To Get Where We’re Going, We Should Understand Where We’ve Been
Once of the things I’ve found to be a personal challenge is dealing with the past. Most of us don’t realize we make decisions everyday based on the past, and we even forecast our futures (thereby creating them with our actions and our thinking) by recreating the past. Our perceptions are dictated by the past, and not even always our own actual past experiences! Often our thinking is controlled by past thoughts — teachings from our families, employers, churches, schools, our cultural influences … the list is endless. So we “own” these opinions and judgments and create a set of beliefs and assumptions based on past events and opinions and then use them to guide our current and future decisions. Kinda like driving down I-95 today with a really old map — we’d get off the highway at the same old exit ramp not realizing that of course the new road goes all the way through!
This repetition of past behaviour, expecting different results, creates a myriad of problems for us. We do need to understand the past, observe it, and make sure it gives us a foundation of facts on which we can base opinions and decisions. But we need to direct the decisions using a firm understanding of present conditions — not allow the past to drive the car, read the map, and determine the route.
The past should be treated like a history lesson. It can be very useful, when we don’t attach emotion to it. It is best used to get knowledge about an event, place, person, culture, or organization that will give us good background and understanding, lay a foundation of knowledge we can build on. We can look at lessons learned without fear or judgment.
It’s when we get all caught up in it — the nostalgia, attempts at recreation, (funny how we do forget the bad times quickly and remember the good forever!) the attempts to return to it and “go home again” that we can feel victimized, hopeless, disenfranchised. This is not only a denial of the present, it can become a justification for failure to accept personal responsibility for our own attitudes and behaviours. We start to blame. Get inert. Paralyzed.
So how does this affect us in the workplace? How does this understanding of past employer/employee paradigms help us become “EmployeeNext?” I’ll start a discussion of that using my own personal experiences in my next post.
