You’ve probably heard the story about the old fellow sitting on his porch on the edge of his hometown who is approached by two separate individuals at two separate times. The first individual pulls up, gets out of his car, and asks the old man, “I’m thinking of moving into town and I was wondering what kind of people live here?” The old man replies, “Well, what kind of people lived in your old town?” “They were rude and obnoxious. Everyone was only concerned with themselves. No one cared about getting to know their neighbor.” “Well,” says the old man, “I’m afraid you’ll find exactly the same kind of folks here.” Later that day the second individual pulls up, gets out of his car, and asks the old man the same question: “What kind of people live here?” “Well, what kind of people lived in your old town?” “They were pleasant and friendly. Everyone looked out for their neighbor. It was a really great place to live.” “I’m happy to say you’ll find exactly the same kind of folks here,” says the old man.
The bottom line of the story above, as I understand, is what you see is what you believe. But then I also thought it might be a step even further – what you see is what you have done.
Dog training and human training are pretty much the same. What you get in general is what you’ve trained others to give you. Like, if you reward your dog when it does something, it’s going to do that more. That may be kind of reward/punishing mechanism going on there.
In the example above, guy A said “They were rude and obnoxious. Everyone was only concerned with themselves. No one cared about getting to know their neighbor.” Would it be possible that it’s him that didn’t go out to get to know his neighbor? Maybe his neighbor was not initially open or hyperactive, but did you think he proactively went out to meet his neighbor? What most likely happened was he saw his neighbor “looked kind of unfriendly”, and he gave a “kind of unfriendly look” in return. It all ends up in a bad loop.
Now perhaps that sounds like some serious common sense there but I’d say a lot of people don’t seem to fully understand how this works, from what they’re doing. Most people can’t really express what they’re really thinking. Let’s say they got treated shit from their boss from work, typically they wouldn’t do anything about it on the spot but they’d badmouth the boss at the back later.
From the boss’s perspective, the employees responded well to that kind of behavior, so he’d keep doing it. Now sure, if the employee stood up for himself he probably wouldn’t get very good treatment right away, but there’s no denying that it would have “taught the boss a lesson”, no matter how small.
People “reward” other people’s bad behavior when they are afraid of the consequences of standing up for themselves. At other times, however, most people neglect to reward others’ good behaviors. When people do something to cross us, we’ll blame them immediately (if it doesn’t seem to have any immediate bad effects to us). Now let’s say if you get some good treatments from someone, most people would usually not give too much about it but a contrived thank you.
Why care about all this stuff? All the title suggests, what you see is what you have done. So the bottom line is, if you want people to respond well to you, maybe the very thing you can start considering right now is to change the way you respond to other people.
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