by : lacylit10 Life Lessons

Growth.

I am all for holding people accountable, and I am skeptical of people who change their minds. But we don’t know what we don’t know, until we know. Quite frankly, I live in fear over the things I post online. When and how will it come back to haunt me? Nothing is safe anymore.

It seems that people neglect context. They jump to conclusions. They make immediate judgments and assumptions. And that’s fine, it is natural human behavior. It takes practice to be aware of when we are making judgments and assumptions, then overcome our initial reactive feelings. But it is the second step that is critical in how we interact with each other and form conclusions.

Take the short food safety videos I do on Instagram, as an example. You cannot and should not come to a conclusion on the safety of your food in one 2-3 minute video. Not even a series of 2-3 minute videos can begin to cover the complexity of efforts taken amongst our food supply chain.

But this is exactly what we do. We see a short video or quote or paraphrase, and we base our entire belief on something with just a fragment of information. We take so many things at face value.

But it goes beyond that. If we’re not changing, we’re not learning, and we’re not growing.

I recently saw something online that said “Trying to hurt me by bringing up my past is like trying to rob my old house. I don’t live there anymore.” I am an entirely different person today than I was 10 years ago, and definitely different than the 16 year old I was 20 years ago. So. much. life. has been lived between then and now. Unless I have done something ethically wrong, should I be held accountable for personal decisions made in the past?

We all take our own specific journey, and that includes making our own mistakes and learning our own lessons. We do not know the mental state of a person that led them to make their decisions. We do not know their past and their trauma. (And everyone has trauma no matter how small it may seem to someone who has suffered more severely.)

Today, we pick up our cell phones and record complete strangers for actions without their knowledge and post it on the internet without their permission. What if that person had been abused by their spouse before the angry outburst? We drudge up information from people’s pasts and try to hold them accountable to today’s societal standards, when the environment is completely different. Then when we can’t hold them accountable, we humiliate them and shame them.

This behavior is being normalized and promoted as acceptable. It. is. terrifying. People learn from their mistakes, but we aren’t letting nature take it’s course. Instead, we are taking it into our own hands to ensure that individual is punished by a means that we see fit. We aren’t letting the past that people have learned from stay in the past. We are forcing them to relive what might be painful experiences.

We tell children not to bully each other online or offline, yet, we, as grown ass adults, do exactly what we tell them not to. We ruin people’s lives without context. We ruin people’s lives based on fragments of information. We ruin people’s lives based on past decisions they may be trying to move on from.

I try to be honest with what I post here. I do not know everything. As I say in my intro, some people may consider me an expert in food safety. Yes, I may know a lot more than most people, but I know a hell of a lot less than others. And everyday, I am learning more.

How I handle a food safety crisis today may be different than how I would have handled it 5 years ago. But that doesn’t make how I handled it 5 years ago wrong. Since then I’ve gained knowledge and experience, regulation has changed, and the environment has changed. We all start somewhere. Can I be punished for something today that I did 5 years ago when I acted to the best of my ability given the knowledge and experience I had at that time?

The ability to learn from our mistakes and build upon our experiences is how we grow. Genuinely good people who act poorly without malicious intent should not be so publicly humiliated and shamed for errors in judgement. It’s cruel. And if they are genuinely good people, they’re actions will not go without personal punishment.

You have to be vulnerable enough to share things about yourself to connect with people. We should not attack those with whom we do not relate, because we are not going to connect with everyone. When we do attack those with whom we do not relate, we push them into silence and create our own echo chambers. And we wonder why our society has become so polarized…🤨🤷🏻‍♀️

by : lacylit10 Leadership

Avoidance.

We all value the importance of communication, but so many people avoid conversations that make them feel uncomfortable – which doesn’t solve anything.  It actually makes everything worse.  I’m not going to go into examples here.  We all know how it feels when we don’t feel as though we’re being listened to.

I tried to have one of these uncomfortable conversations with someone. I told him what I wanted to talk about, and we agreed to have the conversation at a later time when we would both be prepared to do so.  But that later discussion never happened.  This person invited me to have a seat at the table, then never let me pull up a chair.

That is such. poor. leadership.

Good leadership doesn’t turn off when you walk out of the office doors.  People who embrace leadership, live and breathe it in all aspects of their lives.  It becomes part of who they are.

I had two choices in this scenario:

  1. Push the issue.  I could have sought him out and demanded to be heard.
  2. Let it go.  I could accept that if he didn’t even want to hear me out, then it’s likely he wasn’t going to listen even if he did.

You probably know which choice I made.  Actually, you probably don’t.  This could really go either way. 😂

Here’s what I figured…

This person deliberately avoided this conversation and red flags came out:

🚩 He did not care enough about my discomfort (to set aside his own discomfort) 
🚩 He did not value my opinion or perspective (because he refused to hear it)
🚩 He did not respect me as an equal (by not giving me the opportunity to speak)

While I stewed over this for several days, I eventually let it go.  (I mean, that’s not entirely true.  It still pisses me off to think about it, but I let it go as far as he’s concerned.)  What I realized was that if none of those things applied before the conversation, nothing was going to change after the conversation.

As leaders, we must set aside our natural tendencies for the greater well-being of others.  He didn’t do that for me. And for as much as I wanted to give this guy a piece of my mind, I knew that ultimately it wasn’t going to do any good. Even if I received an empathetic and compassionate response, it wouldn’t have felt genuine. Because really, it wouldn’t have been. His authentic response was one of avoidance.

Remember when I said I’m starting to see more people in an unfavorable light? This is an example of one of those times. I realized this person wasn’t treating me in a way that I deserve, and I adjusted a new boundary accordingly.

We all have the right to be treated the way we want to be treated. That is 💯 within our power to control. He did what he thought was best for him by avoiding the issue, and I did what was best for me by walking away from it.

While I would like to say an unfortunate and unintended consequence is that our relationship has since taken different shape and suffered because of this, I can’t say I’m all that disappointed. If I’m not going to be cared for, valued, or respected, then I’m not getting much benefit out of the relationship in the first place. And let’s be real, it’s his loss anyway. 😁💁🏻‍♀️