I am acutely aware of the innate human tendency to blame our ‘context’ for our disappointments, our shortcomings, our failures. We so frequently point externally to find reason or excuse, and often to satisfy the human desire to attribute blame. Aware, because I so often experience it in myself. Often resisted – but not always. I know I’m not alone.
What inflicts us in the personal domain will often impact our professional domain. This tendency, while potentially damaging for any professional activity can have particularly substantial consequences for those in positions of leadership.
There are times, of course, when the externals do absolutely influence our trajectory – when the ‘forces conspire’ to determine our outcome in unwelcome ways. Then, disappointment and anger are appropriate. Perhaps even a justified need for blame.
But there are many times, too, when our outcomes are determined by our own choices. Failure to recognise and accept such situations is troublesome because it amounts to an unwillingness to take accountability for ourselves, and for our decisions and actions.
Stephen Covey challenged this innate worldview when he wrote: “I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my choices.” And the ground-breaking psychiatrist Carl Jung pivoted the focus to encompass the ontological centrality of personal identity when he wrote: “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
These profound quotes open up a number of rich themes.
First is the dynamic of becoming – explicit in Jung’s words, though inherent in Covey’s view. There is a sense of the present-future tense in the phrase “I am what I choose to become.” As long as I continue to live, I continue to choose, and so I continue to become.
Second, there is an empowering sense of agency within this. To the extent that the realities of our circumstances and capabilities allow, there is a sphere of operation in which I can take responsibility for my journey and determine at least some outcomes. In that agency there is a genuine reason for hope.
Third, there is the implicit acknowledgement that an unwillingness to recognise the potential of that agency leads to a lack of personal accountability. That lack of accountability inevitablyhinders personal performance by reducing the imperative to learn and adapt and grow. And, as Patrick Lencioni has elegantly demonstrated, a lack of personal accountability invariably infests corporate accountability and limits team performance or spawns team dysfunction.
Fourth, an avoidance of accountability points to an underlying inability to deal with failure. This itself often points to the presence of a fixed mindset – as opposed to a growth mindset – whereby the experience of failure precipitates the ontological supposition that ‘I am a failure”. This can lead to a self-imposed glass ceiling which erects an artificial boundary to potential. This has substantial consequences for growth and maturation through the avoidance of challenge, the eschewing of risk, and the tendency to feed a blame culture.
Something as simple as an innate psychological worldview which exists in the psyche of most of us has profound implications when allowed to roam unchecked. It is surprising how often one of the corollaries of this perspective factors, at some point, in many of my conversations as a leadership coach.
But to end where we began, on a note of hope. The freedom to choose and to exhibit agency is a powerful catalyst for human growth and a source of hope. The despair and despondency felt by those for whom freedom and agency are denied bears apophatic witness to the pivotal importance of hope for human flourishing.
Which takes us to our title, drawn from words in The Cure at Troy, a poem by Seamus Heaney. Taking its inspiration from the play Philoctetes by the 5th Century BCE Greek dramatist, Sophocles. Heaney addresses questions of personal morality, deceit and political expediency, suffering and healing. He disputes a prevailing worldview that “History says, don’t hope”. But this is a fatalistic view of history – a history that conspires, controls and imposes. A history devoid of agency. But when freedom to choose is present, personal agency can drive our growth and shape our history. And then “hope and history rhyme”.
