A few weeks ago, at a school parent’s evening, the teacher was quoting from author Charles Covacs who drew parallels between human development and the development of humankind. This sparked my curiosity because I believe my personal growth and evolution – and your personal growth and evolution – is what will evolve our society.

Then I came across a recent article by Deepak Chopra that really underlines the need for this kind of evolution. The article begins by talking about the limitations of the current world view – Materialism - based on physical objects as the stuff of creation and yet reality remains inexplicable.

He cites examples and poses excellent questions, it’s a fascinating and – for Chopra – very readable article. One of his juicier questions is “If you don’t know where the universe came from and are equally baffled by where thoughts come from, how reliable is your explanation of reality?”

But, he goes on, “no worldview explains everything, and so humans must prioritise the things that need explaining most urgently”. He cites our most urgent problems as overpopulation, pandemic disease, refugeeism and climate change and says “you may hope and pray that science and technology (which have been the most urgent things in the age of materialism) will come to the rescue, but the chances are tenuous without a huge change in how we think”.

All of this leads him to conclude that the change necessary is a change in self awareness. He says “We have had the luxury of ignoring self awareness for a long time and it has given us the chance to deny responsibility for the problems that no self-aware person would tolerate. A self-aware person wouldn’t go to war, stockpile nuclear weapons, harbour racial prejudice, mistreat and abuse women, and foul the environment”.

So as I ponder this issue of self awareness and link back to Charles Covacs’ thoughts, he adds another dimension, one that explores the development of feelings and logic within each of us.  In his book Botany, Covacs was pointing to the Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) as a turning point in human history because that is the time when scientific enquiry (as we know it) began.

He explains that prior to this, in older civilisations (India, Babylon, Egypt), a myth was as valid an explanation of the world as scientific explanation is for us. He continues “the time of those Greek philosophers is the time when one could say fantasy and logic became separate and independent functions of the human mind. It is also the same time when poetry emerges as a separate art”.

The thrust of his observations are the parallels between that and human development, being that we start our lives in the feeling state and, as we get older, develop logic.

The relevance in that particular book is in coming to how to teach botany. In a child of ten or eleven this separation of fantasy and logic hasn’t yet happened. Children want facts, but they must be linked in a way that satisfies the feeling, the fantasy, the poetry in the child. Given only facts, he says “their fantasy, imagination and original creative ability dies and withers”.

Feelings versus logic, in some ways are quintessential aspects of feminine versus masculine qualities. When I started undertaking psychometric tests earlier in my career, I was always taken down a metaphorical rabbit hole as I tried to place myself in one camp or the other. To me, I always felt human nature – and certainly mine - was more multifaceted than that.

Over the years my understanding of masculine and feminine traits has expanded and deepened. Back in the 1990’s, the era in which I began cohabiting with a significant other, I remember feeling somewhat enlightened by John Gray’s infamous Men Are From Mars, Woman Are From Venus books.

But it wasn’t until I heard Allan and Barbara Pease speak at a conference, and read Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps that I was really more clearly introduced to this idea that human gender is not just a duality in the sense of identifying as male or female. It’s a duality within each male and female, meaning each person is comprised of both masculine and feminine traits.

In their book Allan and Barbara cite the science (of that time) of brain development in the fetus, and estimates that about 15-25% of men have feminised brains and around 10% of women have masculinised brains. However, both are  a composite.

This came up for me personally earlier in the week when getting some therapy to ease pain on the right side of my body. The therapist said, “Your right side simply doesn’t want to work with your left side, it’s holding on tightly”. The idea that the right side of my body is the male side, the left being the female, gives me something to work with.

Note that while the idea of right side/left side of the body relates well to the theory of left/right brain thinking (as the left side of the brain supplies nerves to the right side of the body and vice versa), working with the body as an indicator of our internal conscious and subconscious psyche is not new as I discuss in What is Your Body Telling You?

In terms of my own growth and development, these male and female qualities within me seem to be screaming for more attention and integration. There certainly seems some old patterns at play and it’s something I’m looking forward to delving into more.

Bringing this back to Deepak Chopra’s ideas on how the future of the human race depends on self awareness, there is also an old article of Teal Swan’s where she asserts “the restoration of balance within the human race is not about decreasing masculine power while increasing feminine power...it is about both rising to power simultaneously”.

