Rol says:
"I would love to hear from other managers how they feel and how they work
with people they do not care for."
This has been a hard lesson for me to learn and I still have a loooong
ways to go. The turning point came when I came to realize that the
problem was with me, not with the other person. Carol Sanger expressed
the same kind of discovery in her posting. I now think of these people as
persons I've not learned to care for YET. I have come to discover that
every person has good qualities but that sometimes my narrow perspective
has made it difficult for me to see them. So I work at seeing the good in
others. I have come to believe that God puts these people in my life to
stretch me.
In the course I took at Ghost Ranch on communicating with non-human life,
we studied the techniques that Monty Roberts, the renowned horse trainer
and author of The Man Who Listens to Horses, learned from observing wild
Mustangs. He went into their habitat, set aside all that he *knew* about
horses, and opened his mind to learn from them, accept their forms of
communication, acknowledge their form of intelligence. Roberts says that
listening and paying attention can "effectively cross over the boundary
between human (the ultimate fight animal) and horse (the flight animal).
Using their language, their system of communication, I could create a
strong bond of trust. I would achieve cross-species communication."
I believe that applying these techniques to our difficult human
relationships should be even easier. But we must take the time to try to
understand these less appealing people and even if we can't fully
understand them, to accept them as they are. Rol, you expressed the
difficult in mentoring people you don't care for. It may be that it's
necessary for you to first be mentored BY them, to learn FROM them, before
you will be ready to teach them anything.
Best regards,
Roxanne
-- Roxanne Abbas mailto:rabbas@comp-web.com http://www.comp-web.comLearning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>