To Me vs. For Me

Michael had been a divisional president for three years when the restructuring landed on his desk. Two more departments folded under him overnight, his vice president of program management left for a competitor, and by the end of the week the new CEO wanted his initial plan for achieving a ten-percent budget reduction.

Within a month, the job he had shaped carefully became one he barely recognized.

When we met, Michael opened with a flood of issues. He spoke for twenty minutes without pausing, and every sentence began with some form of “they.”

I didn’t interrupt. When he finished, I mirrored his language back to him. “They changed their priorities. They’re slow-walking replacing your VP. The CEO expects too much of you. Who is the common thread in all of these situations?”

He stared at me. Then he gave the kind of laugh that comes right before something uncomfortable becomes clear.

“Seems like I’m the central character in this story.”

I asked if he was willing to try an experiment: For the next week, every time he caught himself thinking this was happening to him, turn it around. How was it happening for him? Where was his opportunity in this restructuring?

He came back the following week and said the exercise had been "miserable, and useful." He'd caught himself fourteen times in the first two days. By Thursday, he started thinking differently. He stopped describing what was happening to him and started drafting what he could create from where he stood.

Michael didn’t fix everything in a week, but he stopped narrating his circumstances as if he were watching them from outside. He stepped back into the story as its author. While the restructuring hadn't changed, how he related to it had.

Ownership is authorship. Write the next chapter.

The Question

Listen to your own language this week. When you hear yourself say they, should, or why does this keep happening, ask: What can I take from this? What can I create?

“We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.” — Carlos Castaneda