She takes this further by addressing the elephant in the room (as she is apt to do), also known as the “Wait, men have been in power for thousands of years” thought. Her response? “Far from it. Instead, they’ve been stripping power from women for thousands of years. There is a big difference between gaining power in and of yourself and stripping power from another.”

As with everything, I suspect the extent to which male and female qualities show up within us is a mixture of both nature and our life experiences. I particularly like the short article from psychologist Shari Derkson that explains the aspects of masculine and feminine and what integrating them within ourselves might look like.

She says “There is a movement towards inviting more feminine aspects into our lives, states of being, rather than doing; such as through stillness, meditation and tapping into our intuition and creative processes. Equally, it is important for both male and females to develop the more masculine qualities of rational and logical ability, clear non-attached thought and problem solving etc.”

So as we begin to look within ourselves at how to integrate both our feeling states with our more logical states, this begins the kind of self awareness that is perhaps more suited to addressing our most urgent  problems for the human race today.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, How to Appreciate Our Differences Enough to Admire and Want to Embrace Them,  Kneel at the Doorway of Your Heart to Usher the Dawn of a New Era and Embracing the Feminine within All of Us. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I have to admit I’m a champion at complicating matters for myself. I’ve noticed as I have committed to becoming more attuned to my own needs and developing healthy boundaries, I often fail miserably as my mind goes down a familiar rabbit warren of thoughts that try to dissuade and confuse me.

While I feel better knowing it’s just a protection mechanism, it is something I have to be alert to as I determine to get better at holding healthy boundaries.

Why is it a protection mechanism?

Like many people, the main philosophy I experienced from the adults around me growing up was that they knew better than me what was correct and good. If I was good, I avoided punishment, simple. In response my “spidey senses” were acute, I was hyper attuned to people around me so I could think ten steps ahead to avoid danger, and my general strategy was striving for perfection in everything I did.

In short, my mind learned these strategies to keep me loved and safe throughout childhood. Unfortunately it hard wired those responses into my thinking and patterns of behaviour, whether or not they were suited to my changing, less dependent circumstances as I grew.

Once in the workplace and out in the big wide world of relationships, any criticism or conflict threw me into a tailspin. And, as I began to undertake psychometric testing in my career, a really confused picture began to emerge as I seemed to have adopted a little bit of everything along the way in order to stay ahead of any perceived danger; my nervous system on high alert much of the time.

By the time I was reaching my forties I became more determined to figure out who I am if I stripped away all the layers of fear and expectations.

So here I am another decade on, a recovering people pleaser working my way through the legacy of enmeshment trauma and co-dependency. Basically meaning I had no sense of self (where me ends and you begins), and no idea that personal boundaries were a thing (never mind a healthy thing), I thought good people were those who put others before themselves.

In traditional fashion, opposites attract. My partner’s challenges are quite different, having placed himself in a metaphorical bubble to protect himself from feeling pain, shame or guilt as he grew, he tuned out from any depth of feeling in himself or others. Empathy is a foreign word to someone who can’t relate because he has never let himself feel his own pain.

As I determine to develop healthy boundaries, in practice that means putting my needs before others who are used to quite the opposite. I can imagine that a people pleaser becoming healthy isn’t a comfortable experience for those who have been used to being indulged.

My experiences this week reflect this dynamic wonderfully. Both my partner and I suddenly found ourselves very busy. His workload increased just as the time approached that he’d scheduled to get some work done tiling the walkway through the heart of our house. Meanwhile I had been busy clearing everything out in readiness, while also preparing for another out-of-town trip with the kids.

Simultaneously one of my children decided it is now time to move to her big room, instead of the one adjoining mum and dad’s room, which will become an office. Being the think-ten-steps-ahead person I am, I suggested to my partner that we take the opportunity to recarpet since both rooms will be in an upheaval anyway.

Getting new carpets throughout was on our to-do list already, though not until next year, but logic and efficiency drove me to consider doing it sooner. But after introducing the idea to my gung ho partner (not a wise move for someone like me who likes to float ideas and mull things over before making decisions), I quickly regretted it as I started to contemplate clearing not just two rooms but six, in readiness for carpet to be laid.

