“About a year ago,” said Bud Jefferson, a main character in the book Leadership and Self Deception, “I flew from Dallas to Phoenix on a sold-out flight that had open seating. I boarded early and found a window seat with a vacant seat beside it.
“I put my briefcase in the middle seat and opened my paper wide enough so it seemed to fill both seats. I hoped no one would want to sit next to me.”1
Bud’s behavior illustrates the See-Feel-Act progression I’ve been glued to these past couple weeks. How did Bud see the people boarding the plane? As threats and nuisances. And how did he feel? Fearful someone might invade his space. And how did he act? He put a briefcase in the seat and spread his paper.
“Now compare that experience with this one,” Bud said. “Six months ago, my wife and I took a trip to Florida. Somehow there was a mistake in the ticketing and we weren’t seated together. The flight was full, so there was no way we’d get to sit together. As we stood in the aisle trying to figure out what to do, a woman a couple rows back spoke up. ‘There’s a vacant seat next to me,’ she said. ‘I’m happy to sit in one of your seats.'”
Unlike Bud, she saw the people boarding the plane as they really were. They were people, not nuisances, with needs just like her own. And this way of seeing naturally gave rise to feelings of compassion and acts of love. Because she saw people different than Bud, she felt different and acted different. Her act of giving up her seat grew naturally out of her feelings, which grew naturally out of the way she saw the people on the plane.
Who saw more clearly, Bud or the woman? The woman saw people. Bud saw threats and nuisances. Bud’s view was distorted and self-centered. It diminished the humanity and value of the people around him. The woman, on the other hand, saw clearly. She knew that people, just like her, have needs and value. And it made all the difference in the way she felt and acted.
Do we tend to see people in the distorted way Bud did or the clear way the woman did?
1Arbinger Institute, Leadership and Self-Deception (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.,2010), p. 33-5.