Want to lose my respect? When something goes wrong, make your first priority finding out who's to blame.
I'm not talking about about "big" things like murder or assault. One-on-one things that involve the legal system or an insurance claim. I'm talking about day to day things.
One of my early memories of blame was in Junior High. The lab partner assigned to me in Science, Mark, was a boy that I didn't otherwise know, but I later found out was the team quarterback. (Having always been mature for my age, and feeling school was something to [barely] get through before my life could start, I never paid attention to such things.) We were doing something in lab with Bunsen burners, and Mark accidentally knocked over a beaker and broke it. He immediately pointed at me and shouted, "You did it! You did it!"
What a low-life. I didn't even try to defend myself, because he was protesting so loudly that it was obvious he was trying too hard to turn blame away from himself. And besides, what's the big deal about a broken beaker? I don't remember anything else about the incident -- what the teacher said, etc. -- beyond some of the other students looking our way. What I do remember is how unfortunate it was that he'd shown me who he was -- someone who couldn't handle admitting a simple "oops". In the midst of my disgust, a part of me felt sorry for him.
My mother was an exceedingly passive person, but I've no doubt she would have stomped me out of existence if she could have gotten away with it. Even as a young child, since I was the only daughter, I was a threat to her status as the Queen Bee of the Household. Since outright harm wasn't in her repertoire, she was content to cut me down any chance she got. Once, when I was a pre-teen, she drove my brothers to a park so they could shoot off their model rockets. Upon her return, she needed to go grocery shopping and told me, "The boys might call to have me pick them up, so let them know I'll get them when I'm back from the store." "Okay," I said.
Indeed, while my mother was grocery shopping, my brothers called from the park that they were ready to be picked up. I'd told them I'd let our mother know as soon as she got back. When she returned, I started up the stairs, from my room in the basement, and she called down, "Did the boys call?" "Yes," I replied, still on the staircase. So, she went to pick them up. When they all returned, my brothers were on my case, and I was my baffled. One explained, "Mom said she had to ASK you whether or not we had called." As though I wouldn't have said anything if my mother hadn't asked. The fact that I was coming up the stairs to tell me mother she had to pick up the boys was irrelevant. Nothing had gone wrong, but my mother needed find reasons to blame things on me, to assure herself that I was a horrible child.
When I moved into my current home in 2005, it was a newly built house, and builders were working hard to make sure it passed all the inspections before the closing. At one point, I was on site when final touches were being applied, and a supervisor told me about a problem that had happened with the water spicket in the backyard, and some water got into the house on that side. All had been cleaned up and repaired, so I wasn't concerned. When the supervisor left, a workman inside the house assured me that the supervisor had lit into the plumber who installed the back spicket, ripping him a new one. Like, that was supposed to make me feel good? That the guy who made the mistake had gotten chewed out? The problem had gotten repaired. That's all I cared about. I didn't gain any benefit from knowing someone had been made to feel bad about the poor job he'd done. All that knowledge did was make me wonder about the motivation of the workman who wanted me to know that the plumber had been chewed out.
I once heard about a CEO who paid a large "bonus" -- something like $500 -- at each monthly meeting to the employee who admitted to the worst mistake of the month. The bonus was to encourage employees to discuss things that had gone wrong, so everyone could learn from them. Sounds like a smart CEO to me.
Doing things wrong can be a wonderful thing, because it guides one in a more correct direction. Numerous times, I've had clients or friends or acquaintances be in a quandary, as they aren't sure if they should approach a certain task this way, or that way. They're frozen with indecision, terrified of making an incorrect choice. If I don't have a beneficial perspective to offer, I try to point out that they need to make a decision and go with it. If it turns out not to have been the best choice, well now they're all the wiser and therefore further along than when they'd been indecisive. But so many find the assurance that "everything will be all right" to be incomprehensible. After all, if something goes wrong, well then they're going to get blamed. Because everytime something goes wrong -- or someone simply does something we don't like -- we need to point a finger at them, don't we?
No, we don't.
Even with the recent vacation I took, where I outlined a major oops on my part -- I had thought I'd gone north out of Colorado to Wyoming, when in fact I'd gone west and found myself in Utah. There's no doubt in my mind that that was all Meant to Be, because I saw some fabulously wonderful sights in Utah, and still ended up at my intended destination in Wyoming late in the afternoon. But when I told my friend in Montana about my wonderful "oops", she was appalled. "I would have been so mad at myself," she said. "I would have turned back around and gone back to whatever turned I'd missed that would have put me back north." The fact that my "oops" had such wonderful scenic consequences was irrelevant to her. A mistake had been made, there would be no one to blame but herself, and job number one would be to correct it -- as though something had gone terribly wrong. She did admit, "I wish I could feel about something like that, like you do. But I guess I have to have control over what I'm doing."
I have plenty of control over my life. Including the control to relinquish control. Just let go and let the universe do its thing. I guess I'll accept the blame for that.
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