people is that when the situation gets desperate they'll hurt you. That was my bottom-line about people for most of my life: That it is human nature to get nasty. So I expected the worst of people in situations that even faintly smelled of conflict. This lead to me feeling tense even when objectively the situation didn’t warrant it.
Ironically, as the biblical patriarch Job said: “the thing I greatly feared has come upon me”: when I feared people those out to take advantage of weakness smelled me from a mile off and I got severely bullied. We do, in some way, attract the thing we are trying to avoid.
If I knew then what I know now about myself – and people - I probably would have handled it differently.
Fear of man as the Bible calls it, often starts early in life with an insecure or plain dangerous home life. If you grow up believing that the people you should be able to trust most are untrustworthy then how the heck are you going to trust anyone else? That is a fair assumption for a child and also needs to be one of the first ones to go when you get old enough to realise that you are using your parents as an archetype for everyone else – and they are not. There are millions of nice people on the planet – your parent was maybe just not one of them.
Dealing with your expectations of perfection
Our parents aren't perfect. I guess for most people the day they realise their parents are just human beings is a shock. One of my parents said and did something last year that I really didn't respect. I still feel sad about it but you know what – they're only human. When I came to terms with the fact that my parents didn't love me the way I needed to be loved my next question was: Can I love myself that much? The answer, happily, is yes. More on this later.
Give others the same breaks as yourself
I know, I know. Every other driver on the road is an idiot except you. But we would like people to judge us by our good intentions whilst we judge them by their behaviour. Isn’t that rather hypocritical? Since we don’t know most of the time whilst people do what they do shouldn’t we give their behaviour the best interpretation possible? No, you don’t know why the guy cut you up. Perhaps his wife is dying of cancer. Perhaps it was a mistake.
Look for similarities between you and others rather than differences
Whilst reading The Magic of Thinking Big I came across a life changing idea.
Schwatz said “remember that the other guy is like you with similar hopes dreams and interests.” On one level this is not true – how much do I have in common with the guys who did the ethnic cleaning in Bosnia or the guys who gassed Jews in Auschwitz?
On the face of it, not much. But usually when these guys are found 50 years later they have been living normal lives and are nice to their neighbours. They eat, sleep, had dreams for their lives, probably enjoy some of the same things we do like music and good reading. They probably loved once or still do – and they have their fears in the night as well.
People are basically out to get the same things albeit in different forms. The day I was able to look around the bus, believe this, and see 'my fellow man' rather than a bunch of people 'out to get me' was a victory day indeed.
These people despite their nice clothes, their technology, their posturing (in London everyone postures, especially the young) were, beneath it all, asking the same questions about life: Who am I? What am I here for? Does/will anyone love me? Can I feed my family/self today?
C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series, did a comparative study on world religion's (major and minor) and discovered a huge similarity in their major precepts: do not kill, defend the weak, help the poor etc. How is it that these people over thousands of years in different countries with no contact with each other came to similar conclusions? Because, beneath it all, we are all made similar. Francis Collins, the scientific head of the Human Genome Project argues that this is evidence of a moral law embedded into each of us and although the interpretations can be different – there are many similarities. There is no them and us really – there is only us.
Develop your view of others through the views of great people
Many of the world’s heroes had a positive view of people which is what drew people to them in the first place. Reading their biographies and what their concepts of people enabled them to do can inspire you to change your views.
I just finished reading the biography of Mother Theresa. She said that she saw the broken body of the crucified Christ in people dying of terrible foul diseases – and this enabled her to treat them with great love and respect. This is an example of a paradigm changing perspective. Here are some others I recommend.
Franklin Rooselevelt
William Tyndale
Sebastian Co
Anthony Robins
Self-acceptance is key
Self acceptance means acknowledging what we find in ourselves whether we like it or not. After all, if it is raining it is raining – fact - and only our interpretations can make it good or bad.
Self-acceptance can come from a number of sources. You can self-accept by getting so sick and tired of fighting yourself and your thoughts about what others think about you (take a breath) that you just say 'stop' inside and give it up.
You can remember people in your life who modelled self-acceptance for you and imagine what it would be like to feel that about yourself. My audio The Personal PowerPack has a powerful exercise for this along with 13 other tracks on esteem and self-control.
You can receive acceptance from a higher power. I confess to not knowing much about other religion's view of human nature but I know that Jesus Christ accepted us for what we were and are before we were (and even if we are not) interested in Him.
Knowing that He loves me despite my many faults gives me the confidence to apply acceptance to myself. After all, if God accepts me then what right have I got to not accept myself? This creates a powerful frame to live from.
Unpick the Gordian knot
In order to rework your perceptions you’ll need to get your hands dirty. Dive into that brain and find out what makes up the content that drives you. We all operate out of concepts in the world and reworking your concept of people will change your life. In fact, if you use my audio course:
Change your Concepts: Change your Life you can unpick and reconstruct any concept you choose – and there’s a big list of words and ideas we can have problems with!
Make a start for yourself by writing down as many answers as possible to the sentence:
People are....
Take a break when you’ve done this and come back to your answers. How reasonable are they? How do they affect your view of yourself and other people? Is this really what you think about you?
I hope this helps,
To your highest and best
Douglas Cartwright
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