Tag: self-awareness

Life is not a highlight reel

Like so many of us in the corporate world, I use LinkedIn (sometimes grudgingly) to connect with others. Look, it’s not my favorite site in the world, but in many ways it’s a necessity, so I try to focus on the benefits. ANYWAY… I was scrolling through my feed the other day and realized how little of it felt unfinished. Everything was presented as a completed thought. The lessons were clear. The vulnerability was controlled. Even the hard stuff showed up only after it had been resolved, when it was safe to talk about. Some of the posts felt like they were just missing the “tonight, on a very special episode of Terry’s LinkedIn feed….”

Each post was a single moment in time, presented as if it stood on its own.

And it made me think about how much we’re being trained to see the world in fragments.

LinkedIn isn’t unique in this, but it’s one that hits the business world hardest. It takes long, messy careers and compresses them into highlight reels. It turns ongoing work into finished insights. It rewards confidence, clarity, and closure, even when none of those things are honest representations of real life.

On the cutting room floor

I should probably admit that I can overthink this type of thing. I was a history major, and that way of looking at the world tends to stick with you. You get trained early to be suspicious of tidy explanations and single moments presented as truth.

In history, context isn’t optional. A quote only makes sense when you know who said it, when they said it, and what was happening around them. An artifact on its own might be interesting, but without knowing how it was used or what problem it was meant to solve, it’s easy to get it wrong.

That’s probably why LinkedIn, and social media in general, often makes me uneasy.

Most things that matter don’t make sense in isolation. Careers, decisions, leadership, relationships, etc., are shaped over time by pressure, tradeoffs, and accumulated experience. The way we consume information online trains us to do the opposite. We take in a post, a screenshot, a clip, a “stitch” (and yes, I know putting that in quotes makes me look old) – each one detached from what came before and what followed. Over time that starts to feel normal, even sufficient.

It isn’t.

When we start treating fragments as facts, it becomes remarkably easy to draw confident conclusions from very little information. We forget something archaeologists and historians take for granted: meaning lives in the context, not the artifact.

And once the fragment starts to feel like the truth, it changes how we judge people. We become less generous with our assumptions. Quicker to decide we understand someone based on a moment that was never meant to carry that much weight.

What we miss in the edit

When we lose context, we lose patience…and empathy usually goes with it.

It becomes easier to assume intent instead of complexity. Easier to believe that someone else’s decision was obvious, careless, or self-serving because all we’re seeing is the outcome, not the constraints, the history, or the tradeoffs that led there. We react to the end of the story without having seen any of the middle.

What makes this harder is that social media doesn’t just encourage that kind of thinking; it actively trains us for it. The constant stream of short, emotionally charged moments rewards quick reactions over reflection. Our brains get used to novelty, speed, and certainty. We’re nudged toward snap judgments because they feel efficient and satisfying, even when they’re wildly incomplete.

So we get quicker to judge and slower to wonder.

That shows up everywhere – not just in leadership, but in how we relate to colleagues, friends, and strangers. How willing we are to extend grace. How quickly we write people off based on a moment that was never meant to carry that much weight. A post becomes a personality. A decision becomes a character flaw.

At the same time, we start editing ourselves.

If every moment can be isolated and judged, we learn to present only the most defensible versions of ourselves. We share conclusions, not process. Results, not uncertainty. We wait until things are resolved before we talk about them, because unresolved things require context…and context doesn’t suit the algorithm.

Over time, this creates a strange feedback loop. Everything feels more staged, so we trust less of what we see. And because we trust less, we harden our judgments even further. The system rewards polish, but it quietly erodes understanding.

Finding the Director’s Cut

I don’t think the answer is to stop using these platforms or pretend they don’t shape us. They do.

But I do think we can be more intentional about how we show up within them, and how we interpret what we see.

That might mean slowing down before forming an opinion based on a single post. Reminding ourselves that most of someone’s story is off-screen. Choosing curiosity over certainty when we don’t actually have enough information to justify either.

And when we’re the ones posting, it might mean resisting the urge to over-polish. Offering a little more context than the format encourages. Letting things be unresolved. Accepting that real life, real work, and real people are rarely as tidy as a feed would suggest.

Context doesn’t fix everything. But without it, misunderstanding becomes the default.

If people who study ancient civilizations know better than to judge meaning from a single artifact, maybe the rest of us can learn to sit with a little more uncertainty when all we’re seeing is a moment, carefully curated into a post.

Vulnerability is…

There has been a lot of talk around vulnerability lately.

I blame Brené Brown.

Okay, not JUST Brené Brown, but she’s probably the most famous one at this point. She gives talks about vulnerability all the time. They are really, really good talks. She speaks from the heart. She lays bare all her flaws. She challenges everyone else to do the same.

And people love it. And they love her. And everyone leaves promising themselves and each other that they will be more vulnerable to get past that fear, that they will have a strong back and a soft front, because there is power in vulnerability.

