
Cheshire Cat fading to a smile, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. It is this character that expresses one of the many pieces of Carroll's wisdom that have been repeated and re-expressed so often. Upon Alice's meeting the Cheshire Cat, the following dialog occurs.
'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
'I don't much care where-' said Alice.
'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
How many of us are wandering in Wonderland? Image courtesy WPClipart.
Humans are amazing. We can accomplish great things. We manipulate the flow of rivers, we stave off diseases and other afflictions, we probe the mysteries of life and Nature. For me, though, our most impressive talent is our ability to control how we perceive our own behavior. And I don't think I'm fooling myself.
Among the most useful examples of our brilliance is the collection of patterns that we use to avoid getting what we really want. Over the years, observing myself and others, I've assembled a toolkit that includes some fiendishly clever techniques. Here they are.
- Be ignorant of what you really want
- Understanding or identifying something within ourselves can be difficult. But to maintain unblemished ignorance of something internal, over a period of years, we must avail ourselves of the perverse genius we all share. To accomplish this, some keep busy with mind-numbing entertainment or substances, useless gossip, or misdirected busywork.
- Rejecting these activities can make room for exploring new goals.
- Be uncomfortable with not knowing how to get it
- The feelings that arise from knowing what we want, but not knowing how to get it, can be exquisitely uncomfortable: frustration, pain, fear, confusion, sadness, and more are all possible.
- Focusing on the challenge of finding a path to the goal, rather than the discomfort of not knowing how to reach it, frames that challenge as a problem to be solved, like any other problem.
- Fear failure
- Fear of The feelings that arise from
knowing what we want, but
not knowing how to get
it, can be exquisitely
uncomfortablefailure prevents some of us from trying to reach our goals. But if our goal is determining what we want, fear of failure — and the shame that can come with failure — can preserve ignorance. We don't try to figure out what we want because thinking about it is too unsettling. - With one exception, failures to figure out what we really want are all temporary. The one exception is the failure that comes from giving up.
- Be compulsive about consistency
- Sometimes we blunder. We think we know what we want, and when we get it, or sometimes on the way to getting it, we realize it's a mistake. But we push on anyway, because we absolutely must be consistent, and acknowledging the error would be inconsistent.
- We have the right to change our minds. Surrendering that right, or failing to exercise it, can be an effective method for avoiding getting what we want.
Perhaps the most dispiriting and effective method of avoiding getting what we really want involves holding fast to the belief that we don't deserve anything good. By eroding the desire for what we want, this belief prevents exploration, and halts any explorations that do somehow get started. But most tragically, this belief can cause us to reject or destroy what we want even if it somehow comes to pass. Top
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
It's a Wonderful Day!
- Most knowledge workers are problem solvers. We work towards goals. We anticipate problems as best we
can, and when problems appear, we solve them. But our focus on anticipating problems can become a problem
in itself — at work and in Life.
Mitigating Outsourcing Risks: I
- Outsourcing internal processes modifies the usual risk configuration of those processes, but it also
creates a special class of risks that are peculiar to the outsourcing relationship. What are some of
those risks and what can we do about them?
Logically Illogical
- Discussions in meetings and in written media can get long and complex. When a chain of reasoning gets
long enough, we sometimes make fundamental errors of logic, especially when we're under time pressure.
Here are just a few.
Irrational Deadlines
- Some deadlines are so unrealistic that from the outset we know we'll never meet them. Yet we keep setting
(and accepting) irrational deadlines. Why does this happen?
Brain Clutter
- The capacity of the human mind is astonishing. Our ability to accomplish great things while simultaneously
fretting about mountains of trivia is perhaps among the best evidence of that capacity. Just imagine
what we could accomplish if we could control the fretting…
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Critical Thinking at Work for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming June 14: Pseudo-Collaborations
- Most workplace collaborations produce results of value. But some collaborations — pseudo-collaborations — are inherently incapable of producing value, due to performance management systems, or lack of authority, or lack of access to information. Available here and by RSS on June 14.
And on June 21: Asking Burning Questions
- When we suddenly realize that an important question needs answering, directly asking that question in a meeting might not be an effective way to focus the attention of the group. There are risks. Fortunately, there are also ways to manage those risks. Available here and by RSS on June 21.
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