Are you familiar with The Onion?

I came across an old headline and laughed at how applicable it is to so many of us.

Search for Self Called Off After 38 Years

Phil Gerbyshak described himself in response to Becky Robinson’s Be Who You Are, in which she said that she couldn’t separate her business self and personal self.

But would she want to?

We are all a product of our MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

The biggest difference between personal and professional is the words used to describe what’s going on. We have ‘relationships’ in our personal life and ‘interactions’ in our professional one.

Knowing who we are is important, but constantly updating our knowledge is even more important, because we continue changing as long as we live.

Stopping your search could mean being stuck at that point like a fly in amber.

Along with continued searching, we need to share the information with the world, not just in words, but through our actions. I came across a quote from the movie Fat Like Me that says this best and has always resonated with me.

The world will tell you who you are until you tell the world.

And another one I read somewhere.

What we are never changes.
Who we are never stops changing.

So be your MAP, tell the world and update them frequently.

Image credit: Thiru Murugan on flickr

(Today continues a conversation initiated last Thursday and added to yesterday.)

Everybody lies about sex. Those who aren’t getting any say they are and those who are getting it where they shouldn’t deny it.

Governor Mark Sanford followed the same path of Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Rudy Giuliani, John Ensign, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Helen Chenoweth (the first woman) and many more.

But you know what?

I don’t care. At least, not about the sex—or even the lies. Even the lies under oath, because I don’t believe that an oath is going to change someone’s attitude about admitting something they don’t want to admit, it just adds another layer to the lie.

As Becky Robinson pointed out in her comment I could have just as easily used the Evangelical community—Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman, Jim Bakker, Lonnie Latham, Earl Paulk, Paul Crouch, Douglas Goodman, Frank Houston, etc., etc., etc. and, of course, the Catholic Church.

Dan Erwin made two very salient points.

In his first comment he said, “If you reframe the context from leader to bureaucrat, then the ethical expectations change.”

Amen, Dan. To assume that an elected official or any person-out-front automatically possesses all the sterling qualities of a “leader” as defined by the media, pundits and leadership industry has no basis in fact.

The second point that hit me was, “The notion of “standards” etc. is often a set-up for failure.”

This is getting closer to what angers me so much.

Not the sex, not the lies, but the standards.

Standards that they defined, preached and worked so hard to shove down everyone’s throat—standards that not one of them has even come close to practicing.

Mark Sanford voted for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment citing a need for “moral legitimacy” as his reason. Now he cites the Bible and the story of David and Bathsheba as his reason for not resigning.

As to the apologies, are they for the action or for getting caught? Americans are so focused on the sex and accept the apologies so readily that the hypocrisy becomes mere background noise.

It’s the Richard Nixon mentality all over again. As Nixon said in 1977, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal,”

The reigning slogan these days for too many “leaders” seems to be “do as I say, not as I do,” which both angers and confuses their followers.

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Dan also said, “No question but what they’re hypocrites…of the worst kind. They made claims they didn’t follow through on. However, the issue parents (and grandparents, too) have to deal with is the education of your children.”

We’ll explore Dan’s thoughts and personal example of this in the next Leadership’s Future on Thursday. Please join us.

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Image credit: Poldavo (Alex) on flickr

Thursday I wrote about today’s excessive hypocrisy using, among other examples, Senator John Ensign.

Like most bloggers, I post ahead, so that I wasn’t able to include South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

Today I want to offer up some quotes from him and tomorrow I’m going to address the subjects brought up by Dan Erwin and Becky Robinson in the comments on Thursday’s post.

“The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His [Livingston] situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. He lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”

“I think it would be much better for the country and for him [Livingston] personally (to resign). I come from the business side. If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.”

“What I find interesting is the story of David, and the way in which he fell mightily—fell in very, very significant ways, but then picked up the pieces and built from there.” (King David, who slept with Bathsheba, another man’s wife, had the husband killed, married the widow, but continued to ‘lead’.)

“Too many people in government seem to think they are above regular folks, and I said I would expect humility in the way each member of my team served—that they would recognize that the taxpayer is boss.”

“We as a party want to hold ourselves to high standards, period,”

I hope you’ll come back tomorrow as this conversation continues.

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Image credit: moonstarsilverwolf on flickr

Last Friday I offered you a brain-stretching riddle. Did you get the answer?

You will recall that the shifty moneylender had put two black pebbles in the bag.

The girl put her hand into the moneybag and drew out a pebble. Without looking at it, she fumbled and let it fall onto the pebble-strewn path where it immediately became lost among all the other pebbles.

‘Oh, how clumsy of me,’ she said. ‘But never mind, if you look into the bag for the one that is left, you will be able to tell which pebble I picked.’

Since the remaining pebble is black, it must be assumed that she had picked the white one. And since the money-lender dared not admit his dishonesty out of fear, the girl changed what seemed an impossible situation into an extremely advantageous one.

I like this story because it is a simple illustration of the difficulty of so-called thinking outside the box, but why is that?

Starting as young children we are praised for coloring inside the lines and praise for coloring inside the lines continues as we grow.

The lines we stay inside my not be apparent to an onlooker, but they are obvious to our chosen world. Fashion is a great example, the Goth look that is seen as so outside-the-box by many is framed with as many rules and lines as is any mainstream look.

Fred H Schlegel had a nice suggestion, but it depended on changing the basic nature of the villain and when looking for out-of-the-box solutions we rarely can change people’s basic nature.

Becky Robinson came closest; she was honest and said that she had seen a similar problem previously. But in her synthesizing Becky allowed the crook to take the active role, assuming he would act ethically to maintain his honor, but if he had honor he wouldn’t have cheated in the first place.

Did Becky win? You decide in comments.

Creativity requires us to step away from many of our own basic assumptions as well as going outside the lines dictated by our world.

Doing this is how we enlarge our box to encompass the universe. (My apologies, I just found that this link didn’t work last week.)

It takes effort and lots of practice, but the rewards more than justify the work.

Image credit: piblet on flickr