Then people go back to their daily lives, where there a whole bunch of other people who have never heard of Brené Brown who think vulnerability is a weakness and that you have to suck it up and show a brave face. And so, the idea of living a life of true vulnerability (like Brené Brown) is abandoned. It just seems too daunting and overwhelming, and besides – just getting through the workday is hard enough without worrying about whether you were vulnerable enough, right?

Here’s the thing – I think most people live lives of vulnerability all the time, just in different ways. They don’t call attention to it, they just do it.

Vulnerability is….

  • Standing up for a coworker
  • Just eating the damn cake without apologizing for it
  • Crying when you’re upset
  • Sharing when you’re nervous
  • Wearing that red pair of shoes because you feel amazing in them
  • Dressing up for Halloween, even though the “cool kids” will make fun of you
  • Reading a romance novel at lunch in the cafeteria
  • Posting updates about how you had to evacuate your home
  • Sharing your love of goofy movies
  • Asking for help on a project
  • Giving a friend a hug when they need it
  • Admitting you were wrong
  • Going to the grocery store with small kids and an even smaller budget
  • Traveling to an unfamiliar place
  • Granting grace to someone…especially yourself
  • Being different

Recognize any of these? In others? In yourself? Vulnerability happens EVERY. DAMN. DAY. We just don’t always recognize it or appreciate it when it happens.

So how will you embrace the vulnerability in your life? How will you define it?

Because guess what –

Vulnerability IS.

 

 

 

The way we win matters

What’s that? ANOTHER movie reference in a blog post? Hell yes. Buckle up, buttercup. Let’s do this.

It’s no secret that I love science fiction (and science fantasy, where I firmly place Star Wars, but that’s a discussion for another time). I started reading Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison at a very young age. Which explains a lot, really. What I appreciate about the genre is that it is such a mirror of who we are as a society – and who we want to be. Some sci-fi is post-apocalyptic and depressing, some is unnaturally cheerful and optimistic. (You can probably guess what kind I tend to watch.) All of it acts as a social commentary for the time in which it was made.

One story I experienced first as a movie and then as a book is Ender’s Game. Regardless of what you think of the book’s author, the story and world building is brilliant and engaging. Years ago, Earth was invaded by an alien species and barely survived. Since then, society has been obsessed with preparing for the next attack, training children to be the leaders of the battle because their brains can process the multitude of data faster.

Ender, so-called because he is a third child in a society that limits most families to two, is unique among his peers. He is the perfect combination of aggression and compassion, believing that the best way to defeat his enemy is to love them, because only then do you understand them. When confronted by bullies at his school, he gravely injures the toughest boy – an apparent over-reaction to the situation. When questioned why later, he replies that he wasn’t fighting to win that battle – he was fighting to win all future battles, too. (Seriously, go watch the movie and read the book – so good.)JALWS Letterhead I

One line in particular has stuck with me. [SPOILERS AHEAD] Near the end of the story, Ender and his unit have been undergoing simulation after simulation to defeat the Formics (insect-like aliens). In the final simulation, they risk nearly everything to defeat the entire race of Formics. Ender sacrifices thousands of (he thinks) simulated lives to achieve victory. Following the simulation, the adults cheer…it turns out, the simulation was the real battle. Colonel Graff (played by Harrison Ford) explains they didn’t tell Ender because they didn’t want him to hesitate…that they needed him to do what was necessary. Graff insists Ender will be remembered a hero. “We won,” Graff proclaims. “That’s all the matters.” Ender fires back, “No. The way we win matters.”

This line says so much. It embodies so much of our humanity…or lack of it.

How many times have leaders claimed winning is the only option? How many organizations sacrifice values, integrity, dignity because they tell themselves the ends justify the means? Win at all costs. No holds barred. You have to play the game to win the game.

How many times do people regret that approach? In the long term, I hope it’s all of them. Because you give up something vital when you tell yourself that it doesn’t matter how you won. In the short term, it might seem like the smart play, but ultimately, history judges us all. It exposes the lies we tell ourselves and lays bare our mistakes.

Right now, American society is at a crossroads. We have an administration that values “winning” and loyalty over all else. We have a majority party in Congress that is willing to “win” no matter what the cost. We have organizations that are choosing to align themselves with a president who has been accused of sexual assault, and then turn around and speak about the dangers of #metoo. We live in a world where the number of  impressions and Twitter followers appear to be more important than values and critical thinking.

Is this what winning looks like?

I’d like to believe we’ll right this ship; that we’ll realize that attention isn’t the same as regard. That small “victories” are meaningless if we lose the larger battle. That sacrificing what we believe for the sake of a photo op means more than a slight PR hit. The decisions we make moving forward as leaders – as human beings – say more about us than short term gains. Are we willing to admit that sometimes the right thing to do IS the hard thing to do? Do we have the courage to turn down what looks good in favor of what IS good? Are we willing to speak up when our leaders can’t? Or won’t?

I hope so.

THE WAY WE WIN MATTERS.