The Isolation

The Isolation

May 18, 2021 | Social Media

For those of us who sometimes feel isolated and alone, social media can tend to make us feel worse about ourselves. We are not part of the scene that is social media. We don’t have as many “likes,” “shares,” or “follows.”

Whatever social media is measuring, we don’t have enough of it. We are always missing out on something. Did we see the latest tweet or Instagram post of whoever is trending at the moment?

Honestly, do any of us really remember the most impactful Facebook post of our lives? When was THE moment we saw THE post that unlocked THE answer? There was no such moment.

The world is not a static image that one may ‘click’ at one’s leisure. It is a world of loss, tragedy, murder, rape, love, hope, deception, hunger, homelessness, awful humans and much, much more.

Social media enables us to look outward so we can avoid looking within. It is not all bad. There is beauty in it, too, but there is also something very isolating about the experience of it.

Social media packages reality into sound-bytes and pictures that show others what we want them to see. It is a carefully, although often thoughtlessly, curated experience that does not reveal the fact that our lives are lived in our own heads.

How do we capture the reality of reality in a format that primarily reveals the lives of others through images and/or videos that capture very limited points in time? There is no context for what we are seeing, no before and after, which is real life.

Do you have “friends” on Facebook that in fact have no idea who you really are? Were they high school friends that you have not seen in 20 years? How are we using the term “friend” now? Are you our friend?

There is something subtly quite isolating about social media. We can connect with the world without ever leaving the screen of our handheld device. No, that is simply and utterly false.

Regardless of one’s age, we make time to physically meet the people that matter — and that number may be in the single digits. Social media allows us to participate in something without really being part of it at all.

Perspective

Perspective

May 15, 2021 | Organizational Behavior

If we are to understand an organization, we must ask certain questions first, right?

What are your job descriptions? What is your employee retention rate? Do you offer benefits? Are you profitable? What is your mission?

These and so many other questions are most definitely important, but does it make sense to jump right into an analysis of an organization before, in fact, we take a step back?

We are talking about perspective, which we define here for our purposes as the ability to see something in its largest context.

What are you as an organization now? Where were you before? Where are you going? Is it working well? Are there problems and/or challenges you would like to overcome? What connects all staff with one another? What might be driving them apart?

This line of questioning entails that we observe as well as reflect on what we see and hear before we jump into the kinds of questions that have binary sets of answers. If A, then B. If not B, then A. It is more complicated than that, of course, but answers to questions like, “Do you have benefits?” are easily answerable.

To gain perspective, we need to go into the gray areas of an organization in order to uncover clues to the ‘how’ and/or ‘why.’

Perspective of an organization does not begin or end within its proverbial walls. Rather, we must also consider the actual lives of the people who work there.

Are they motivated? Is this their first job? Their last? Are they parents? Grandparents? 

The roles we play outside the office has a direct bearing on how we conduct our behavior within it. Whether our staff work within an actual office or virtually, organizations operate by unwritten rules of behavior.

“This is the way the handbook says things work, but this is how it really works,” an incoming new hire might hear from a well-intentioned supervisor. Is this something we really want to hear?  

Perspective is the ability to see things from many angles. It seems like an art, but it is a science, one grounded in philosophic inquiry.

If we spend actual time each day thinking about the ‘how’ and the ‘why,’ there is a better chance we will gain insight not just into a business operation, but our very selves.

Ever work for a boss who was unable to offer you perspective? There may be nothing more uncomfortable in work, or personal, life for that matter than individuals unable to contextualize to any degree the behaviors around them…