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Perspective

BlogCultureFacing Adversity

Struck Down

by Ron Potter

We’ve been looking at a text written over 2,000 years ago.  A partial reading of the text says that we are afflicted in every way, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down.  We now come to the last word in the sequence, Stuck Down.

Being Struck Down is Painful

While being persecuted seems very painful and personal, being stuck down seems to be the ultimate of pain and suffering.

Maybe you’ve been struck down in the past.  It might have been a baseball to the head that knocked you unconscious.  Maybe you didn’t see the low beam or branch.  These are very painful and physical.

I was never a fighter.  However, there was a time in high school when the school bully decided to pick me out of the crowd and make an example of me.  He was a couple of years older than me and much larger and stronger.  He slapped me hard on my left cheek.  It stung and brought water to my eyes and nearly knocked me out.  But when I recovered and just stood there, he didn’t like that.  So he struck me on the other cheek with similar results.  I guess at that point he decided he wasn’t going to be successful in either starting a fight or knocking me down so he simply walked away.

Years later a friend told me how impressed he was that I simply stood there and took it.  He thought it took real grit, self-control, and humility to accomplish.  I had felt almost ashamed for many years for not fighting back or defending myself and yet here was my friend telling me how impressed he was with the grit and strength that I showed during that moment.

Last Word of the Four

Being struck down seems to be the most destructive and painful of all of the four descriptions.  It can either be physical as in the example I gave or it can be emotional and maybe not even seen or noticed by others.  But it will feel as if you’ve been struck down physically when it happens.  Maybe it’s a simple word said by someone in a team meeting.  It may have been intentional or completely innocent but it feels as if you’ve been struck down.

Being struck down is painful and destructive.  It may even cause you to change who you are.  It can affect your character and your outlook on life.  And yet, it happens.

Dealing With Being Struck Down

There is no good way for dealing with the feeling of being struck down.  My only suggestion is to endure.  Remind yourself of who you are.  Fall back on your character and belief system.  You may have been struck down physically or emotionally.  Either way, endure.  Live through it.  Become stronger.  Grow.  The text says that it will happen.  We will be struck down.  In our lifetime, we will not avoid it.  At some point, we will be or feel like we’ve been struck down.

Read the next post in the series.
Facing Adversity
Afflicted in Every Way
Perplexed
Persecuted
Struck Down
Ancient Text
Regrets—Text to Corinthians
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BlogLeadership

Perspective

by Ron Potter

We’ve talked a lot about perspective lately.  Then I saw a short video by Barry Hall II.  I thought it was great and decided to make this a short blog by sharing.

Barry started with a video of a person spray painting some graffiti on a building that said

 

Just Do Nothing

That’s often a perspective that people take.  They think “If I ignore it, it will go away.  Just do nothing.”

Problems don’t go away.  Innovation doesn’t happen.  Nothing good comes from a perspective of “Just do nothing.”

His next frame was another person painting more graffiti on the wall around the corner that says

 

It is Impossible

Of all the possible perspectives, I may have seen this one the most often.  It’s just not possible.  If this is your perspective than there is no reason to try.  There is no reason to search for alternative perspectives.  Innovation will never happen.  It’s more than being difficult, it’s the belief that it’s impossible.

His final frame steps back at an angle so that both walls can be seen at the same time (an entirely new perspective).  Now the viewer sees a much different message than was provided by the first two sketches.

 

 

Just Do It, Nothing is Impossible

Step back, take a look at your situation from a different perspective and new possibilities might be seen.

The next time you’re faced with a difficult situation, listen.  What are you hearing?

  • Just Do Nothing
  • It is Impossible

More importantly, don’t just listen to voices outside your own head.  Pay attention to what you’re saying to yourself.  Do you start with Do Nothing or It’s Impossible?  It’s OK that we start there.  I think it’s part of our human nature.  But don’t leave it there!

Start thinking about how you could do things differently.  What perspective would be entirely new?

There are a few books that can help on this front.

Just do it, nothing is impossible.

 

 

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Truth: Perspective and Memory

by Ron Potter

We’ve been introducing and preparing ourselves to walk through the elements that make great teams. The first of these is Truth. Great teams can tell each other the truth. But truth needs some special understanding.

Memory

How well do you remember that event? Is it seared into your memory? If so, brain science tells us that it’s very likely wrong. The more intensely we remember something, the more the memory has been modified by our brain to align with our beliefs and assumptions and therefore the “surer” we are of its accuracy.

The day after the shuttle Challenger blew up, a professor in Florida asked his class to write down everything they remembered about the moment and following hours of the Challenger explosion. The accident had happened only 24 hours before the class. The professor gave them some guidelines to write about:

  • What were their emotions at the moment they saw or heard about the explosion?
  • Who were they with? How did the other people react?
  • Where were they at the moment of the explosion and for the rest of the evening?
  • How did their emotions shift over that time? What was the focus of the conversations they had with others?

The students spent a couple of hours of class writing about these questions and other thoughts.

A few years later, the professor tracked down as many members of that class that he could find. In each case, they were handed their hand-written papers and asked how it fit with the memory they have of the explosion.

In all of the cases, their memories were different from what they had written that day. In some cases, the students rejected what they had written and told the “truth” about what happened that day. Their memories had been modified over time and solidified about the “story” they would tell of the events they “had experienced” on that fatal day.

Because computer hard drives and “memories” have been around for over four decades now, we have this belief that just like computer hard drives, we put things in our memory and then when we retrieve them, they are exactly what was put into our memory the moment the memory was created. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Our memory is modified from the moment it is created by events and experiences along the way. We are constantly modifying our memory.

Perspective

Perspective changes everything, even the things we’re observing at the moment. Again, brain science has shed a great deal of light on how we observe the world around us and “remember” events.

I’ve written other blogs on this topic, but the essence of the matter is that we assume what we are observing is the “truth” while everyone who has a different conclusion is simply expressing their “perspective.”

Science tells us the once an image enters our eye, the image itself is broken into at least 127 million bits of information and run through several processing centers of our brain. These centers include (but are not limited to) values, emotions, goals, ideas, memories, stress, pain, experiences, etc.

It’s easy to understand that each of us has different values, emotions, goals, ideas, memories, stress, pain, experiences. It should then be easy to understand the each of us will have a different view of what the “truth” is, based on what we just observed.

Realize that your perspective may be one of many. Each perspective is valid based on the persons processing centers.

Truth

Being part of a team means that we respect each other’s perspective of a given situation and work hard at reaching a collective perspective that will help us move forward and stay united and committed to an action plan.

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