Is the glass half empty?
Is the glass half full?
Some friend you are.. calling me a pessimist.. I think of myself as a person who is realistic.
The glass is always full, just not full of what you want or expect.
Walk around in a bubble and you are bound to see the world from your own 360 degree perspective. This doesn’t really reflect what is truly going on in THE world, just YOUR world. It is shame really when you think about how business is today. Long gone are the days when you trust anyone. I second guess almost everything because I have a hard time with trust. I can trust but let us say I am cautious about it at this point. It is kind of sad because growing up in Co-op City in the Bronx, I could trust people. Of course we had our challenges but the only people that would steal from you would be the kids taking your lunch money. Business people, every day people had honor.
That is what this is about. You have a code? Do you honestly care about your business or the people working for you or with you? We don’t trust each other but you give all sorts of content to Facebook. We don’t seem to trust each other but Amazon wants you to trust them with your business. The truth is that we are being robbed and that is just real. We are losing ourselves in text and media. We are losing our honor and our ability to treat each other with kindness. We don’t trust each other and we have to find a way back to that. We have to find ways to trust each other and build trusted partnerships. We also have to realize that we are being robbed.
How can we trust each other or learn to trust each other?
It seems to me that businesses need to start talking about trust and honoring their word.
- We need to start practicing honest behaviors and proving ourselves as honorable people.
- We need to define and follow up on a code of ethics and actually mean what we say.
- We need to start communicating better and we need to start this by active listening.
This is our world today.
The WheelBarrel Story
There are many variations to this story. I have seen a lot of churches use this in their literature but it isn’t religious.
There once was a man who worked at a factory. He worked at this factory for 30 years. And
about 20 years into his time there, the owners of the factory decided that the workers were
stealing things, so they set up guards at the gate to check all the workers every day as they left.
And every evening for those 10 years, five nights a week, this guy walked through those gates,
trundling his wheelbarrow, and the guards could see, every evening, that the wheelbarrow was
empty. They checked his pockets and all. They were sure that this guy wasn’t stealing anything.
Finally he retired, and the next week one of his co-workers commented as he left the factory,
“Well, we’ll see a lot less theft now that he’s gone.”
“Why? What was he stealing?” the guard demanded.
The co-worker grinned: “Wheelbarrows.”
Where are your wheelbarrows going?
Just a thought..
The Cohenization Project 
Can you have trust without empathy? Seems to me, that discussions on trust boil down to something much more than code of conduct; instead, it is about simple empathy with each other. Understanding the situations other humans are in and that it could just as easily become yours or your family’s own situation is essential for human to human trust building. As the world gets more diversified we are finding many more divisions in our understanding. These divisions foster miss-trust. Amazingly we have learned that diversity helps creativity and survival. I think Howie’s experience in the Bronx could be an icon for such diversity. But what is happening is diversity is being overcome by special interests. One of the biggest factors that contributed to the success of the US economy was the diverse work force; but what was in common with this work force was we were united under the ideals of the country. And that understanding was embraced by our Grandparents and our Parents. We weren’t asking the government to grant us special permission to stay separate from the crowd; instead we shared our differences and let them blend into this massive society we call home.
Recently I read that when government gets big and starts to inject itself in more of our daily lives; that special interest groups also grow as they want to influence what government is going to be doing. They have a need to bring their concerns ahead of the national concerns as they don’t see the linkage any longer as our Parents and Grandparents did when the government was smaller and people didn’t rely on government intervention in their daily situations. Back then we wanted to empathize with our fellow workers and associates and not have the attitude that they need to fend for themselves because there is already in place avenues for them to seek for their well-being. We don’t have to get involved because the government was already involved.
We grew up when a Nero Jacket wasn’t a cultural icon for a certain ethnic or religious group but a style of clothing. People were looking to assimilate instead of segregate. We all wanted to learn English as it was the one common communication opportunity we had to making it in this great country. How can you understand and build trust when you cannot even speak with each other?
Trust starts with understanding. Trust needs for us to realize that understanding means that we all are children from the same Creator Parent and that once we realize that primary understanding, we can build our trusted relationships. The one thing that our Grandparents knew about this country was that opportunity needed to be equal for all. These feelings of equality gradually surfaced with our society pushing to finally realize fully the intent of our constitution for equal rights for all citizens to include the diversity of color, culture or religion. We have evolved but the pendulum of allowing the government to be the arbitrator for our everyday lives has swung too far and now we have started into the dissent of trusting each other. We need to realize where the pendulum is in order to understand how to get it back to center.
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