The final mis-blink or mistaken assumption that we can easily fall into during this time of change is called blaming or scapegoating.
When a situation turns out differently from the way we wanted or expected it to and we blame someone for something they had only partial control over then we are mixing up the person, the event, and our feelings about the event: we are ‘scapegoating’ the individual.
Human beings have used scapegoating and blame for thousands of years as a way to dump our emotions and responsibility on to a single individual. But although it makes us feel better, it isn’t fair and it doesn’t improve the situation. In fact, it takes a bad situation and it makes it worse.
This complex mis-blink often contains a mixture of all the others:
- A value judgment (of the person)
- A strong attachment (to the outcome that didn’t happen)
- Extreme thinking (that not getting the outcome we wanted is somehow “the end of the world”)
- An expectation (that things should have turned out differently from the way they did) or an assumption (that they were going to)
- Mistaking our feelings for truth (imagining that because we are feeling so bad it must therefore be their fault), and
- Dependency (ignoring the actions we could have taken but didn’t, which could have prevented the situation from arising)
All of this makes blaming and scapegoating a very convenient way to avoid taking responsibility for our feelings and for the actions we didn’t take. And because it is so easy, many politicians and broadcasters love to place blame: it’s emotionally engaging, it boosts their ratings, and they don’t have to take responsibility for anything.
But blaming is essentially bullying. It doesn’t improve the situation. And in fact it explicitly distracts us from looking for ways to create the outcomes we want.
If we truly want to improve a situation, or prevent it from happening again, then we have to get beyond blame. And there are two ways that we can do this.
The first is that we can learn to manage our emotional responses by learning to centre and ground, then make clearer sense of what has happened. Then we can shift our attention to what really matters: what we wanted to happen instead, what our options are now for how we might move forward, which option we’re going to choose, and what we (individually and collectively) are going to do differently next time to prevent this situation from arising again.
When we respond to situations in this way — using our energy to build what we want instead of attacking what we don’t want — then we have found yet another way to use change to become stronger and more inspired, antifragile.
When did you last hear someone ask, “Who is to blame?” Would it be useful to shift that question instead to “What could we each have done differently to prevent this situation from happening?”, “What are we all going to learn from this?”, and “What are we going to do now, individually and collectively, to create the results we most want?”
Adapted from The Churning, Inner Leadership: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.
You can sign up to daily posts here.
You can buy the book here and the workbook here.
(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also need to do the practice.)
Photo By Charles Nadeau via StockPholio.net