“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
-Anonymous
(click here to listen to George Dubya’s version! lol)
Last week in my Global IT Management course we were discussing teams and team building in the corporate environment. At one point the lecturer was talking about assuming the best of people and giving them the benefit of the doubt. The example he used was: If a team member says they’re going to be late, don’t think to yourself: “Oh, this guy is ALWAYS late or sick or whatever”. He then made a VERY interesting statement:
“Take everything people say or do as if there was no precedent.”
I thought this would be an excellent way to behave in terms of life in general not just the business world. Imagine if you could forget about past behaviours and just take everything people say at face value. This goes along with the idea of ‘Living in the NOW’. However, after considering it for sometime, I wondered: is this a reasonable concept? Not only in the sense of “is it humanly possible?” but also in the “would it be wise to live that way?” sense. I then remembered the quote I started with.
I would rather go by the first quote because it’s somewhat of a defence mechanism. If you live by the second quote chances are you’ll be the one getting hurt; go by the first, and odds are the other person will end up hurting themselves in the long run. If it’s a repeated negative behaviour, unless there is a negative consequence that behaviour will never change…I suppose sometimes you have to remember the past. I’ll wrap this up with another quote I’ve always liked.
“Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”
- Frank Outlaw