Have you ever said, "That's just the way I am?"
Hi, I'm J. D. Taylor. I'm the Principal Consultant and Coach at Crucial Transformations and the author of Taylored Tips.
I once took a colleague by the lapels of his jacket and pulled him up close to my face and shook him as I said, "Do you know who you're dealing with?" I've done similarly angry, attacking, disrespectful things at home and I've behaved badly when I'm out in public or socializing, said or done offensive things. That's morally reprehensible behavior. It's indefensible. It's inexcusable.
I always heard that you can't manage what you can't measure. And so, when I had the realization that I wanted to change, transform the kind of person I was, the kind of leader I was, the kind of husband and father I was, I decided I needed to track these bad behaviors. So I got out a 13-column spreadsheet. Some of you who are watching or listening, won't even know what a 13-column spreadsheet is. It's what we used before we had Excel, how we tracked data and information. And every time I thought something unkind, I gave myself a check mark. Every time I said or did something rude or offensive or disrespectful, I gave myself a check mark. At the end of my first year as I tallied up all of these check marks I had over 6,000 of them on my spreadsheets. You do the quick math, you divide that by 365 and you find a pretty alarming number. Every day, of these disrespectful, rude, unkind things. I've kept that spreadsheet every day of my life for over 30 years. I keep it on my phone now, it's always with me. At the beginning of the day, at the end of the night or even in the moment, I can give myself a check mark. Anytime I think something unkind, say something mean or do something that's rude. Last year when I tallied up my check marks for the year, I had 9. So not perfect yet and I still have some work to do, but over the course of the last 30 years I've gone from 6,000 to 9 check marks. And I know how to help you do that same thing. Maybe you've said to yourself, "Well that's just who I am, some people can never change, it's just in my DNA, it's the way I was raised, I was born this way, it's the way I’ve always done it."
Here's the Taylored Tip: who you've been is not who you are.
Think about that for a minute, who you've been is not who you are. Dr. Carlfred Broderick who taught at the University of Southern California in California in the United States coined the term "transitional character". Let me share with you what Dr. Broderick said.
"A transitional character is one who, in a single generation, changes the entire course of a lineage. The changes might be for good or ill, but the most noteworthy examples are those individuals who grow up in an abusive, emotionally destructive environment and somehow find a way to metabolize the poison and refuse to pass it on to their children. They break the mold." (They don't pass it along to their colleagues. They don't pass along to their teams or their organizations, their friends, their neighbors. They break the mold.) "They refute the observation that abused children become abusive parents, that the children of alcoholics become alcoholic adults that 'the sins of the fathers are visited upon the heads of the children to the third and fourth generation.' Their contribution to humanity is to filter the destructiveness out of their own lineage so that the generations downstream will have a supportive foundation upon which to build productive lives."
Remember, who you've been is not who you are. You have the ability to metabolize the poison of the past. You have the ability to filter out the destructiveness of your life to this point and refuse to pass it along.
I hope this Taylored Tip will help you leave conflict behind. Good luck!
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