SEE YOURSELF IN THE PICTURE

It has never ceased to amaze me how we, humans, have continued to disregard our role in all things that seem not to go right. Each time something goes wrong in any sphere our lives, we switch to flight mode. We remove ourselves from the picture. It can never be us. We sharpen our fingers and look for where to point them and perfectly lay blame. The interesting thing with the game of blame is that you will always find something or someone to blame but you will never find something or someone to share with the impact of whatever has gone wrong.
A couple has lived together for long. Suddenly, the husband realizes that the wife has gone deaf. She doesn’t seem to respond to any of his questions or even during a normal conversation. The husband consults a medical specialist to help in treating the wife. The doctor requests the husband to assist in diagnosing the extent of the damage on the hearing system. “Doctor, how do I assist you yet I am not a specialist in the field?” the husbands asks. The doctor then gives the procedure, “when you go home, I want you stand 40 meters away from your wife and ask her any question in the normal conversational tone and pitch. Do not raise your voice. If she doesn’t respond, move 30 meters and repeat the question. If no response, move 20 meters and 10 meters from her as you repeat the question. If there is still no response, stand right behind her and ask the question. That way, we shall know how damaged the hearing system is.”
The husband rushes home to perform the prescribed test. At 40 meters, “Honey, what are having for dinner?” No response! At 30, 20 and 10 meters, no response. He then stands right behind her and poses the question once more. “For the fifth time, rice and chicken!” shouted the wife in a clearly irritated manner. So who was deaf? Instead of the husband looking at the likelihood of him being part of the hearing problem, he rushed to conclude that it had to be the other person. We do not like being associated with things that are not right. We are angels. We call people names based on our judgements without questioning the proficiency of our judgment. Someone said, if you wear green glasses, you tend to think everyone and everything in your midst is green. Few are the number of times you remember to question the color of the glasses you are wearing.
In yet another story, a young couple moves into a new neighborhood. The first morning, while they are having breakfast, the young woman sees the neighbor hang up the wash outside. “That laundry is not very clean,” she said, “she doesn’t know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs another laundry soap.” The husband looked on, but remained silent. Every time her neighbor would hang out the wash, the young woman would make the same comment. About one month later, the woman was surprised to see nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband, “Look! She has learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this.” Her husband said, “I got up early this morning and washed the windows.”
That is exactly how most of us are. Distancing ourselves from ‘bad’ things and imagining that they can only happen or be caused to happen by others is our order of the day. As such we miss the golden opportunities to work on our weaknesses and become better people. We miss to see our mistakes and the priceless lessons that mistakes bring to us. We miss the chance to take responsibility of our misdeeds. One of the greatest differentiators between great achievers and the rest is that the achievers have learnt the art of accepting their mistakes and learning from them. They take responsibility for each of their actions. They first think of their role in the scenario without looking for where to lay blame.
Losers on the other hand, rush to blame things on everything and everyone but themselves. You are not a loser. You have a part to play in everything that goes wrong around you. It could be a contributory part, a part to correct the mess or simply a part of learning from the problem. Do not be in a hurry to absolve yourself from blame. Do not hasten to define the other person before defining your own self. The window through which we view others might just be the one that is dirty and not the people we define as dirty. Could be it is time we cleaned our own windows. It might not be your wife/husband who is deaf, but you; it might not be your neighbor’s washing that is dirty but your own windows. Endeavor to see yourself in the picture because YOU CAN DO BETTER!

Roy Okonji
Motivational Speaker and Author