The final mis-blink or mistaken assumption 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 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. 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 makes it worse.
This complex mis-blink often contains a mix 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 be their fault), and
- Dependency (ignoring the actions we didn’t take, that could have prevented this situation from arising)
All of this makes blaming and scapegoating a convenient way to avoid taking responsibility for our own feelings and for the actions we didn’t take. And because blaming is so easy, many politicians and broadcasters love it: 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 results we want.
If we want to resolve a situation, or prevent it from happening again, we have to get beyond blame. And there are two ways that we can do this.
First we can learn to manage our own emotional responses: to centre and ground and make clearer sense of what happened. Then we can shift our attention to the things that really matter: what we wanted to happen instead, what our options are 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 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 — then we have found yet another way to use change to become stronger and more valuable, antifragile.
When did you last hear someone ask, “Who is to blame?” Would it be useful to shift that question to “What could we all have done differently to prevent this situation?”, “What are we going to do now?”, and “What are we going to learn from this, 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.
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