PLAYING THE VICTIM COSTS YOU - power, influence, reputation and more. Tyler shares how he found much greater success when he learned to stop playing the victim. Hey - Don't forget to connect with The 5-Star Approach on LinkedIn, Facebook & Instagram!
with Tyler Small
Are you a victim? I don't want you to be a victim. You lose your power and influence. You lose your ability to innovate and contribute. Your organization loses an important voice. And you’re seen as less of a leader.
I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence, where we help you to build 5-Star Relationships at work by boosting your ability to understand and manage your own emotions and to help other people understand and manage theirs.
In this episode, we're going to talk about signs that you may have given up your power by playing the victim card. And I'll tell you a story of when I played the victim card once, and what I learned from it.
So without further ado: You might be playing the victim card... if you simply give in when powerful people ask you to. If you allow people to gang up on you. If you give up your votes, when conflict arises. Or if people manipulate you just to obtain more political power. So those are indications. Sometimes it's more simple than that, though. Sometimes choosing to be a victim can be as simple as making an excuse.
And I don't want you to be a victim. Because consider what happens if you act like a victim: You lose your power and influence. You lose your ability to innovate and contribute. Your organization loses an important voice that could have improved their impact. You also are seen as less of a leader.
So, we've all chosen to play the victim card here or there. For some it's more chronic. I can tell you that, for me, it used to be very common.
Many years ago, I attended a leadership training based on the book, The Oz Principle. (And since then, I suppose I've created a few of these trainings myself.) But the central tenant of the book The Oz Principle - which is one of my absolute favorite books by the way - is, there's this model, and there's a horizontal line that delineates the victim zone, which is below the line from the zone of accountability above the line. So if you're above the line, you're in the accountability zone, you're taking responsibility for your actions and so on. If you're below the line, that means you're playing the victim card.
And then I did this big project for the client that had supplied the training. And it was this week-long event for, I dunno, it seems like about 15,000 people; and we had hundreds of international subject matter experts flying in from all over the world to give presentations in a dozen languages. And I was responsible for helping a bunch of these people to design their presentations, to prepare, as well as some of the keynote presentations for the event. And 95% of it, I would say, went really, really well. All the prep was fantastic.
However, there was this one part that went very poorly. Part of the problem was that I had this huge nosebleed, and I didn't want to tell anyone about it. And so I acted like nothing was wrong; of course something was wrong. And although I got somebody to cover my responsibility for that time, that person had an issue. And when I didn't check in on them, there was this downward spiral of events that I could have prevented just by asking for help.
Afterwards, the client did invite me out for this really nice dinner with a couple of the VIP's we had been working with. It seemed like, from their perspective, the overall execution was a 5-Star Experience for them. Everything overall was great.
Still, it bothered me that I had dropped the ball on this one piece; and I was trying to write down this explanation of what happened - just to get it straight in my mind, so I could have a conversation with my counterpart. And I must've written it down about four different times to get my thoughts all straightened out. And the trouble was, every time I wrote it, it looked like a victim mentality. It was below-the-line thinking. And, in fact, I was playing the victim card. It looked like a bunch of excuses. It looked like I was blaming everything around me and not taking accountability like I had learned in The Oz Principle training. So this is very ironic; I was like, Oh my goodness, it looks again like a list of excuses. I'm going to rewrite this, right? Each time it was the same.
So I came to the realization that no matter how well I had prepared, I had failed to fully deliver this one part. And I failed to ask for help when I should have, because I was in the victim zone. And I would say that this was actually a very liberating thought for me because I realized what I had to do in order to fix it. I had to get out of the victim zone by taking accountability for what I had done. There was no one else to blame but myself.
At that point I backtracked through the whole thing and thought of ways that I could have reacted to those challenges with a mindset of personal accountability. And so I was able to have that conversation, which was really helpful, just for closure on my end for that situation with the client.
And this experience opened my eyes to a huge problem that I had. It gave me the desire to steer clear of the victim mode, and helped me also to reset my thought patterns for the future. And now I'm always asking myself, if a project fails, why will it fail? And what can I do now to prevent that failure from occurring? These questions have helped me be very successful in the years since.
I've also had some really great examples of people who have shown me how to handle tough situations. And I'm really grateful for so many people for modeling this. And one of them that comes to mind at the moment is Steph Potter, who I worked with at Western Governors University. So thank you, Steph.
Anyway, I don't want you to be a victim. I hope this episode gives you the opportunity to break out of victim thinking, and to take more responsibility for your actions. For more information, you can read The Oz Principle, one of my all-time favorite books.
Thanks for joining us. I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence.