Everyone's the Hero in the Movie of Their Life (Ed Batista)

Joker and Batman by Brecht Bug 14365592824 EDIT

Much of my work as a coach involves helping clients deal with "people problems." The CEO with an overbearing investor who's full of unhelpful advice. The investor with an egotistical CEO who never listens. The CEO with a defensive executive who calls any oversight "micromanagement." The executive with a distrustful CEO who can't give up control.

In any situation like this it's important to bear in mind that everyone's the hero in the movie of their life. This is true for my clients, and it's true for the people who are causing their problems. It's true for me, and I'm willing to bet that it's true for you. It's true for almost every single person we encounter.

When we're frustrated with someone and unhappy with their behavior, or when we feel thwarted by someone and view them as an obstacle, it's remarkably easy to characterize them as a villain. We imagine that they're intentionally working at cross-purposes to us, and that their primary aim is to prevent us from achieving ours. They're not trying to build anything--they just want to tear us down. There may be some truth to such perceptions, but they rarely encompass the full truth.

Sociopaths exist, but the lifetime prevalence of antisocial personality disorder is estimated at 1 to 4 percent, and most of those people are in prison. [1] It's extraordinarily unlikely that we'll ever interact with an actual villain in day-to-day business life. I've been a coach since 2006, and I've conducted over 8,500 coaching sessions [2], and in all that time only a single client had an antagonist whose behavior was sufficiently irrational and destructive to raise the possibility of sociopathy.

It's true that there are countless zero-sum scenarios in life where there will be few winners and many losers, and the resulting pressure causes people to act selfishly and aggressively. But when we find ourselves in such a contest, it's useful to remember that our rivals and and competitors aren't villains, at least not in their own minds. From their perspective they're the heroes, fighting the good fight, and we may be their villainous adversaries.

So what's happening here, why does it matter, and what can we do about it? Humans are reliably subject to an illusion described by theologian Eric Springsted, drawing upon the work of philosopher Simone Weil: "The illusion is that it appears to us as if we were at the center of the world. We thus appear as terrifically important, and what else is of value can be ranked by its proximity to us." [3]

And as I've written before, "We can readily grasp why evolution has selected for the center of the world illusion--viewing ourselves from this perspective, we typically put our subjective needs and desires above those of others, making our own biological success more likely." [4] It's a short step from there to villainizing others while valorizing ourselves, and thus we are all the heroes in the movie of our life.

This mental model confers some benefits in a competitive environment, but it also carries a number of costs. When we view others' intentions as malevolent and their behavior as hostile, we protect ourselves against potential villains, but we also make it less likely that a mutually beneficial outcome will be achieved. We turn every contest into a zero-sum scenario, often needlessly. We forego the possibility of collegial relationships, even with rivals. And we keep ourselves in a perpetual state of hyper-vigilance and distrust, undermining our own quality of life.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we naively assume good intentions or leave ourselves vulnerable to bad actors. My former Stanford colleague Jeff Pfeffer describes a student of his who did just that and came to regret it:

"Why did you do that?" I inquire. "Because," she responds, "I have been taught to build relationships of authenticity and trust at work." When I ask how her efforts went, she comments that of course they didn’t work at all, because her peer was not interested in "repairing a relationship" or behaving with trust and authenticity; he was interested in taking over her team for his own advantage--a not uncommon situation. [5]

But there's a world of difference between allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of and viewing all competitors and rivals as villains. We can protect our interests and work toward our goals in a competitive environment while viewing other parties realistically and dispassionately. Some of them will turn out to be untrustworthy, overly aggressive, even predatory, and we'll need to respond appropriately. But almost all of them will believe that they're the hero, and it will serve us well to bear this in mind.

We craft stories to explain others' behavior, and there's always some missing data left out of our narratives. Further, we take action on the basis of theories and beliefs which rest upon our interpretations of a selective data set, and at each stage of this "ladder of inference" errors may creep into our thinking. Slowing down to consider what data we might be missing or misinterpreting allows us to take a broader view of the situation and act with deliberation, not reflexively. None of this precludes the possibility that we may find ourselves in a hostile conflict. As I've written before,

Sometimes fights have a way of finding us, and sometimes angry people show up uninvited and refuse to leave, and sometimes the circumstances simply dictate a zero-sum struggle. And if we're unable to de-escalate the conflict, unable to find a win-win solution, and unable to turn adversaries into allies, then a successful outcome may depend on our ability to step into the conflict and make effective use of our anger. [6]

Footnotes

[1] Despite the rarity of antisocial personality disorder among the general population, it's estimated that 60 percent of male prisoners have this condition. For more on this topic, see the following: