by Dave Davis
There’s a phrase that I’ve offered countless times to others over the years that seems to be getting a lot of traction lately.
It goes as such: “You can’t change the other person or the things that happen, but you can change how you respond to them. The choice is yours.”
The incomparable essayist, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, wrote something along the same lines that I’m also quite fond of saying: “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
It sounds pretty logical, but I bet many of us lose sight of it when we find ourselves in the middle of a circular discussion going nowhere, or a difficult situation that someone has presented to us. I can think of many occasions in the past where my first impulse was an attempt to convince the other person that they needed to change their view or re-think their actions if we were to reach some sort of acceptable resolution.
Rather typically, because they were unwilling to cede any ground, the scenario would result in my walking away frustrated, having gained little to nothing from the exchange.
More often than not, when confronted with a similar situation farther down the line (especially with the same person), the pattern would undoubtedly repeat itself. The stress that I’d internalize from such engagements would eventually hit a threshold that was no longer tolerable, resulting in a more escalated conversation.
One particular scenario comes to mind that’s a perfect example to share. Years ago, a fellow work colleague and I would often clash whenever it came to submitting quarterly documentation required by management.
Since we were viewed as a ‘team,’ the final overall product was a representation of both of our efforts over the course of several months. Invariably, I often compensated for her lack of time management skills by completing the bulk of the work in order to be able to submit it on-time.
It was clearly an issue that I hadn’t brought to the attention of management soon enough. I was hoping that we could resolve the problem ‘in-house,’ without the need of further assistance. At that time, my teammate and I had been working together for several years. For the most part, each of our skillsets complimented one another, yet for some reason, this particular issue would become a point of contention every few months.
In hindsight, I was much too passive in my approach initially, allowing this pattern to continue for far too long. Each quarter, I’d hope that she’d changed her ways but, to no one’s surprise, that failed to happen. My insistence that she “try harder” or “do a little bit each week,” in order to spread the workload out over time, seemed to fall by the wayside.
As professionals, we were both in agreement that to achieve some sort of meaningful change with an acceptable outcome would require a strategy with definable goals. We even held periodic discussions about what progress was or wasn’t being attained.
Despite her efforts, she’d inevitably fall back into a similar pattern. Where I failed, was not changing my own response to the situation each time it fell short of my expectations, and therefore, I paid the price from a social-emotional perspective.
In retrospect, it’s easy to look back at some of the relationships where I sought to invoke change, oftentimes by solely fixating on the other person’s inability to concede or at the very least, find some sort of compromise. Not until I took a more objective, self-reflective view of the situation (something that I eventually came to embrace through my meditation practice), did I fully realize that there are only so many things that I could control, and one of them was my own response.
Over time, in subsequent situations, it has been my experience that when my efforts to find an equitable solution appear to fail, it’s how I react in those moments, and the response that follows, which will determine just how far I’ve come.
