1: It was 6 pm. Andrés parked his car across the street from his home.
“As he stepped out, two armed robbers assaulted him,” Fred Kofman writes in his book The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership.
One of the thieves pointed a gun at him and commanded him to open the front door of his home.
Andrés stayed calm.
“Listen, guys, my wife and daughter are inside. If I come in with you, they’ll freak out and start screaming. Nothing good can happen after that,” He told them. “You can take my car, my wallet, my phone, even my life, but you can’t take my family. I will not open that door.”
The thieves stole all his valuables and then ran away.
Andrés shares, “I wasn’t going to open that door. I made it clear to them that they’d have to shoot me if they wanted to get into the house. I’m glad that they just robbed me. But even if they had shot me, I’d still feel I had done the right thing.
“If they shot me in the street just because I didn’t open the door,” he continued, “God knows what they would have done inside to my wife and daughter. And if they shot me, the noise would have alerted the neighbors who would have called the police. I might have died, but they would have run away, and so I would have saved my wife and my daughter,.”
Andrés smiled. “Not quite a happy ending, but not the unhappiest one, either.”
This week, we’ve been exploring the concept of “response-ability,” our ability to choose our response, and the difference between a victim and a player.
Fred writes: “Andrés was more than a player; he was a hero. He was clearly victimized by ruthless thugs. He was innocent. He didn’t do anything wrong or bring this on himself. He faced a horrible threat with poise; he kept his cool and chose his response with courage and love—even though he had a gun to his head. He is a role model for me.
“Anytime we feel that we have no choice: remember Andrés’s story and realize that even though we may not like our options or their consequences, we always, always, have a choice.”
2: How do we move from the victim to the player mindset?
One essential step is to change how we explain what has happened. It turns out the words we use are very important.
Victim language: The meeting made me late.
Player language: I stayed late at the meeting.
Victim language: It’s impossible.
Player language: I haven’t found a way yet.
Victim language: Someone should have done it.
Player language: I didn’t check on it.
Victim language: I couldn’t do it.
Player language: I chose not to do it.
Victim language: You shouldn’t do that.
Player language: I ask you to not do that.
Victim language screams: “I’m not in charge.” Player language says: “I’m making a choice.”
When things go bad, and sometimes they do, we take responsibility.
We say: “I didn’t back up the file”; “I missed my deadline”; “I could not find a way to reach our profit targets”; “I did not establish rapport with the client”; “I couldn’t convince senior management to support the project”; “I underestimated the risk of the project.”
3: Here’s an exercise Fred often does during his workshops: “Consider a bad experience you had, or are having right now: an ineffective meeting, a harsh conversation, a business or personal problem,” He asks the group. “Choose a situation you think was brought about by people or forces beyond your control.”
Then, he instructs them to answer a series of questions from a victim’s perspective:
o What happened to you?
o Who’s to blame for it?
o What should this person have done instead?
o What should this person do now?
o What punishment does this person deserve?
When someone complains, Fred encourages others to “help” him by sympathizing with expressions such as “I can’t believe they did that to you.” “That is so unfair.” “They shouldn’t treat you like that.” “Those people are so mean!” “You deserve better than this.”
Typically, everyone is smiling and laughing. “The mood is boisterous,” Fred shares. “As I’ve said victimhood is a drug.”
Then, he lowers the boom: “Validating the victim’s helplessness is not friendly,” he tells them.
“Just as we don’t really support an alcoholic by buying him another drink, we don’t really support a victim by telling him that he has been treated unfairly. Alcohol and victim explanations may soothe the person who consumes them, but they are ultimately destructive. The drug dealer is not our friend.”
The laughter and smiles disappear. He tells them: “A real friend offers us long-term wellness rather than immediate gratification. He blends a compassionate acknowledgement of our pain with a fierce challenge of our self-disempowering beliefs.”
Fred then introduces a second set of questions. The situation is the same: a bad experience or a business or personal problem.
The questions to elicit the story of the player are:
o What’s the challenge?
o How did you contribute (by doing or not doing) to creating this situation?
o What’s really important to you? What can you do now to accomplish that?
o What can you learn from this experience?
“The story of the player is not more truthful than the one of the victim,” Fred writes, “but it is more effective because it shifts the player from the passenger’s to the driver’s seat.”
He emphasizes that the player questions are equally effective in personal and professional situations.
“The important thing to remember is that when you present these questions as a loving challenge, love—in the form of empathy and compassion for the others’s pain—comes first, and challenge—in the form of poignant inquiry to invite the other to own his power and accountability—comes second.”
Life is difficult. And we get upset. “Being a player does not mean being Superman or Wonder Woman, he notes. “Being a player doesn’t mean that you deny these painful facts of life; rather, it means that you don’t get stuck in them. Our feelings are the beginning of the story, not the end.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Think of a recent situation where things went wrong. How did I respond? Was I the victim or the player?
Action: Journal about the situation and our response. Is there anything I would have done differently?
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