The next meditation on developing courageous followership from Ira Chaleff’s book The Courageous Follower is: I am responsible for the attractive and unattractive parts of who I am. This is a tough but important principle to practice.
We are who we are. By the time we reach adulthood, our personalities are relatively stable. Our responsibility is to understand our personality and how it affects what we are attracted to, what we like to avoid, and how we interact with others as we engage in both the activities that we love and those that we despise. We can’t change who we are, but we can control what we do and how we interact with others along the way. It is unacceptable to blame personality for bad choices or bad behavior.
Our attitudes, on the other hand, are subject to change. As I have said before, please stop thinking in terms of “good attitude” and “bad attitude” - those approaches are not useful. If we can identify a specific attitude at work in ourselves, then we can take specific action to change that attitude. For example, if we realize that we have low job satisfaction, then by understanding the most powerful drivers of satisfaction at work we can partner with others to try to improve those characteristics of the job and work environment with the hope of eventually becoming more satisfied.
Because of the self-serving bias in explaining our behavior, it is much easier to see and take credit for the attractive parts of who we think we are, and much more difficult to identify and take ownership of the unattractive parts. We are very skilled at deceiving ourselves into into believing things about ourselves that are distorted or simply not true.
One way we facilitate this skilled unawareness is to surround ourselves with people just like us. We are much more comfortable with people that we perceive to be like us along a dimension that is core to our identity and much less comfortable with people that provide a stark contrast to who we think we are. This exclusivity makes it easier to justify who we are and those that fit with us and to discount and disregard any notion of a need to change and grow.
We also must assume full responsibility for our own happiness. Smile, because happiness is a choice and we should appreciate how the attractive parts of who we are can make a significant difference in the lives of others.
We need to see clearly how who we are affects how we follow because how we follow will more than anything affect who we ultimately become.
Related Posts:
The Importance Of Understanding Personalities And Attitudes
ACT Change: Recognize Hypocrisy And Patterns Of Self-Deception
Attributions: The Fundamental Attribution Error And The Self-Serving Bias
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I’m loving this series. I loved Chaleff’s book. This principle reminds me of the quote: All men are self-made, only millionaires admit it.
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Welcome, David. glad you had a chance to read Chaleff’s book. It is a quick read and worth the time. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Bret
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Thanks Brett.
I like the way Chaleff explains this way of being and how we need to be mindful of our accumulated life experiences and the way in which they form our adult personalities.
Chris Argyris of Harvard, along with his protege Peter Senge of MIT, have done a lot of work on mental models and what Argyris calls his Ladder of Inference. This is also good material to read in conjunction with Chaleff.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
January 8th, 2010 at 6:39 pm
I am a big fan of both Senge and Argyris, Jim, so I appreciate you mentioning them here. You raise a very good point – thanks for sharing! Bret
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