Step into the punch
The recent past has changed every aspect of our society and the way we interact with each other. It is especially challenging when things still need to be done… differently, forcing all of us to collectively rethink old approaches. We can protest the new realities all we want but that can go so far as the complaints will eventually fall on deaf ears as we all must move forward. And in doing so, many have discovered that sometimes the best advice to avoid adversity isn’t to run from it, but into it!
This counter-intuitive thinking isn’t new and there are many examples in conventional wisdom that illustrate this ironic fighting-fire-with-fire approach. In an uncertain world, it is possible to recenter oneself and find the calm in the center of a hurricane of chaos.
In the pandemic years, I have been with three employers. The first one, I was severanced. I took a bit of time and enjoyed being a stay-at-home dad for my daughter as I looked for new work. Within one month of returning to new work, I discovered that I didn’t like the management and thought the firm lacked leadership. I wanted to leave during the standard probationary period, but then the pandemic hit. The job market evaporated while I was in relative safe harbor. Being stuck with a bad employer is never an ideal situation. I could have fought it. Or accepted it. I did neither. Instead, I rolled with the punches and performed what I was hired to do with an eye on an exit strategy. When I resigned from this second employer, they never saw it coming as I had stayed close to the work, perform adequately, and exited at the conclusion of a big project, owing them nothing. While my first employer divested me due to financial reasons, I detached myself from the second employer for personal reasons. I left at the right time for a third. The work remains relevant and rewarding.
We can protest the new realities all we want but that can go so far as the complaints will eventually fall on deaf ears as we all must move forward.
Fighting fire with fire isn’t tough love. It’s a strategy of using a tactic to deal with another party by engaging—not disengaging. The other day, my daughter came home and told me she got a ‘B’ on an assignment. This is a very admirable achievement, but she knows that we both knew she didn’t pull her weight. “Why?” I inquired. She shrugged her shoulders and said she didn’t know. “Then you should ask.” Ask my teacher why I didn’t get an ‘A’? “Yes. You should question their evaluation, so you know where you lost marks for the next time.” I can do that? “If your teacher failed you, wouldn’t you want to know?” Yes. “Your teacher just gave you a mark lower than your expectation and didn’t give you comments or reasons. You want to just accept it?”
The next day, she had a discussion with the teacher and was thoroughly surprised at the feedback the teacher gave her. My guess is that few students engage their teachers in this way and because my daughter took the time and sought legitimate insight (rather than complaining about a mark). The teacher must have felt it was another teaching moment. My daughter learned that while her assignment had excellent content and encompassed creative thought, it was deficient in proper grammar and spelling. It also had incorrect capitalization, tense, misplaced commas, apostrophes and a misused adverbial clause. “‘B’ was generous. Clean all that up, and it would definitely be an ‘A’ paper,” said the teacher. Rather than shying away from the authority of the teacher, she stepped right into it with a genuine and sincere inquiry and walked away informed and even more determined.
For both of us, refusal to accept what was dealt to us only gave us the break for self-improvement. For me, I was pushed to a place where I would compromise myself by putting up with the dysfunctional personalities of co-workers, much less the leadership—or lack thereof. With inadequate cooperation, it would make the work less interesting and for me, less meaningful. I’m too old to tolerate incompetent people’s bullshit and I was not going to take the punches lying down. For my daughter, she saw clearly where her learning opportunities were and eager to avoid the same errors. These situations wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t look ‘no’ in the eyes and punched it in the face!
