Reflecting on the necessity of self-awareness, we examine how our actions can either deposit or withdraw from our 'trust bank', impacting our relationships. But it's not just about us. We also delve into the power of empathy – visualizing a middle ground to meet others halfway and seeing beyond the 'monsters' that can cloud our judgment.
Reflecting on the necessity of self-awareness, we examine how our actions can either deposit or withdraw from our 'trust bank', impacting our relationships. But it's not just about us. We also delve into the power of empathy – visualizing a middle ground to meet others halfway and seeing beyond the 'monsters' that can cloud our judgment.
📖 To access Travis' complete book list, visit his storehere
Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss, and I have one final replay for you, number 5 of 5, that talks about developing skills that will help us along the way in our just cause journeys. From here, we're going to put a bow on the book the Infinite Game and we're going to get ready to move on to our next season, the book the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Today's episode, though, is a dust off from season 3, when we covered Surrounded by Idiots. The episode covers how to better understand where people are coming from, which can lead to building more trusting relationships. In the words of some of our guests this season, it takes a village to pursue a just cause, and that requires strong relationships that are built on mutual trust.
Speaker 1:
Enjoy, we've talked about the trust bank and how to build up deposits in it. Every time we control our monsters, we make a deposit, and every time one of these little monsters gets the best of us, a withdrawal is actually made. So that balance it is contingent on our consistent behavior. We keep doing good, the balance grows. We start doing bad. Again, the balance drops. We do good, we do bad. We do good, we do bad. It cancels each other out, so it's a barometer of sorts To get a full bank account.
Speaker 1:
The most important step is to develop real self-awareness. Self-awareness is about learning from and correcting our own personal mistakes. What this means is that we first have to be aware of who we actually are, and I think one of the dangers of this book is that we can want to be something that we are not. It is very natural to look at someone else who has that get it all together and we idolize them and want to be like them. We're going to talk a lot about this in the next episode, but I want to get into today that we have to be aware of who we are in the present and why. That is important. Known people before that will read a book and they start to change who they are. It's not that that's a very dangerous thing. We also need to be more aware of who others are.
Speaker 1:
When people are acting different than us, are we giving them their due considerations? Are we stopping ourselves and saying is this their monster talking? Is this the monster under or out of control? I say it like this because sometimes we think people are bad people or we don't like them because of how they act, how they talk to us, how they interact with us. Or are they really bad, though? Are they really not worthy of being liked? Are they really out to get us? Do they really not care about us? What if they could learn one or two little skills to keep their little monsters in check? Would we like them more then? Would we stop considering them so bad? Would we stop questioning if they care? Each different monster shows how they care differently. None of them are right. None of them are wrong. It's just different ways to do it.
Speaker 1:
So what if it is not their monsters? That is the problem? What if it is our own monsters, if it's not the rest of the idiots in the room? What if I'm the actual idiot in the room? What if my personal monster is so out of control that I can't meet anyone in the middle? What if I can't really understand where anyone else is coming from? And because I'm not really in control of myself? So I found in the super majority. So I don't know what the percentage is here, but more than most of any frustrating situation that I've been in, it's normally a 50-50 issue.
Speaker 1:
One of the skills that I've learned to start is by visualizing where I am starting from, and that gives me a better context for where someone else is starting from. Then I can put a peg someplace close in the middle, so someplace like in between me and this other person. It doesn't even have to be perfect, it can be anywhere, but just get it somewhere in the middle. So close your eyes and envision it, find your arms apart, curve your hands forward and the left hand is you and the right hand is this other person. These are your two competing perspectives on whatever you're dealing with, and somewhere in the middle between those two hands is where you have to meet them to properly communicate with them. So the goal is to bend my communication style to meet their communication style somewhere between me and them. And the better I am at this, the closer to them I can get, which makes me a better communicator. This is when people say, wow, they really communicate very well. It's because I'm learning how to understand where I'm starting from, understand where they're starting from and how to meet them in the middle or as close to them as I possibly can. So the better I am at this, the closer I'm going to get. Gives me a chance to connect with someone who has a lot less skills than I do. So this isn't an exact science, but it is better than no science. It gives you a framework. It gives you a dialogue, especially if you've read surrounded by idiots and they've read surrounded by idiots and not just reading it Remember, we talk about in the show all the time.
Speaker 1:
This is as much about reading something and putting it into action. It's the putting it into action part that matters. How do we actually implement these things that we read about, these things that we learn about to make us better? When we are self-aware, we can learn the skills to meet people in the middle. This fills up that trust bank that we were talking about, and when that trust bank gets filled up, since you're capable, others will want to listen and learn from you.