Just thinking through the practicalities of adding that to my to-do list right now almost tipped me over the edge of my sanity. So here was a glaring signpost to a boundary. All I had to do was say, “Mm, it’s too much right now, let’s revisit later”.

But no, my keep-me-safe mind was in overdrive, it was thinking perfection, efficiency, discussions having raised expectations, not wanting to let anyone down and wanting to get this ghastly task behind me.

Short of Marie Kondo coming in and working with my kids directly on decluttering their stuff though (while I sit on a beach doing nothing except watch the sun glint on the water), my body did not want to cooperate with this plan at all, it simply filled me with dread.

So began the internal war within. I came up with a plan – not quite Marie Kondo, but a packing service. We have used a packing service a few times when moving, it’s always a small component of the cost and yet worth its weight in gold; especially for someone as ponderous as me.

Unfortunately, I tackled my highly stressed partner with my marvellous idea in the wrong way at the wrong time. The result was ugly, with all the worst aspects of our well worn old dynamics coming to the fore.

This set my keep-me-safe mind into hyperdrive.

But it was after observing my daughter attempting to write an answer to a question in a ten minute timeframe that it dawned on me how complex the workings of my own mind can be, and how it can completely coax me away from seeing what is obvious.

My daughter had to write about her favourite game and the three things she loves most about it. True to her nature she went diving down the rabbit hole, her imagination instantly filling her mind with all sorts of pictures and visions that make it incredibly hard for her to ever get to the part about the three things she loves most about it without having some sort of structure and tools to keep her focused.

In a similar way, my mind completely distracted me from that simply boundary “Mm, it’s too much right now, let’s revisit later” by instead taking the well worn pathways and patterns of codependence, defence and heartache.

It became so clear to me that I was making this whole deal way more complicated that it needs to be. I was making my needs into something I needed to fight for, because that is what I was so used to having to do to get my needs met as I grew up. In true fashion I felt deeply hurt and unseen.

My big win was I didn’t jump into the flaming pit of anger and outrage that I would have previously used to assert my needs. But I will admit my relief when my partner handed me a parcel that had arrived while I’d been away, it was Terri Cole’s Boundary Boss book that I’ve been waiting on. Terri has a beautiful way of communicating and instructing on boundaries and it’s clear I still have a lot of work to do in that area.

But I am grateful that endlessly unconscious cycles of “getting triggered and distracted” in my relationships have been broken, and what I have achieved is much greater awareness. As my partner says we “are a work in progress”.

And let’s face it, it is better to become aware of things, even if belatedly, than unconsciously repeating the same patterns of painful experiences without any learning.

If like me you have a pattern of co-dependency, your mind will likely try to protect you by resisting your healthy boundaries – especially in moments when you are highly stressed. But be encouraged knowing that this is normal, and why. Being aware of the pitfalls that can occur as you move towards your goal of healthy boundaries puts you far further along the path than you were before.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Take Heart - It Takes Courage and Tenacity to Step Into Your Power, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will?, How to Appreciate Our Differences Enough to Admire and Want to Embrace Them, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and What You Need to Know When You Feel Pulled in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Last week I was watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in which the character Jackson Avery has a realisation about his calling in life.  He reflected “No one said it was easy becoming the person you’re meant to be. It takes bravery to step into your power, power you’ve discovered, earned and deserve.”

Then just a few days ago I received an email where Teal Swan echoed this sentiment saying “The journey to self love is not comfortable, it will feel scary and you will want to quit. But personal growth is within your power; others can teach you but only you can walk the path towards your unique truth.”

When I think back to my childhood, I had lots of stories about how life was, and would play out. For example, I had accepted my own lack of personal power to make decisions about many aspects of my life as a necessary but temporary evil of being dependant on my parents. I imagined that, as an adult, all would be well.

Actually though, having not had enough practice at making my own decisions, it didn’t exactly all go well. Especially when I add in the dynamic of co-dependency and enmeshment trauma, put simply as being taught to put others needs before my own, and my happiness depending on the happiness of those closest to me; anything else being inconsiderate and selfish.

I didn’t suddenly shrug off those unhealthy ways of being as I grew up. They had become ingrained habits, ways of interacting that were wired into my nervous system and thinking and being, mostly subconscious.

So much of my experience in adulthood has had me tolerating things I didn’t enjoy or, at times, even felt were unhealthy for me, in order to please others. Having learned to attune to others’ needs in childhood as a survival technique, it didn’t simply disappear, even with awareness. I can feel tremendous guilt, pain or shame if I contemplate choices that aren’t going to make others happy.

This was the point Teal was picking up in her email, she says “Every time we give up on ourselves we open the door to let in self hate, feelings of worthlessness, a fear of being seen, an inability to speak up, sleep problems, depression and abusive or unhealthy relationships to mention just a few; this is an act of self betrayal.”

Having made the link between giving too much to others in order to be perceived as useful (or not calling out someone who mistreats people) as an act of self betrayal, she then goes on clarify “this internal self betrayal is what caused us to stop trusting and loving ourselves, and self-love and self-trust are all about having healthy boundaries.”

Boundaries. Again. Until about a year ago I hadn’t even heard about healthy boundaries – and, if I had, it had passed me by.

Terri Cole, author of Boundary Boss, says that with healthy boundaries “you have separate needs, thoughts, feelings and desires from others. You recognise that your needs are different from others. You are empowered to take responsibility for yourself. You have good self respect. You share personal information gradually, over time, in a trusting relationship.”

Suffice to say I have since done, and continue to do, a lot of work on defining and holding my personal boundaries. It’s definitely a work in progress and takes conscious effort and focus to keep moving forwards without swinging to the opposite behaviour and being narcissistic. Balance isn’t something I’ve really seen modeled in my life.

Teal’s email suggested listing ten things I am unhappiest about in my life right now, and ten things I’d like other people to stop doing around me, or to me, or saying to me. That was a good litmus test as I could previously have written ten and more things easily, whereas now I struggled to write more than a few.

I was also reminded this week of the work of Terry Real, a relationship therapist and creator of Relational Life Therapy. He has devised a relationship matrix depicting how people show up in relationships. It has a horizontal axis showing boundaries (from boundary-less to walled-off) and a vertical axis showing self esteem (from shame-based to grandiosity) which shows the various dynamics between people.

I find his matrix is another helpful way of seeing what healthy looks like, and for seeing where I used to sit versus where I currently sit, as opposed to those other important relationships in my life.

He also made an excellent point about self esteem, sharing how the extremes on that axis (shame versus grandiosity/elitism) are based on the same emotion – contempt. Shame being contempt turned in on oneself, grandiosity being contempt towards others. With boundaries, the extremes are being love dependent versus love avoidant.

In hindsight, when I look back on things that didn’t work out the way I had hoped for, I can see the way those dynamics played into each scenario. I can also see that there was usually a silver lining.

Obvious examples are the friends and self interests I gave up when becoming involved in relationships, it took a few times around that same track to recognise my chameleon behaviour and begin to wonder who I am. 

Getting healthy; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, and staring into the abyss where all my feelings of self love and self worth had been shunted in years gone past is a journey.

These did not slip into the abyss overnight, in fact the best analogy I can think of is one of those coin-drop/nudger/pusher arcade machines where I drop a coin in and it joins lots of other coins on a moving ledge, perhaps shunting the ones at the front to spill over to the next ledge and so on.

It’s as if every time I said no to myself, that was another coin I’d dropped into the machine, eventually those no’s nudged more and more of my sense of self into the abyss. So I would have been foolish to think I’d regain this healthy sense of myself overnight. The benefit of hindsight, though, has helped me to trust that life is always working out in my favour, even if it seems backhanded on occasion.

There have been times I have wanted to give up, and times I have given in to previous thought patterns and behaviours, but with the light of awareness it’s become too hard to tolerate the way that feels for very long. Just this week I uncomfortably declined a request from one of my daughter’s friend’s parents, I still want to please and help people, but it wasn’t the right thing for me in this situation – in fact, it wasn’t even possible and yet I still felt that familiar twinge of guilt.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever feel great about saying no to others, but I know it feels a whole lot better than compromising myself. Even when I listen to Terri Cole talk about boundaries, and she speaks so gracefully and uses her words so well, she admits it’s still uncomfortable for her at times.

