4Sight: Blog
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Regular tidbits showing you how self-esteem and self-confidence pervade your every day.
This is how your brain works.
4Sight; the future of behavior management.
Our current system isn’t working. You don’t even need to know the depressing statistics that support that statement. Just read or watch the news and you’ll ask yourself “why is conflict and pain so prevalent?”. It’s simply because we don’t understand. We’re not looking at the core problems or asking the right questions.
4 reasons why we need to abandon our mental health system- It’s stigmatized: how can a system help how you think if it makes you *not* want to think about it?
- It’s difficult: you need an “expert” who you meet once a week who may or may not truly help you over the course of many months if not years.
- It’s complicated: one need look no further than the DSM, the bible in the industry, to see a plethora of confusing labels and diagnostic methods.
- It’s non-uniform: there is no standard approach as to what is going on with you, what causes it, and what you can do about it. The system literally works against your being successful.
Fourtunately ;) there is a new way of looking at how you think and what drives your behavior. The 4Sight Model explains it all.
4 great things about 4Sight- It’s friendly - It explains all of our mental states and behavior on a spectrum without derogatory labels and descriptions.
- It’s accessible - if you really want, you can do it on your own, when you want and need it without any cost.
- It’s easy to understand - it makes so much sense once you understand the basic self-esteem and self-confidence concepts.
- It’s (relatively) easy to make change once you understand *and* commit to the 4Sight Process. It’s all about being accountable.
To learn more about the Model and the Process, visit 4SightModel.com. Help is not only on the way. It’s here now.
In order to become an adult - other than turning 18 or 21 depending upon how you look at it - the only real requirement in place is graduating from high school. That includes a pretty long list of academic objectives but almost none from a behavior standpoint. You need to do what you’re told and not get into trouble. That’s pretty much it. And that same concept is mimicked in our day to day lives where, as long as you don’t run afoul of the law, you can act however you want if you can get away with it.
If you consider personal freedom our ability to say and do what we like and that our current situation is acceptable, I’ll suggest you look at the daily outpouring of news as it implies widespread disapproval. Add in the many negative interactions that we all encounter on a regular basis - from work and the community to even friends and family - and I’d say that as a society we’re not meeting decorum by anyone's standards. If you look at the workplace it’s not any better where the rash of sexual harassment reports alone shows how poor our situation is. It is time for a code of (adult) behavior. 4Sight has a solution. Contact us today.
The 4Sight Model says that your consciousness is driven by two thought processes.
How you look at the past - your Self-Esteem (SE) - and how you plan for the future - your Self-Confidence (SC).
Together, they determine everything that you say and do and, really, also what you don't say and don't do.
Both processes "filter", your "perception" of the past or "assessment" of the future.
Flaws in SE and SC permit our emotions to drive our behavior in an undesirable fashion.
Unfortunately, those flaws allow triggers from our development to develop judgments that are erroneous or flat-out incorrect.
I talk to crazy people. Or at least that's how most would refer to them. I hate that saying though. Same way I hate the phrases of "mental illness" and "personality disorder". They're misleading, create stigma, seem to enable nothing good... I should stop here. I could go on for days about it and our "mental health" field in general. I digress.
It happened for the first time in 2016. It was a rainy, chilly day when a street person tried to seek refuge in the coffee shop in the building where I worked. Bad history was evident as he and the staff almost immediately entered a shouting match as the eight or nine people present in the expansive space clearly became tense. I walked up to him.
"What's your name?" I said calmly and respectfully. "M" [real name removed] he responded, going from 90 to 10 in a second in terms of his excited demeanor. I did my best over the next several minutes to keep focus on our dialog but the staff wouldn't let me work with him and things eventually escalated. He then stood up about five feet in front of me, grabbed a metal chair, put it over his head, and ready to throw it down at my feet.
That's when something astonishing happened...
In the mid 1300's the Black Death caused by the Bubonic plague devasted Europe. It is believed that anywhere from one to two thirds of the population died as a result. Part of the folklore from that time period - no one can say if this is really the case, but there is some validity to the concept - is that people killed the cats and dogs because they thought they were spreading the diseases. Our understanding now is that the plague was spread by bacteria in fleas transported upon rodent hosts. The tale says that this mass animal killing worsened the spread of the disease because the cats and dogs were actually part of the solution as they were natural predators of rodents and were, in actuality, helping slow if not halt the spread. The reason I'm writing about this story is to support the concept; what if our mishandling of a problem is actually exacerbating the problem to the point of our inability to do anything about it?
Behavior management - as I'll call it from a more non-judgmental standpoint - is something that is needed now more than ever. It has been having devastating effects on our society in both micro and macro levels for years and, I contend, is only slated to get worse. I will cover that in a future blog article. For now, let's get back to M.
In the height of what seemed to be his hysteria, he held the chair over his head, turned around where no one was present, and crashed it down to the ground. Just before he did that I saw him look at me. He very consciously, albeit in a rage from the ongoing interaction, acted in a way so as not to hurt me. I was floored for about a second. And then I got it. I wasn't his enemy.
I could talk about developmental trauma, also for days, and also a likely future blog article. I know it when I see it, unequivocally so, and it breaks my heart every time. I have gone on to have numerous interactions with people who were likely living on the street, some successful, none injurious to me in any way. Instead, they all gave me hope that there's a solution to the behavior problem that is plaguing our society.
This might seem like a complete distraction from the corporate services I offer when, in reality, they're a validation. Human behavior occurs on continuum, or at least as far as 4Sight goes. And if you can manage the extreme end of the spectrum, the middle and other end of the spectrum are far easier to navigate. I now see that my more than twenty years of successful project management experience is the result of the principles now engendered in 4Sight. And whether it be an executive, a department, or a whole company, your organization can benefits from insights into what drives behavior. In the end, all organizations are driven by people. And if you truly understand what drives people, you can change anything.
When someone has specific SE issues, they don’t want to talk about the past because of feelings of shame and guilt around specific events. Unfortunately, discussing SE issues in general will be avoided because that can lead to the specific events they want to avoid. In other words, having SE issues prevents us from discussing the very thing we need to discuss to learn how to decrease if not eliminate their undesirable impact. And if, as I’ll suggest, a vast majority of people have SE issues, then that would seem to explain why it’s not part of our daily dialog, either in private conversations with others or in the public domain of our media. Instead, we seem to be chasing our tail, trying to find out why poor behavior is rampant and coming up with explanations that distract us from the root cause. We are lost in stories of people acting badly for some specific reason. We pine for explanations when the root cause is always because they feel bad.
When we speak, we say something about ourselves. And when we act, we treat others the way we treat ourselves. If we have negative self-talk that can spew out onto others. And when that pessimism becomes too much we won’t respect ourselves, which inevitably leads to our not respecting others. It may sound far-fetched, but I can guarantee that all abusive behavior is based in self-loathing. Taking it one step further, that self-hatred was learned when we were very young, reinforced over years of adolescence until we became adults with one or more maladaptive behaviors to cope with the void we have inside. The feeling that we don’t like ourselves. This person rapes people, this one condescends, this one hits, and this one controls. In the end, they all come from the same thing. Until we learn and then start discussing that, the cycle will never go away and the news will continue to be what it usually is: bad.
If these are the questions:
How can we attract great talent?
How can we keep them?
How can we maximize their output while we have them?
And how can we efficiently meet all our compliance requirements while doing the above?
This is the answer:
Provide an environment that inherently promotes collaboration, validates success, works through failure,
enables accountability and removes obstacles.
Sound too simple? It makes a lot of sense when you hear the reasoning behind it.
And this is how you can get there:
Most people have self-esteem (SE) and/or self-confidence (SC) issues.
At best, they mean an employee’s performance will be regularly reduced.
At worst, an employee will reduce the performance of other employees.
And until core SE and SC issues are resolved, organizations will be forever chasing the latest problem.
Contact 4Sight to learn how we can help.
Men have testosterone. They are doers. They tend to have self-esteem (SE) issues and, when more severe, are prone to abusing. Women have estrogen. They are nurturers. They tend to have self-confidence (SC) issues and, when more severe, are prone to opposing. I will suggest that this is the essence of why men and women are different. It is by no means, however, a statement that one is better. In fact, each can learn the benefits of the other. Unfortunately, that's not that way our country works.
America is a society based upon capitalism which is driven by action. Until we learn how to truly foster collaboration, the star performer (the doer) won’t be compelled to worry about the team (nurture). How about multiplying the CEO’s stock gain compensation with an employee satisfaction index? Or multiplying a salesperson’s bonus by the percentage of favorable peer reviews? Until we start to do that, we will not harness the full power of the crowd. And we certainly won’t start to extinguish the poor behavior tolerated when the lead player is also abusive.
That’s a well-known saying amongst investors. The concept is that you should ignore temporary influencers and even short-term changes because the overall momentum will win out. That is a very appropriate theme given our turbulent times. Despite disruptions, the world is becoming more global, groups more diverse, people are gaining more rights, and, overall, humans are becoming more civil. I’ll suggest that what you see now are those who are unable to adapt and take advantage of what are truly benefits versus problems. They are immersed in their own SE and SC issues. Some even seem to celebrate the dysfunction. They are part of the intellectual - or more accurately, emotional - throw backs, unable to evolve their maturity. And as some of them probably even disavow evolution to begin with, they will certainly succumb to its inevitable and positive change. Be patient and forthright. Diversity knows no sexual preference or religion or skin color or gender or anything else other than what it takes to survive, and survival takes the group with the most wide-ranging approach that can collaborate, and that's the key. Whoever manages - or rather, governs - that best first will win as long as the opposition doesn’t blow up or drown the planet before then.
When you have mild self-esteem (SE) issues, you are negative on yourself. When you have moderate SE issues, you become negative on others. When you have severe issues you can wholly blame a person or whole groups for your problems, unable to handle with the huge emotional pain personal responsibility causes. And in the extreme case, all bets are off. Maladaptive strategies can spiral out of control. This is *the* root cause of all mass abuse. One should not dissect what happened to find motives as you’ll only enable more people for whom a moment of power and infamy satiates their dysfunctional SE views.
When you're having a disagreement with someone and they've been triggered, it's usually pretty easy to recognize. Their demeanor will go beyond the response you might expect and their language will match that body language. Regardless, know the difference between having a logical conversation versus one that is emotional. In the latter case the person has drawn a conclusion and they're going to make whatever statements they can to get there. If they let you, you'd easily be able to point out the flaws in their logic. But, they won't. The 5 D's will come into play and you'll never win. You can't. They're triggered and they probably don't even know it. And if they do they probably won't admit it. So whatever it is you may be discussing it would be wisest to let it be. At best, leave it to some other day to revisit. At worst the other person has some unknwon event from development that's been tuched during your encounter, and you're just talking to a toddler that's scared and worried. Let them be and move on.
That was a statement made to me on more than one occasion at Burning Man from a couple people. I've grown to love it because it accurately portrays me. If I have a problem with someone I'm willing to be direct. I won't censor myself because someone may feel bad about what I have to say. In this case they told me that my statement hurt their feelings. They also told me I was right. I'm just looking to be honest. I don't want to make people feel bad. And because they were, in turn, honest with me, I can say "Hey, you're imperfect. Just like the rest of us." And maybe, just maybe, their self-esteem will improve in the process. And maybe, just maybe, they won't think I'm an asshole the next time I'm direct ;)