In this video, I want to talk about history, our own history and how the way we've lived our lives and continue to live our lives forms the very core of how we see the world, emotional biases and all. We truly are our history and there's no point trying to deny it. I mean, this has important implications, doesn't it? First, because we can't run from our past, which is defined by the positive and negative emotional tags that have become attached to our lives. And second because we have to do everything we possibly can to avoid letting our past completely dominate our present and our future. You know what, at home in our deck, we have a couple of cosmos plants. I don't know if you've seen cosmos plants. They're really beautiful, multicolored and they keep popping up in growing season one after another after another and they're in two different pots. And last week I noticed that one is busy producing flower after flower, but the other is not, I mean it's growing, it's green, it's just as tall. It looks perfectly healthy but it's not producing any flowers yet. And then I don't know why but I realized, this plant suffered a trauma of sorts when it was still quite small. For whatever reason it had shed leaves and was not growing. And I noticed that one day, I don't know what happened to it, but it wasn't doing well. And so I added some more earth. I watered it every day. I gave it a little bit of plant food and sun and it recovered, but you know what, it's still not producing flowers yet. And I can't help feel like that trauma, if you will, that this plant suffered while still young is exacting a toll. As a proud gardener, I understand this trauma and I'm doing all I can to help it grow. And yeah, it is growing. It's not quite where it needs to be yet, but it is growing. And when we see someone doing something we don't understand or we don't like, there are many reasons why they are doing that, but one of them, maybe the most important one, is that they have history. And that history cannot be denied, traumatic or otherwise, no matter how much we might try. And that history is inevitably stamped with our and their emotional tags. There's really an art to try and understand what the person across the table from you or on your team, etc, is really experiencing when they interact with you. We don't know what's happening in other people's lives. And often maybe even usually we don't even try to understand. Someone might not be doing a good job one day, but why is that? I mean, this speaks to emotional intelligence as well, but it really highlights for us, if we spend a little bit of time and you can't spend all day all the time thinking about this. But if we spend a little bit of time thinking about where they're coming from, what's going on in their lives, who are they and in the era that we've seen with Covid and people dealing with so many different things at home. And especially moms who have full time jobs and have primary responsibility for kids. I mean, that history, that ongoing daily activity that's happening, how could that not affect how they show up for work? How they show up with their friends, how they show up in their relationships. And we need to think about that. We are our history, think about it for yourself. The way you were treated by past bosses inevitably impacts how you perceive your boss today. The boss that claimed all the credit, spent his time managing up, took out his stress on you and other members of your team. Well, that's not that easily forgotten, is it? And you carry that with you to your next job. Rather than evaluate your new boss on a clean slate, you're probably going to compare him or her to your last boss. The reality is that that's actually not that fair to your boss or to you, but we do it nonetheless. We kind of lock ourselves or anchor ourselves into what we've been doing in the past. And we do it, but that's not necessarily the best thing to be doing because it allows our past to govern how we exist and how we behave in our present and into our future. And so when you think about it maybe a bit more, maybe now we can understand our own reactions to our bosses, your reaction to your boss better. And we can try to remove that passed bias, good or bad, and keep it from coloring our mindsets on work with the new boss. So it's pretty practical, isn't it? Now, while I won't get into this very much, perhaps it's occurred to you as I was just sharing these examples that the same thing applies to us as individuals and even as parents. How we were treated by our own parents inevitably plays a huge role in how we act as parents ourselves. I mean, of course it does, right? Our lives are so busy we often don't spend any time reflecting on this, thinking about this. How do we get to be the way we are? But I'm hoping maybe some of you based on what I'm sharing in this video might be prompted to do exactly that, to maybe take a little bit of time to reflect on your behavior and how you act and what you do and when you do it. And ask, well, in what ways might my history, the things I've lived, the things I'm living affect that? And the reason why we might want to do that is that starts to give us a little bit more control. It's not like we're a puppet being controlled by things in our brains through these emotional tags that we don't even know we're doing. I mean, wouldn't we all like to have a little bit more agency, a little bit more control, a little bit more mindfulness over what we're doing? This is also why of course empathy is such an important quality for leaders. I mean, for all of us. Putting ourselves in the shoes of others, well, we can't fully comprehend everything about where they're at in their lives and their life experiences, we can at least try to understand and get part of the way there. And it would make life really so much better for all of us. And what's true for individuals is also true for organizations. When we talked about the Motorola cellphone story in course one that some of you may recall and in a nutshell, that was when Motorola dominated in the global cell phone industry. This is going back to the 1990s, before iPhone and Samsung Galaxy. And actually even before the Blackberry, the market shifted from being based on analog technology to a digital technology. And the nature of the customer shifted. The early cell phone business was business people paying huge per minute fees. And obviously for a long, long time, this has been a kind of a massive consumer product. Everybody's got a cell phone it seems. And it's just a very different type of thing. At Motorola, when you look at their culture and their history, historically, they have found it difficult to adapt in any market segment when the product shifted. And the customer shifted from being kind of this technologically oriented business customer to the mass market consumer. And that's what happened in the cell phones from analog to digital. And I won't get into it in much more detail other than to highlight for you as a bit of a recollection for those of you who did course one. But even now whether you did or not, just in this kind of brief example, the history of Motorola as just one example, one company, is absolutely critical to understanding their behavior and what they do. We are a history and I also think by the way, when we do competitive analysis, if you want to put your strategy hat on, how often are we spending time trying to understand the history and the culture of our competitors as opposed to doing more traditional analytical work and financial work? You can't ignore it because it's there. So anyways, I don't know if my cosmos plant is going to flower, but I am paying attention to it. I'm appreciating what it is and its beauty nonetheless. And I'm understanding that something happened to it and it's going to be a little bit different. I don't know if that cosmos knows I'm doing any of that, but I know, I know I'm doing it and that's enough and I think there's an important lesson in that for all of us.
