Own your story and build better relationships
Hey everybody. I hope you’re having a wonderful day today. Today’s topic is kind of a serious one, but I think it really gets at things that get in the way of productive healthy relationships that are able to get optimal results in business and in life. But let’s talk True Team as many of you have shared with me.
A lot of people have gone through some really difficult things during this virus, but it honestly applies to all the times. If it wasn’t the virus, it would be something else. Last year you had hardships to write and the year before that and the year before that. You know difficulty just comes innately along with life and I wanted to share in my opinion, relationships and results go hand in hand all the time.
We are the stories we tell ourselves
There are a lot of people out there that say, “Hey, focus on results results results.” I believe that you can demand results. You can tell people what to do. You can enforce rules and compel people to do things and that may get you great results.
In my experience they’ll be short term. In order to get long-standing and sustainable results, I’ve never seen that done to the degree that I want to win or achieve without good relationships. So, the principle I want to share with you today is about stories.
Our brains are wired to make sense of things. We see things, we hear things. We don’t see things; we don’t hear things either way. There’s a set of facts or a lack of facts and our brain will naturally make up a story about it. It’s what we think.
What do they say about assumptions? Makes an ass out of you and me, but that’s really true.
We all tell ourselves a story. For example, I had some great kids into visit me this past weekend and by all appearances, it might look like everything is perfect. There are no hardships here and that, “I’m joyful all the time”, sometimes gets misconstrued and people think that, oh that must mean they know that she’s never been through anything difficult.
We’ve talked about this many times, right? The story they tell themselves is that there’s no challenge. Saying there’s no hardship and their life is more difficult than mine, somehow, it’s easier. I hope I’m not crossing a boundary here with any of you super personally, but a trend that I am hearing and heard it again today in coaching calls, was that people are frustrated about what other people think about them because it may or may not be their truth.
What I’m hearing a lot of is that, “Hey, I wish this person really knew who I genuinely am and what my character is, what my values are. They talk about me in a way that doesn’t represent me at all and it’s very hurtful. It’s very upsetting.”
For all of you whether you want to admit it or not, you really do care about what people think and you want to at least be judged fairly and truthfully based on fact. It can get very disenchanting to feel like you need to convince people or help them see the real you because their perception of you isn’t right.
So, I want to share a thought with you today and it is this.
People that aren’t okay with their own story cannot possibly care about someone else’s story.
Hear that? Need a pen?
If you’re not OK with your story, your lot in life, your journey, your adventure, the realities and truths, The Good the Bad and the Ugly about your own life story, it is incredibly difficult to genuinely care about or even be interested in someone else’s story.
When that happens, it creates a wall and a barrier between you and that person. If there’s someone that you need at work or in your personal life to get results or achieve something with, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to do that.
When you’re not okay with your own story, which leads you to not genuinely care about someone else’s story, that leads to a complete inability for you to be in relationship with another person. Obviously, that has tremendous impact on your world, on your quality of life at work, or at home.
Let’s say if it’s a work team and you’ve gone back to work and there was someone on your team that had deaths related to the virus and that really was a hardship for them, they were still having to go home and pay all their bills. The people who have the most, have the most to lose and in times like this. Keep that in mind.
You can’t just turn in your house or just turn in the car. Everyone’s trying to stay afloat, right? You’re trying to keep the mortgage paid, you’re trying to keep all the bills, all the car payments, everything covered whether you had a full paycheck or whether you had a paycheck at all. A lot of people that kept working were making less than what unemployment would have been but they couldn’t collect unemployment because their job kept them at work and it actually made it even harder for them.
There’s just a lot going on and I guess what I want to share with you today is just, consider that if there are hang ups in your head and in your heart about your own world, your own challenges, or your own issues, working to resolve those is the best investment you’ll ever make.
Those things will get in the way of you partnering with other people genuinely and truthfully in a way that will get the best. These people could be your direct reports, they could be your peers, they could be your boss, or your manager. I don’t know who those people are, but if you need them to get the best results in business or in life, I encourage you to work on the one person, the one thing that you can work on, and you will have a hundred percent control over and that’s yourself.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about that and hear if that’s even relevant for you or if it makes any sense at all. Love to you all, stay safe out there and I will be back with you again tomorrow.
Take care.