Despite the heartbreak and pain I’ve endured in various situations, I wouldn’t swap those experiences for what I’ve learned from them. It took a while to get the message but I’m a wiser, kinder, more self aware person than I was. And, perhaps, most importantly to me, I feel more at peace with myself and the world around me more often.

I would encourage anyone who gets disheartened to keep going. As we each regain more awareness of the parts of ourselves that we have denied, suppressed or disowned, we start to move towards a more healthy, more connected, balance between me and us. And right now, this world needs a healthy sense of perspective more than ever.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will?, How to Appreciate Our Differences Enough to Admire and Want to Embrace Them, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and What You Need to Know When You Feel Pulled in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

There is a Scots expression about making a “helluva caffudle” which translates as “a lot of confusion” that sprung to mind this week when dealing with the corporate office of the online grocery supplier I’d used for many years.

The conflicting replies I received were indeed confusing, on one hand sympathetic and responsive, on the other contradictory, uncaring and disingenuous, which pointed to a culture that isn’t exactly customer driven, the experience depending entirely on the individual who I happened to be interfacing with.

Not much different to most places right?

To be fair, it’s one of the key reasons I exited the corporate world. It gave me a bit of a litmus test of where the customer experience has evolved to (or not) since I last worked in that field. And I realised that, after all my study and experience of human potential, psychology and dysfunction, if I were to liken most organisations to a personality, it would be a narcissistic one.

To explain what I mean by this, I’ll quote from a few sources to explain what lies at the heart of most dysfunction among humans, and thus at the heart of most organisations of humans – lack of attunement.

Dr Dan Siegel says “Attunement is the process by which we form relationships”. When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift to come to resonate with the world of another.”

One of my all-time favourite articles happens to be on this topic, and the crux of the issue is summed up exquisitely by Teal Swan:

“Ask yourself the following questions...Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me? Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not? Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way? How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

When our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble, where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw in his book Traumatic Narcissism as “The child who externalises their experience, projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear they experienced and cannot tolerate themselves”). Or
2. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw as the child who internalises their experience and persecutes themselves).”

She goes on to explain that neither state is healthy. “It is not a fulfilling life to spend all your energy obsessively trying to keep yourself safe by attuning to other people at the expense of tuning out to yourself.

But the destruction on this planet owes itself to those people who have learned to cope by retreating into the egocentric bubble...You cannot attune to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot attune to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality.”

So let me tell you the story about strawberry jam, and you can judge for yourself how much a lack of attunement contributed to my online grocery company losing around $25,000 per annum of our business...

I’d been having trouble with my online grocery shop for the last year and things seemed to be getting worse, with more and more items appearing to be in stock at the order stage and then not getting delivered because they were out of stock on a regular basis. This was resulting in regular trips to other stores to get what was needed, far from ideal.

While it is plausible that, between me ordering, and the store picking my order from the shelves, other customers may have come off the street and purchased those items each week, it seemed to me that it was happening with such regularity that something wasn’t right. Somehow, behind the scenes, the demand didn’t seem to be informing the supply.

Calls to Customer Service, and discussions with people at the store directly, resulted in no change. So I did what I’ve learned is most effective when I want to get to the bottom of root cause issues, and I contacted the Managing Director. This is usually an excellent entry point to find the person in the organisation who can investigate and help fix the cause of chronic issues.

All I really wanted to know was whether the company had some management, process or systems issues it could easily fix, or whether this was a good as it gets for now.

It was a disappointing start, having contacted the Acting-top-bod (whose day job is looking after the online offer, which I thought fortuitous at the time) but having had no acknowledgement after week, I had to follow this up. This, however, led to a phonecall from one of the online managers, who assured me this was not the level of service that I should be receiving.

She investigated and found some process issues and she also mentioned that the area’s online store should be the one offering the widest variety to customers, which makes absolute sense to me. She asked if I had any other issues aside of the ones I’d mentioned so I brought up the topic of the strawberry jam.

I buy a particular brand that has no refined sugars added and, about a year ago, the online store mysteriously stopped supplying the strawberry option. It still offered the raspberry, blueberry and apricot, but no strawberry.

