We tend to categorise humans as being either selfish or altruistic, however, we know that humans are a combination of both of these traits. What is your general tendency? I have really found value in keeping a joy journal: daily journaling can help us discover what traits we tend towards. Then we can show up better and more often for ourselves – and others.
If we work in solidarity, this can be of great benefit to all group members. Cooperation can become our superpower but it does also seem to require sacrifice. What if for instance, you are in a large family where you should be able to benefit from the richness of cooperation but your parents are also attention-seeking and so seem to take too much from each of you– in that case, it can seem as though cooperation is over-giving.
Who are you accountable to?
I’m going through this issue at the moment as I’m organizing a family gathering. The price of cooperation with family can feel really too much to bear sometimes, but I’m gritting my teeth nonetheless!
Why? Apparently, it’s an evolutionary thing. If we cooperate, future generations will benefit. In early humans for instance, if the mother needed to go out to forage for food because there wasn’t enough around her, she’d have to leave her children with other mothers. We can see the benefits when there is an unmistakable collective win that makes us all feel proud. Feeling accountable to and with others, also helps us to get out of our ‘cave’ of thinking on our own as we start to see we can alter our own fixed mindset and see our own problems in an entirely new light. For instance, as an academic researcher, I find the benefits of peer review invaluable – a peer reviewer can sometimes help me to shape an argument or take an article in a whole new direction. See this Harvard Business School article about ‘growth’ versus ‘fixed’ mindset: https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/growth-mindset-vs-fixed-mindset
The benefits of cooperating in an accountable way
Nichola Raihani, in her book, The Social Instinct, What Humans Can Teach Us About Working Together, points out that every time we offer a seat to a stranger, let an older person stand in front of us in the queue or see a rocket go into space, we experience the benefits of cooperation. Without networks and organizations which focus on collaboration and cooperation, we cannot progress. For instance, lionesses form groups to hunt, even if it means at the end of the hunt, some lionesses do not get as much as the other lionesses. Their prey – such as herds of gazelles – also work collectively since they are more likely to be able to defend themselves from predators that way.
Taking the risk of being vulnerable
But being accountable to others also means becoming more vulnerable to them. It was the Greek philosopher Aristotle who, when promoting his philosophy of wellbeing – or ‘eudaimonia’ – enlightened us to the fact that, in order to really become fully realized individuals we need to be able to acknowledge our vulnerabilities as well as our strengths. This is tough because we may have had caregivers who have overshared their own feelings and traumas with us and at the same time not been receptive to our struggles. We may have learnt to be ‘resilient’ which can be a byword for self-sufficiency – but at worse, it can imply the need to put up defensive barriers around ourselves, which may, in time, become impregnable to others. This may have arisen because we feel anxiety about trusting other people because we have been hurt in the past. We are often confused about when it might be good to divulge personal information and when not – sometimes sharing an intimate piece of information can make a relationship, but we often fear that it could break it.
Self-development and self-expansion
At NLC we know that self-development necessarily involves self-expansion, which means becoming more and more aware of our vulnerabilities and no-go areas. Unfortunately, however, we live in a world in which the ‘face’ (‘facie’ in Latin) meaning literally ‘surface’ has come to be the be-all and end-all.
Have you ever stayed awake at night worrying about a Facebook post? Have you ever unfriended someone because of an image or comment they have made on Facebook and not followed up with them to find out what was going on in their lives to make them say that thoughtless thing? Why not? Because it’s hard work to find out what others are going through and we live in an age of convenience. The truth is that self-development is often not convenient: it is deeply challenging and it involves major shifts in the way we see ourselves, others and the world.
The benefits of Face-to-Face communication
In my experience based on my postgraduate research in the social and psychological fields – becoming accountable to oneself and others is much better done through face-to-face communication, and, if possible, in person since in digital exchanges, such as emails or text messages, there are no visual and emotional cues. This is even more the case when we are dealing with social media – information shared on social media is rarely private and it’s impossible to control where and how it might be shared. So not divulging personal information on social media but sharing personal information and stories one-to-one, say, on a walk in nature, or while engaged in a hobby, is a really wise way to grow and develop relationships.
When we start to become more accountable, we cannot help but grow. In my newsletter, which is available to subscribers only, I share some top tips about how to develop an accountability practice.
As Joseph Conrad wrote, when we engage in a writing activity, we also establish a bond with others, we connect with ourselves and other people. He describes it like this:
Our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of beauty and pity and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. (Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, 1904)
