I’ve been reading Carolyn Myss’ Defy Gravity, which is a fantastic read about healing. One of her ideas is that people are never what they appear to be when you meet them. Rather then are the sum total of every experience that ever happened to them.
Her point was that if you’ve been hurt by someone, the way to forgiveness is to understand that the person who hurt you has probably also suffered a mish-mash of hurts, aggressions, sadness, and pain which has spilled onto you. This thinking is sort of a first step in understanding that often times, the pain that you experienced from that person is not really personal.
This got me thinking about geometry of all things. Remember the idea that a point is really not a point on its own but on point on a line. So if you meet me at a certain ‘point’ of my life, you may interpret me as that ‘point’ at which you found me. But in actuality, this ‘point’ is really just a part of a line, a trajectory of my life that intersected with yours.
Your Team is a Little Blue Dot
And that line originated from the intersections of my mum and pa (ie my starting point) and has continued since; and that continuation has included financial difficulties through grad school, raising two kids as a single parent, maybe being ostracized for being too smart by bosses who were threatened by me….a WHOLE lot of stuff.
We all have that WHOLE lot of stuff – or said differently, the line of points that is our life is full and complex and long.
What happens when your line intersects with another’s line in the work place?. You probably know that it’s never simple, it’s the cumulation of myriad points over time and BOOM you intersect and bring all those points to bear on that one moment in time.
Now imagine multiple points coming together at say…the beginning of a project.
Complicated, eh? No wonder you head into storming right away – it’s not just the one person, it’s not just that singular moment where you meet everyone for the first time at a project kickoff..it’s rather the sum total of their lives and yours to that point.
The point is (I really need another word don’t I?)..The IDEA is that as Project Managers, we have to understand the complicated nature of human beings. Most of the time bad behavior, be it from a boss who is threatened by you, or a developer who only wants to do what they want to do, has nothing to do with you…it has to do with an accumulation of a life time of points on a line.
Maybe just that understanding can enable one to develop the compassion that Derek Heuther and Samad Aidane are referring to in Compassion is the Killer App.