However, the same company have another store a couple of kilometres away who offer a much wider variety but don’t do online deliveries (begging the question “why not?” apparently it’s something to do with loading bays, though it’s not entirely clear to me). However, what they do have is stock of the strawberry jam. So this told me – and the online manager - the company itself is obviously not having supply issues around this particular product.

So I allowed a number of weeks to pass to see whether the process issues would be sorted and I could rely more on stock levels. This was a bit hit and miss, but certainly there was no reappearance of the strawberry jam.

So I decided, last ditch attempt, to go to the newly appointed top-bod and see whether this could be resolved. This was delegated to another digital manager who replied:

“The size of the store means that unfortunately the full range is not available. Unfortunately the review of the spreads range won’t take place until March next year (i.e 10 months away), but we’ve made a note of your feedback... It’s always our intention to provide our customers with a great online shopping delivery experience – feedback like yours will ensure we can continue to improve this service.”

Then there was the matter of their other store, the bigger one with more variety, not being the online store. Aside of loading bays, the response cited “the location of the store is in relation to the suburb demand to keep our carbon footprint small.” While this might seem sensible, I should point out one store is 6.7 kilometres away, while the other is only 6.8 kilometres from our suburb.

I will confess this response tipped me over the edge, eliciting from me frustrated expressions like “Seriously?”, “Give me a break”, “Shame on you” and “Utter utter garbage, what a complete waste of my time”.

By this point, I’d come to the conclusion that this was the best I was going to get from my online shopping experience with this company. While in some ways it would be awesome to have a one-stop-shop for all our consumable needs, it is a bit like saying it would be awesome to have a partner who meets all my emotional needs. Neither is really realistic nor, actually, desirable since life would then likely lack variety, growth and expansion.

So I decided the best way forward was to register with another online grocery company and split our business between the two, thus insuring a wider variety of product availability. Despite the time consuming process of registering and filling that first virtual trolley, it was worth it to have options.

I will say that my spluttering response, while not actually eliciting a response from the Managing Director directly, did result in a response from their leadership team; the person who is in charge of the company’s public relations. Those of you not familiar with corporate set ups might not know that this is the person usually responsible for a company’s reputation via the media; it’s quite a different field from those who deal directly with customers.

For someone who has worked in both fields, I would have preferred and appreciated an authentic response from someone directly involved in the leadership of the day-to-day operations and customer supply chain.  I then received two crates of strawberry jam, some cereal and the promise of a discount voucher for my inconvenience. Despite the generosity and immediate follow up, I would have just preferred an explanation for the disparity in previous responses if I’m honest, and clarity on the real issues.

While I’m not wedded to the idea of a response directly from the person I’d written to, I would have expected an answer coming from, or being delegated by, a leader to be an honest reflection of the shortcomings. As I concluded on this question of character last week, people who own up to their faults and weaknesses are to be admired, and so it is with business.

I will never forget when I left the railway industry in the UK, one of the extremely frustrated customers I had spoken to many times over the years said “while I will probably never like the service (since it was prone to delays and failures on occasion due to infrastructure issues that were not quick fixes nor within the direct control of the company), your honesty has made it tolerable and I have felt that at least the issues were tabled and someone cared”.

It is my experience that behind the customer interface of most well established companies, quite aside of political agendas, is a veritable feast of legacy systems and spaghetti junctions of often cumbersome processes to manage, the archetypal swan on water. Knowing the limitations and being able to articulate them goes a long way.

There is no doubt that, on my wish list for online grocery shopping,  I’d want a reliable system to capture not only the customer demand failures of the stock the company does offer, but which products the company does not and customers’ buy elsewhere (i.e. opportunity). While that seems a long way off based on my recent experiences, it would certainly create more loyalty.

What I had come to realise though in the years I did work in the field of customer experience was, whether the customer is on the agenda (from a universal experiential perspective, rather than the individual hit-and-miss interactions) entirely comes down to whether its leader is attuned to the customer needs.

By leader I mean the person who actually determines a company’s culture, which is not always obvious. It can be the local Managing Director or Chief Executive, or a Group Executive or at Board level – and that not only changes from company to company, but at different points in time within companies as well. For example, I’ve found its pretty common for many local chiefs to be left alone so long as they are meeting Shareholder expectations. In times of economic or political turbulence the screws come on.

