Last month we looked at self-sabotage in the workplace, today let’s consider how this human tendency affects our personal relationships in everyday life.
A subtle item that comes to mind is the difficulty most folks have with accepting a compliment. Have you ever found yourself being complimented and it makes you squirm? Why is this? If you’ve dedicated years to doing a good job, being reliable and turning out a good product, why might you be bashful about receiving a compliment about it?
When someone wants to give you a gift, isn’t it polite and respectful to take it? A compliment is a gift – the giver is not obligated to offer it, and shrugging off the compliment often leaves the giver feeling dismissed. Why not just take the gift? Not convinced of your own value? Don’t feel like you deserve it? But you ARE valuable; you DO deserve it; otherwise the giver would never offer the compliment…and that suggests you don’t trust the other person’s judgment. See how this is about blocking the flow of good relationships, the give and take of people affecting each other and appreciating one another? It’s subtle, but very powerful. So many people complain about feeling like no one really appreciates who they are and their contributions, but when given the opportunity to receive a gift of commendation, are reluctant to take it.
Looking at another example of self-sabotage, notice that life provides us with many opportunities to commit to things, but ask yourself – do I complete what I’ve promised? Promising and then disappointing people is high on the list and pretty close to chronic procrastination in how erosive it is to relationships. Plenty of opportunities come our way every week and many of them are exciting and attractive to us, but do we really sit down and evaluate “can I actually do this?” I know we’ve spoken to this matter in a previous post having to do particularly with the work environment, but it bears mentioning that the personal relationship ramifications of this are also critical.
Have you ever said “yes” to an assignment only to find out later that it involves more time and energy than you bargained for? Did you carefully evaluate how much investment the project would need prior to agreeing to do it? True, the old saying of “ask a busy person to take on the task” is often a good idea in that the busy person is possibly more effective and responsible than others, but there’s always the matter of overcommitment. Many times a project has a certain appeal which makes it hard for us to turn it down. The wish to please family and friends can be deadly here, getting us in over our heads and paving the way for us to get overwhelmed…and then neglecting to finish the project in a timely manner.
I made an acquaintance a few years back with a fellow who wanted to go canoeing with me and my friends up in the mountains. We made arrangements to meet at my house at 7am on a summer Saturday morning. Finally he arrived around 8am with a big grin on his face, proclaiming “I’m here now, let’s go”. He was carefree in his attitude, as if he was the “most important person in the room”, and deserved to be understood and accomodated for. I had made arrangements with the other canoeists and vehicle drivers to meet at a certain time at the start of our river run, so we could shuttle the vehicles to the end of the run in order to easily get off the river in the afternoon. I told him his lateness made 8 other people wait over an hour and if he ever arrived late again I’d leave without him. Sure enough, he failed to show up the following weekend and I left for the mountains after waiting a few minutes for him. He called me an hour later, angry and demanding to know why I didn’t wait for him. The situation was deplorable and astonishing, and I found out from his wife, who divorced him a year later, that he’d lost his executive position at the company he worked for due to his chronic lateness. He obviously thought he was “special” and that the world should revolve around him. Clinically, we call this narcissism. This is the most stunning case of getting in your own way I’ve ever witnessed.
Finally, let’s take a look at the human predilection to dismiss routine warnings and cautionaries. It’s quite tempting in life to think one is “above the law”…to think the usual rules & regulations don’t really apply to you. We see examples of this all the way from our current global warming debates to driving too fast in a school zone, from not getting that annual physical examination (that your employer is paying for) to ignoring the “check engine” light on your dashboard that’s been lit for the past month. Paying little or no attention to cautionaries is a personal problem as well as a national and international one, and what gets our attention is a crisis situation. However, isn’t the goal not to fall into crisis? Not to wind up caught off guard and surprised, and then having to pay a higher price for our negligence?
So, what can we do about all this? We can recognize our limitations and not volunteer for tasks which will lead us to getting overwhelmed. We can make promises we know we can keep. We can remind ourselves we’re not “the most important person in the room” and remind ourselves that other people’s agendas are to be respected too. We can teach ourselves to take a compliment with grace and decorum, remembering that it honors to giver to receive the gift. We can acknowledge that our actions have an effect on others and that we should be careful and judicious when volunteering to undertake a task, recognizing that the faith and trust others place in us is riding on our sucessfully seeing the task through.
In my next post we’ll examine how important it is to be realistic and not fall into self-defeating behaviors in our financial affairs.
Chase E. Kneeland, M.Div. LMFT 