Articles
Why People Treat You Differently
August 13, 2013 (Number 48) A client complained to me recently about his attempts to collaborate with a colleague. "It's clear he won't lift a finger for me," he grumbled. "Why do you think he's acting that way?," I inquired. "Men are almost always like that," he responded. "Women are much more helpful.""Really?," I asked. I wasn't sure I was quite seeing the same thing. So I queried him, "How else do you usually see men?" "They're the competition," he replied. Leaning back in his chair, he added, "And I always want to win."
Naturally, men were detecting my client's competitiveness. And feeling threatened, they were closing off to him. So as this business leader was chagrined to discover in our work together, his male colleagues' "self-centeredness" was actually the direct result of his own behavior, and his underlying perceptions.
Might you also be inadvertently undermining your relations with men? Or with women? Or with some other population? Consider these tips:
- Ask yourself, "What group of people do I feel unsupported by?" And then ask how you perceive this group, how you feel about them and how you correspondingly act toward them. As explained in my book, your perceptions — including your beliefs and assumptions — drive your emotions which, in turn, trigger your actions.
- Next, challenge your perceptions of this group. Are you convinced they're accurate? For example, might you be "projecting" on these other people how you, deep down, actually see yourself — as my client was doing? To learn more about the dynamics of projection, see this article.
- Finally, given your conduct and, overall, what's going on for you (much of which others will "pick up on"), imagine how people perceive you and therefore feel about you — and how that might be determining their responses to you.
Dean Herman, Ph.D.