Having worked behind the scenes in a few large organisations, and had exposure to many more inside views of corporate structures, systems and processes through colleagues and consultants in the field of customer experience over the years, I came to the conclusion that organisational dysfunction will only resolve and evolve once people – in particular the leaders of organisations - start to do their own personal work to evolve beyond the dysfunctional patterns of behaviour learned in childhood.

And, so, it seems on the face of it, that this is where society remains still. That said, I have great hopes as we move forward with initiatives like the Inner MBA Programme (a Sounds True collaboration with LinkedIn, Wisdom 2.0 and Mindful NYU) leading the way.

And how do those of us who are not the true culture leaders of these organisations make a difference? How will we get organisations to meet our needs?  Get healthy. By recognising and rinsing out our dysfunctional ways of relating to others, attuning to ourselves and each other, developing healthy boundaries, and learning to communicate them and holding others accountable with grace, it is inevitable that organisations will start to attune more to those whose needs they serve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, Stand in Your Own Truth and How to Be True to You When Life Pulls You in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

In this climate of polarization, do you have the strength of character to look at where your own beliefs come from and really do your own research before dismissing others’ seemingly strange and wild beliefs?

I’ve been noticing extremes as they cross my path this week.

Before I begin, I will say this is not an article about pro or anti any subject except:

• maintaining freedom of choice
• using critical thinking and
• thinking for oneself.

The first extreme I noticed was a pro vaccine post titled “Why I vaccinate”. It included statements like“I choose to accept the consensus of science, not focus on one discredited study in isolation”,”I value evidence, not anecdote”, and “I make a choice from clear rational thinking, not unfounded fear or conspiracy theories”.

All that sounds great but since the post lacked any of the science it mentioned, nor any evidence
of rational thinking having been applied, it sounded more to me like a very deliberate dig at those who choose not to vaccinate.

I can understand where this groundswell of opinion arises from though. In fact, another post credited to Linda Gamble Spadaro, a licensed mental health counselor in Florida, sums it up well:

“Please stop saying you researched it.

You didn’t research anything and it is highly probable you don’t know how to do so.

Did you compile a literature review and write abstracts on each article? Or better yet, did you collect a random sample of sources and perform independent probability statistics on the reported results? No?

Did you at least take each article one by one and look into the source (that would be the author, publisher and funder), then critique the writing for logical fallacies, cognitive distortions and plain inaccuracies?

Did you ask yourself why this source might publish these particular results? Did you follow the trail of references and apply the same source of scrutiny to them?

No? Then you didn’t f*cking research anything. You read or watched a video, most likely with little or no objectivity. You came across something in your algorithm manipulated feed, something that jived with your implicit biases and served your confirmation bias, and subconsciously applied your emotional filters and called it proof.

Scary”

In some ways, yes, I agree. However, I have to step back and ask myself where my own opinions have arisen from. As I grew up in the world I accepted a number of truths. In the case of vaccines, that really came from the government literature and medical professionals I was exposed to, and the adults around me readily accepting those as truths, and so I formed an implicit bias towards them; I didn’t compile a literature review from a random sample of sources and apply any of the rigor Linda points to.

A friend of mine was talking to a family member about the roll out of COVID19 vaccines here in New Zealand, and she was questioning the efficacy of them. His view was “why would they lie to us?” This is precisely the sort of question that is useful to ask if used to examine motives. In this case though it was an indication of blind faith placed in a system of power, not dissimilar to my own when I was growing up.

When I relook at the original post I read on pro vaccines, I do know there is not just “one discredited study” that challenges the efficacy of vaccines in general, there are mountains of literature out there both pro and against. That kind of glib statement, to my mind, discredits the point it’s trying to promote. Yes, sure, as it says, there are thousands of safety studies looking at vaccines from all angles, but who is the author, publisher and funder of those?

My own journey with health issues in the last few decades of my life has caused me to question many aspects of the government and medical views I was fed as a matter of course.

I covered this journey in a series of articles back in 2019 (Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing, Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress and You Have Amazing Options When it comes to Healthcare) but the one thing that I can’t deny is pharmaceuticals are extremely profitable, and who stands to make from those profits? And what power (direct and indirect) does that give pharmaceutical companies?

