We often wonder, in whatever context we're in, whether what we are doing is making any real difference. And, if what we are doing is hard, we wonder even more. Besides, what if I am just making things worse? This leads to another question, is it worth it? I think of the story of a friend this week, or of what it was like for the ladies in the story Hidden Figures (a movie really worth seeing, by the way), or of work I am doing with one of my employees.
One thing seems true, we should learn to not only use the current time as a means of evaluating these things. Time has a way of deceiving us.
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As social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson argued now almost 40 years ago in a widely cited paper, people have limited and often inaccurate introspective access to their own (let alone others’) mental processes. This means that people are often unaware of the existence of the stimulus that caused a response and frequently even unaware of the response. Instead, people use widely available and plausible causal theories to infer the causes of their own behavior. The implication: when stimuli are either not salient or are not plausible causes of the response those stimuli produce, people will be quite inaccurate in their reporting about why they behaved as they did. Continue here....
-- Jeffrey Pfeffer
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There is something about separation that can enlighten and clarify.
What we get connected to shapes our identity, particularly our sense of ourselves. This can certainly be good. But, it also can become something else...something along the lines of my identity being distorted or lost, without that connection.
Separation can, often painfully, clarify this for us.
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Photo by Tiina Tormanen
This doesn't even seem real until you see other images from this artist.
