My hat off to Kevin Shadix who wrote:
"as people, most of us have a tendency to place blame for
"what's wrong" with our lives outside ourselves.The more we do this, the
less able we are to authentically choose and create how we want our lives
to be. Sometimes, because of the lack of real, internal power, people
seek positional power, wealth, etc to overcompensate."
The other night I watched a show on welfare reform. On the whole it was an
excellent production. There were two women who really caught my attention:
One was a woman whose husband had left her and her three young children,
and the other was a woman who had been on welfare for twenty years. The
show followed the lives of these two women (plus a number of others). The
woman whose husband left her took responsibility for her life, admitted
that she didn't want to be on welfare long-term, and worked her butt off
trying to find work. She recognized that she needed to work to get a sense
of fulfillment and joy in life. She repeatedly talked about "work" as a
critical part of building a strong self-esteem. The other woman blamed
society for cutting her off from her benefits, and making her life hard.
She kept saying "it isn't fair."
The show captured, in an hour, the fundamental differences between the
powerful and the powerless. The first woman was powerful because she
engaged life, despite the fact that she was struggling to provide for her
children (in fact they were so poor she had no money to buy any of them
christmas presents; all she could give them was some food they got at a
local food distribution point for the poor). The second woman had
surrendered her power to society, thus leaving herself with no options and
no solutions. While I have immense compassion for both of them, I have
much more respect for the first.
This reminds me of my experience in large corporations: People can always
find someone to blame for their low performance. "My manager didn't do
this or that so I couldn't do my job right." Ok. So what about the people
who are performing at 3x better in the same environment? FDR said we have
nothing to fear, but fear itself. And in the same vein, I say we have no
one to blame but ourselves.
And Kevin reference Victor Frankl's book "Man Search for Freedom." Just
for the record, the actual title of the book is "Man's Search for
Meaning." It is a very powerful book (and a quick read too!).
--
Benjamin Compton
DWS -- "The GroupWise Integration Experts"
A Novell Platinum Partner
bcompton@dws.net
http://www.emailsolutions.com
--Ben Compton <BCompton@dws.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>