On the other hand I don’t see the same incentives for health. Yet I know how astonishingly well my immune system works when supported by the right mindset, diet and lifestyle. I feel that the fact my kids had twenty routine vaccines by the age of four, essentially intentionally infecting burgeoning immune systems twenty times, should be something I’m encouraged to investigate and question.

I have another friend who is most definitely in that corner of having no trust in what the powers-that-be tell us and questions everything. She feels “the programming that occurs is not okay, and that we should not allow ourselves and our children to be fed bullsh!t and be kept in the dark in order to control us”.

Certainly British politician, writer and diarist Tony Benn concurred in his interview with Michael Moore in the documentary Sicko, looking at America’s healthcare crisis, when he said “An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern”.

Someone who had been diving into the world of Flat Earthers encouraged me to listen to a series that apparently gave lots of scientific data. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it beyond the first part though as there was no ownership of who the commentator and director was and I like transparency so I can delve more into the credibility of a source.

While it sounded extremely scientific in some of its language (to the extent I’d need to be or have access to experts in the field of physics and so forth to be able to corroborate or refute the points made), there were also a couple of things questioned that, to my mind, were no real mysteries at all.  
I agree it’s important to question things, but I try to limit that, particularly to things I'm interested in or I can control and have a direct impact on me. Whether the Earth is a disk that is essentially a platform for a hologram is an idea I’m merely intrigued by, and why it’s of such importance to so many.

But I also think we need a shared understanding of reality in order to remain stable. As Tristan Harris says in The Social Dilemma “Imagine a world where no one believes anything that was once held true, and everyone believes that the government is lying to them about everything, and everything is a conspiracy theory. We need a shared understanding of reality in order to remain stable”. 

That's what is great and simultaneously unsettling about the online world these days. On one hand there is much greater access to information than ever before. On the other hand the artificial intelligence does not know the truth and is wired for popularity.

So its ability to bring out the worst in society, create polarisation, outrage, instability, lack of trust in each other, loneliness, alienation, election hacking, populism and distraction is also an opportunity to create an inability to focus on the real issues, which is indicative of a society devolving into chaos. 

I personally feel the real game changer, aside of disengagement from the feed and the rat race, is the internal personal work required to defrag our mental and emotional dysfunction as a collective in order to be able to discern the truths that will allow us to grow and flourish as a society.

Much of my journey in recent years has focused on becoming conscious of the dysfunctional patterns of thinking and behaviour I adopted when growing up, recognizing they no longer serve me as a free thinking adult, then creating interruption to those well worn neural pathways, and deliberately creating newer, healthier responses.  

But another aspect of human nature has also caught my attention lately, and I think it relates directly to a person’s ability to question the kinds of things I’ve been talking about here; that of human character.

Thanks to the kids’ thirst for Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s book series lately, I’ve been thrust into the world of a fictional 1940’s Girls’ boarding school, and met an inspiring head mistress, Miss Theobald, who says:

“We are not out to cram facts and knowledge into the girls’ heads all day long, but to help them form strong and kindly characters.”

“I may not know what type of brain you have, exactly where you stand in class, or what your gifts and capabilities are without referring to your form mistress, but I know your characters; the good and badin you, the possibilities in your nature, your tendencies, your faults, and your virtues.”

“Unless you have enough courage to face up to yourself, and try to tear out the unpleasant failings that are spoiling and weakening what character you do have, we have nothing to offer you”

“Faults such as greed, irresponsibility and silliness, these arouse disgust but can be forgotten and forgiven. Spite and malice rouse bitter feelings; they rankle and are never forgotten”

Instead the stories about the school promote such qualities as honesty, self awareness, ownership of failings, bravery, leadership, resourcefulness and ingenuity. And I believe these are the very qualities required to really critically question some of the aspects of our lives that can lead to the growth and evolution of our species and planet.

So when you are confronted by someone’s strange and seemingly wild beliefs, do you have the strength of character to look at where your own beliefs come from and really do your own research before dismissing them?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma, Are You Getting Distracted From Who You Came to Be This Life? What Are the Right Questions to Ask Right Now? and What Is the Deal with Conspiracies? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.