Subtle Yet So Profound
Sep 12 2009

Photo by my very talented 5 year old niece.  She saw this shark outside of her window while they were driving on I-405 in Southern California and quickly took a picture of it!

I was talking to someone I admire the other day, and we were discussing how people are affected by certain things in their lives.  Sometimes there is no easy explanation as to why things happen the way they do.   There is no 1 + 1 = 2 with everyone nodding knowingly in agreement which can sometimes make post mortem analysis of situations and business projects complicated.  She said the things that happen can be subtle yet so profound.  Those words resonated with me.  It can be very subtle, little things that over time have a profound effect on you.

The effects can be positive and negative.  On the positive front, in the right company culture people can achieve more than they knew they were capable of.  In those environments the positive reinforcement can be obviously observable or subtle, which is most often the case.  The people often don’t realize the difference until months or years later when they look back and see what things they were able to achieve and observe how they feel about coming to work.  It can even positively affect their home lives because if they are happy at work where they spend most of their waking hours, they take home less stress.

On the negative side, a friend of a friend of mine was recently telling me about an experience she had at work in a large organization where for three years she worked for a manager who yelled at her occasionally when something wasn’t going quite right.  Since it didn’t happen frequently, she thought she would just take it and move on, but it took a huge toll on her psyche and her energy was drawn elsewhere making it hard for her to do her job as effectively as she would like because she never knew when he would start criticizing her.  She started to be able to tell him that he should not talk to her that way, but it took a lot of her energy to deal with it.  Even after leaving it took her a couple of years to get out from under the berating until her self confidence was up enough to find a job she really enjoyed and performed well in!  I was proud of her for doing the work on understanding how she needed to build back up her self esteem.

One of my stay-at-home mom (I still hate that term and she calls herself a zoom-around mom) friends and I were discussing how our children’s behavior can affect our mood.  She was telling me how she woke up one day feeling good and then her toddler was in a terrible mood most of the day and it affected the rest of her day.  Of course that’s not so subtle but if there aren’t enough smiles and laughter to offset the “I want to pull out my hair” days then you find yourself depressed.  And more importantly you find that you subconsciously establish a way of relating to your child or other people in your life based on the subtle and not so subtle cues you send to each other.  If it’s not more positive than negative, then more often than not one or the other doesn’t want to be around the other and if it’s really bad they end up on the Dr. Phil or the Montel show.  🙂  This can happen at work or at home.

You often don’t even notice the effect of these little things until later.  They can deeply affect your psyche and how you relate to the world.  That’s why it’s so important to focus on the proper culture in the workplace and at home because if there is no one paying attention to the subtleties, you might just find yourself in a sharky situation.  Yes, I know that was a lame attempt to tie the photo taken by my neice to the content of this post, but I thought it was so interesting that I had to find a way to use it in a blog post! 😎

Author: Aruni | Filed under: entrepreneurship | Tags: company culture, shark picture | 1 Comment »

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