News Flash – everyone currently in your life, in your orbit, is there for a reason. It’s taken me a long time, and a lot of running away, to understand this vital point. It doesn’t mean that if I’m being abused by someone I need to stick around and take more. It means that the person – and their behavior – for good or for ill, is meant to teach me a lesson. Once I grasp the lesson, the offensive behavior ceases to bother, or the Offender, exists my life.

I have a colleague who irritates me to no end. For some time, I fretted and fumed over this person’s negative attitude, convinced that if only they would change, then I could breath deeply and all would be well. Days of hoping and waiting for a shift toward the positive turned into weeks that turned into months. One day, as the bile of frustration was ebbing its way up through my throat, it dawned on me that maybe I was the one who needed to change! I’m not suggesting that their behavior was in any way acceptable, but instead of focusing on the other person as the solution to my angst, I focused on a concept we use in coaching – I asked myself, “where do I have agency?” In other words, what type of adjustment in my own attitude, or behavior, could make a positive impact on my wellbeing?

As I turned the focus away from my colleague and onto myself, I realized that I possessed the very same negativity bias and trait of defeatism that was causing me such bother when issuing from them! My colleague was acting as a mirror, reflecting back to me a tendency of my own that I’d rather deny or ignore. The place where I had agency was in my own attitude and behavior. Instead of continuing to pursue the track of setting my colleague straight, I instead went about adjusting my own attitude, diligently watching for my own negativity bias to rear its unhelpful head. The long standing irritation that I’d felt toward my colleague soon faded away, and it didn’t take long before my colleague’s negative attitude followed suit.

I was taking a walk in the neighborhood yesterday when I noticed the upstairs window of a home across the street was open. I also noticed there was no screen on the window and saw two objects sitting on the ledge. One of the objects was small and round, a glass of some sort. The other object was white, about 1/2 foot tall, a bit larger toward the base and small and roundish toward the top. I didn’t have my glasses on so I had to keep squinting to make out the shape, something bird-like. I thought to myself “it looks like a Dove ” and proceeded to make up a story in my mind that it must be a Dove and the window was open to let it fly out of the house. Thinking back on this now it seems rather silly – who would have a Dove in an upstairs window, much less a Dove that was trained to go outside and come back? I finally decided to put on my glasses and low and behold it was a bottle!

This experience brought home the point that what I see (or more aptly, what I think I see) isn’t always what’s really there. In fact, what I’m seeing is, all too often, simply a figment of my imagination. I’ve noticed that when it comes to an object in the upstairs window of a neighbor’s home that’s one thing; but when these mistakes hit closer to my home – like in my relationships – that’s another matter entirely. Too often I can see the look on someone’s face and immediately jump to a conclusion – Dove rather than Bottle – and before I know it I’ve created a whole novel based on conjecture from one look or a gesture.

This happened the other day in a meeting. I made an announcement that I expected would bring sequels of delight from my coworkers. I caught a look on the face of one colleague that I saw as disappointment. I proceeded to challenge her reaction and, Things Not Being What They Seem, I was quickly put in my place when she said she was actually just feeling surprised. I took her at her word, trusting that she knew her insides better than I.

The moral of this story is a reminder to not take things, or gestures (unless they are blatantly rude!), or much of anything else at face value. It’s much wiser to ask, or seek clarification, instead of assuming (we all know what that breaks down to) that what I think that I’m seeing is actually there!