Your Birth As A Leader: When You Start Seeing Your Parents As Human Beings
Photo Credit: MoMo Productions
I remember the moment when my father disappointed me for the first time in my life. I was in my early teens, and he reprimanded me in front of the entire family for something I had done that I believed was the right thing to do.
It was an earth-shattering awakening to the fact that the myth I held as a reality about him was violated at its core. I had viewed him as the hero of my world, the knight in shining armor that rushed to the rescue whenever he was needed. It took much longer for me to forgive him than was probably merited.
These romanticized images may be perfectly normal ways for a young child to view her father, but the reality was that my dad had not been a human being but a human function to me.
In my eyes, his job and, frankly, his very existence was to be supportive towards me, get me out of trouble when I need him, be proud of me, love me unconditionally, be a role model in everything he does, be someone I can be proud of.
I simply saw him as "my dad", a title and a role with a clear set of expectations that I felt he owed to me. I had failed to see my dad as a human being, and that way of seeing him had kept me from connecting with and loving him as a real person with challenges and struggles as everyone else.
How could any human being possibly live up to the view (and the resulting expectations) that I had toward my dad? Ironically, because my dad did live up to my expectations most of the time, he gave me little reason to question the myth I had constructed around him. And with my perspective on him being reinforced in that way in my early childhood, I had subconsciously started to objectify everyone else in my environment as well.
The wake-up call of my father's "failure" in the role I had assigned to him turned out to be a blessing in disguise by offering me two things: First, I now had the opportunity to meet and love a real person rather than a mental script of my own writing, and secondly, as a result of this shift, I was granted an insight into the true cause of personal anger, disappointment and taking offense.
It wasn't always easy to undo my dehumanizing fairytale expectations towards my dad. But over the years, this process helped me understand that the world in the way I see it doesn't exist. I live the narrative of a story I myself am creating, a story about how I believe people should be, about who I believe I am, and about who I believe others are in relation to me. I had always viewed my dad from the perspective of my own needs, beliefs and desires, and as a result, I took offense when his actions ran contrary to those.
Now, here's what hit me like lightning: While I believed that my taking offense was merely my justified reaction to something that he was doing (or was failing to do), in reality, it was a function of how I was seeing him and how my story of him was threatened by his actual behavior.
Taking offense at anything or anyone is a choice I make. It is always about me, a choice to prioritize my worldview and ideas over appreciating and learning about a person's struggle and finding compassion for it.
Shifting our views of our parents is not always easy, but it's the primary relationship in our lives that will teach us this very important lesson. It is a lesson that applies to every single relationship between people, no matter the roles. And if we don't learn this lesson, we will never be able to understand reality. Never be able to build meaningful connections. We will remain slaves to our own world views, blinding ourselves to the reality of others, and inviting resistance and caution in people around us.
When we get caught up in our own stories, we often respond with anger and seek to confirm our identity, our views and our status quo - we long to "be right and justified". And as a result, we end up dividing people around us into "good" (those who reinforce our stories) and "bad" (those who threaten them). Our narratives become self-justifying.
Sometimes, letting go of "feeling offended" and taking a step back to understand feels like we are losing part of our identity, like we are betraying our beliefs - but only until we realize that there was never anything to be lost. The picture that we have of people, just like the picture we have of our parents, is just that - a picture, an image. Nothing has been done "to" us. Rather, we have simply encountered people who are living lives that intersect with mine. And we have a choice: We can continue to live only in our own stories, or we can begin to try to understand theirs.
Until we start to undo any preconceived assumptions about how people are to behave around us, we will never build a deep human connection beyond the immediate predefined-by-me relationship. We will never be able to truly connect. Never let people feel like they are seen. Never have influence beyond the immediate implications of our role authority. In essence, we will never be a connected and impactful leader until we truly see people in their own realities - not from our own, but from their experience of the world around them.
Let us all check our views and become very careful and aware about feelings of anger, about taking offense or about diminishing others. Very likely, this will say much less about them than it will say about us and our inability, still, to see clearly - to see human beings and connect to the endless pool of compassion and togetherness that sits at the heart of our shared humanity.
