Lessons Learned While Helping my Colleagues Discover How Human Works
by Zoltán Dankó
Future-Proof Organization Practitioner -- Human leadership fuels high performance. If you have open mind, I help add open culture to leverage open-source - Change is risk: doing the same leads nowhere. Let's move on!
I am grateful to my colleagues in the past months for participating in a session of workshops on personality, mind, body, hormones, and how they function in all of us.
There were two insights last year that struck me. First: watching how conflicts were emerging between colleagues, how banal they seemed to me, and what frustration they experienced in the episodes. They were not complicated things. Colleagues remembered differently what happened two days earlier. Some colleagues got frustrated about why they thought they pulled the rope harder than others did. It made me think.
Why was that some people could communicate with each other? They found the proper tone, exact phrase, while others didn't. I realized that only a few took lessons on how our personality worked; we spent time and effort to dig deep to get to know the layers of our personality. It was not taught in school, high school, and not even at the university. How could we expect someone to possess this knowledge, then? Why are we surprised to run into conflicts and fights day in, day out?
The second insight was that we do not have a chance to acquire this intricate knowledge at once. We didn't have an opportunity to spend years collecting all the pieces of the puzzle. In the constant existential fight that we have been going through every day, we simply couldn't afford it. Then I thought, what if we could convey this necessary knowledge in an eatable and digestible format to the colleagues?
I spent a lot of time studying philosophy, psychology, or human behavior. It prompted me to tell my colleagues about these life-saving topics, and that was the birth of the PersonReady workshop series for our team. It was not optional but mandatory for everyone. I knew it would be hard for everyone. I also knew that there would be some who still would say, "that was not for me, I always knew what I did."
We started off with memory. We smashed the false concept that our memory would work like an SD-Card. On the contrary, we would reconstruct our memories each time we wanted to recollect a memory. If so, the next concept on the fundament of our personal identity started to tremble. Practical advice was delivered to the colleagues on what could improve this capacity and what would destroy it.
Then, we continued with the instinctive self, ego, and superego. Seeing the colleague's faces in the workshop showed me when a colleague realized how these layers of his/her humanity played out in his/her life. Self-reflection could give us a chance to watch and possibly control our doings.
The third workshop dealt with fears and anxiety. Probably it was the topic that most of us had the idea to know quite a lot about it. Since it was our daily experience, we falsely thought we had everything to control it. Our muscles showed us the truth. If you leaned forward and you couldn't touch your shoes, it was a sign that the muscles in your back were cramped. Fears and anxiety started as an evolutionary, biological function. Later, they were transformed into a control mechanism on society and some religions. Today, media has applied fear and anxiety as a mass control switch.
The shadow-self was probably the least known topic. However, it became the trickiest one as well. We could not explore it directly. In the best case, we had an indirect experience of how the shadow-self used to work in us. Probably the most shocking insight was that all the things we hate in another person were parts of us, too. Just our ego did not let us know about them. Our ego must preserve the best image of us as long as possible.
The final piece of the series was about stress. We went through the three stages of stress, and it turned out why the stress was a deadly weapon against us. János Selye, the famous scientist, taught us: It is not the stress that kills us, but how we react and adapt to it. Faces showed how upset the colleagues were. Depending on how we respond to situations and circumstances would define the outcome of Russian roulette for us.
I wondered if exclusively the top managers in the company would be couched, and the colleagues would get a two hours workshop on how to communicate appropriately? How far can a CEO and a colleague at any company level get without acquiring this knowledge? Afterward, we can have a clear picture of how many open-minded colleagues with growth-mindset we have.
