“If you live to satisfy others, you will be left…empty.”
Mark Peter Kahn
I have run hundreds of corporate workshops and one of the favourite games that I used to play was that I would walk into the room before the delegates had arrived and on the back of the flipchart I would write, “Who did this?” and “The blame culture.”
About an hour into the workshop I would say to the group, “A mother walks into the kitchen and a jug of milk is broken, on the floor, what does she say?” In all but one of hundreds of groups somebody in the group would say, “Who did this?”
I would then flip over to the back of the flipchart and show them what I had already written. I would then tell them that every group but one that I had done this in answered in the same way. I would ask, “What is going on in our culture that we always know that this is what the mother says?”
Somebody would then reply, “Blame!”
I then would flip over to the back of the flipchart again and reveal the word blame culture written there.
I would say to them, “I’m not psychic it’s just what happens over and over and over again in our culture. I’ve asked thousands of people this question and they all come up with the same answer.”
Under pressure, when anything goes wrong we resort to blaming others. [Read more…] about Social Perfectionism
