Craig chats about a learning he experienced early in life that impacted his mindset and approach to others.
When I was growing up, I very quickly made a choice that I wanted to do something that would help others in some positive way. I define this now as helping others to be the best version of themselves. This choice came from experiences at school, where I was bullied, often called ‘playground banter’ by others. This ‘banter’ then continued when I started my career in retail. I loved my job, but along with this came some quite intense and raw banter, which was taken a bit too far to try to gain a laugh. By experiencing this in my early career, it helped me to step back, evaluate and solidify my values around fairness, kindness and seeing the best in others. Whilst these early experiences could be deemed as totally negative, I choose to see the learning in it, as it helped me to think about how I might want to do things moving forward.
It solidified for me how people should be treated and that we’re all equal. Everyone deserves to be treated in a respectful manner, and this behaviour I experienced and witnessed wasn’t appropriate. We should always look to create environments where others feel as though they can be their authentic selves, without ridicule or judgement.
This experience highlighted to me the importance of relationships, understanding others and appreciating people’s differences. We should all be proud of who we are as individuals. There’s over eight billion people in the world today and we’re all unique. Instead of judging, we should choose the mindset of appreciating differences and being curious about others. I’m genuinely curious about other humans and understanding what makes people who they are, but more importantly, why they do what they do (which links in nicely with our work here at Rambutan and our behavioural model, ‘Why people do what they do’). I choose this mindset because it enables me to be grounded. If someone has a different perspective or view to me, which most people do, by being curious it causes me to take a step back and ask myself, ‘What can I learn from this? How can it help me? How can it support or aid me?’ Sometimes, I might fundamentally disagree, but I’ll do it from a point of view of respect and wanting to understand what drives someone to think that way. This sort of thinking links a lot to Carol Dweck and her work on growth mindset.
There’s an amazing quote that resonates with me, often attributed to the American poet Walt Whitman, who said, “Be curious, not judgemental” I just love this quote (and yup, it was used in the awesome TV series Ted Lasso!) So, why not choose to have a mindset of curiosity and ask yourself, what drives somebody to do that? What drives somebody to say that or behave that way? I focus on this mindset, so I choose to take this forward with me in my day-to-day life.
A learning doesn’t always have to be from training, but it could be from an experience at school, in the workplace or in daily life. You take those learnings forward by how you let it impact you and how you choose to use the experience to impact you in the future.
What learning from your early career has had an impact on you?