Bent out of True

I have been working with some new people recently in a new collaboration. I never met any of the actual people other than the guy who ‘put the gang together’ until it was time to jump on the plane and ‘do our stuff’. That isn’t so unusual in the age of virtual companies and is very 21^st century. I had been impressed with the type of people I had ‘met’ on the phone, but there is a big leap for the virtual world to the real one.

The trouble is underneath all this technology and cleverness lurks a primitive animal that is at least 30,000 years old, and just because we have swapped bear skins for Versace doesn’t dampen down these primitive instincts one jot! We all need to feel safe. We want our tribe to smell and look the same. We expect the appropriate signals of dominance and submission. If these don’t happen we feel that something is wrong and then come up with a very rationale reason for dong something primitive like attacking the object of our suspicion.

The end of this little tale is that I just didn’t feel safe with this guy and he felt it too. So we parted company and I was interested to notice how I felt afterwards. In the main, I was relieved; it was as if I was constantly living with a fire alarm going off and I kept trying to block it off. Now there is blessed silence! I think that I just felt bent out of true by this person and their behaviours.

I came across an interesting idea the other day when talking about working metal, and the idea was that when you work steel you heat it to a point where it forms a memory of the shape you want it to be and it will always try to revert to that shape unless and until you heat it up enough to erase that memory. It was like that for me, and now this has passed I have snapped back into shape.

We all want to please others, we want to grasp opportunities that require us to ‘flex’, but this can take a terribly toll on our wellbeing. If your alarm is going off, maybe you should consider acting rather than living with the undoubted stress this creates….

“A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.” Mark Twain

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 08:09 and is filed under General, Personal Change, Values & Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.