What do the worst people you know have in common?
Writer and artist Michael James Schneider, also known as “the guy who spells things with balloons” posted a recent creation: “A licensed therapist just told the worst person you know that they are enough”. Of course it’s a tongue-in-cheek quip, borne of the amusing realization that, at least in the confines of the therapist’s office, even terrible people present themselves as the maligned hero of their journey, railing against a relentlessly critical world.
Image retrieved from @blcksmth
Therapists were quick to respond that indiscriminate affirmation is certainly not the goal of therapy. My dear therapist friend wisely responded that while all people have value, not all actions have value.
Whether our actions have value or not is something that we can only see when we interact with others. And with that lies this idea: The worst people you know also happen to be the ones that have received the least honesty about their actions.
We evolved highly advanced communication so that we could share our knowledge of the world with others. We are the only species that can guide an out-of-town tourist to their desired destination, by sharing our mental map with them (though evidence suggests bees do something like this too). It is a superpower that allows us to engage in a kind of expanded and collaborative cognition that solves highly complex problems, from hunting wildebeest to building a bridge. We see it every day at work, both when this process works and when it doesn’t. Research has shown us that team success is directly linked to how effectively members of the team are able to share their knowledge and perspective.
The knowledge sharing process also extends to giving and receiving feedback about each other. We all have a working model of ourselves, which can incorporate both actual and idealized components. For this model to be useful, it needs to be realistically shaped by our experiences in the world, including the reflections of ourselves that we can glimpse through interactions with others, whether they be family, friends, or coworkers.
In my Authentic Leadership class, students spend a lot of time developing self-awareness and the capacity to see, understand, and describe themselves. Then, toward the end of the class, we switch it up, and they are asked to obtain feedback and stories about themselves from those that know them best, whether socially or professionally. Often, they are pleasantly surprised and touched by the feedback, and the warm light cast on the personal strengths and admirable traits they weren’t even aware of. Then they are asked to consider the question, “What do I wish people had said about me?”, and this is where things get interesting and complicated. Here they must confront a reality that what they might like to project is not what others see.
When faced with such a discrepancy between our self-perception and the way others see us, we have a choice – change how we see ourselves, or change how we behave so that others will see us the way we want to be seen. This is a healthy and empowering process, but it requires a very special ingredient: honesty given and honesty received.
Say for example, I believe myself to be a highly empathetic leader, but no one seems to describe me that way. In fact, I might even get some honest feedback that my team feels like I do not listen to them at all. At this point, I can choose to change my self-perception, and accept that I am not empathetic, or to start making behavioral changes (listening more, reflecting back others’ feelings) so that the signals I get from the world better align with how I see myself.
With my leadership students, we practice both - inhabiting a space where we can accept what may be true of us now, and working toward what might be true of us in the future. Ofcourse, there is also a seductively easy third choice: to see honest feedback as an outrageous, unfair attack, to see myself as the victim, and to continue to cling to the belief that I’m an empathetic person. In fact, in addition to seeing myself as an empath, I might even add the label “highly sensitive person” to validate my defensiveness.
When honesty cannot be given and/or received, we walk around with a model of how we think we are, but now signals we get from the external world start to get confusing. Imagine that we say something to a colleague that offends or slights them, but they play it down - “oh no, don’t worry about it”, they lilt, all the while starting to ignore or act coldly around us, intentionally or unintentionally. These mixed messages start to break down our working model of the world and ourselves. Now we are experiencing a discrepancy, but one that is harder to identify, and one which doesn’t contribute toward an explicit and grounded understanding of how our behavior impacts others. Our sense that we can navigate the social world starts to degrade - scientists and psychologists have in fact identified this breakdown as a cause of mental illnesses like depression. Put differently, mental wellbeing is caused by knowing what to make of the world, not by living in a fantasy world. That’s why in my own research, people report that hearing a hard truth from someone, while extremely painful, still somehow ends up leaving them feeling clear-eyed and empowered. They know what they need to do now.
Which brings us back to the worst people you know. The less honesty we give and receive, the more we co-create everyone’s worst version of themselves. When we do not and cannot share information with others about how they come across and how they impact us, we collectively break down each other’s capacity to perceive and receive any truth. So much so that honesty feels like an act of violence rather than generosity, the truthteller an aggressor rather than a friend, and the recipient a victim rather than an individual who can make a choice about what to do with that honesty. Without this crucial honesty, the working model of the world breaks down, the mental distress ticks up, and for many, the therapist’s office awaits. The therapists’ work often involves repairing our mental model, through a gradual reintroduction of truth and honesty, working towards the most realistic appraisal of the world that we can handle.
So if you want to avoid becoming that worst person, start giving and receiving more honesty in your life, in whatever small way you can.