The next level of above and below the line And the next level of below the line is justifications and their close friend reasons.
When you are below the line in this way you will find yourself justifying the reasons why things are happening consistently. And so often that becomes a way of life.
You're justifying poor behaviour.
You're justifying poor outcomes.
You are justifying poor results.
The focus here is that there are factors that are outside of your control. This becomes a disempowering process because you never actually take responsibility. There's always some other justifications for why everything is happening. Now justifications can sound great and legitimate. The more skilful you are at behaving this way, the more masterful you are at deflecting events and happenings and that becomes a way of being for you.
This can be really hard to change both as a person and culturally.
Here is what is really interesting about reasons and justifications is that often people have surrounded themselves with other people who also live in the reasons and justifications below the line. You can have a whole team of people who then justify each other's, well, let's put it, call it what it is, rubbish behaviour. And so that they all perpetuate making the below the line behaviour ok.
Jim Rohn, said that you become the average of the five people you associate yourself with.
So if you can imagine, if you're around a team, a group or a friendship base, culture or work environment, that's consistently doing behaving this way, guess what's going to happen?
Guess what's going to be the environment and the prevailing theme and message and ethos of that organisation?
One of the things that happen is that a narrative begins to form or also know as a story.
Stories are about the things we tell ourselves.
What happens, why things happen, why we blame things, why we deny, why we deserve things? Why we do and why we don't, it's the weather, it's the times, it's the economy.
These narratives become a self-evident, and self-perpetuating processes that ultimately then define you. The story becomes your identity as an individual, as a culture, as an organisation, and stories become animated and come to life.
The more you and others tell them, the more oxygen you give them, the more they become true.
If you tell a story about something that happened, then it's the story of something that happened. But if you start telling the same story of what happened, what it becomes is not just what happened, but who you are.
Stay tuned for Part 3 in our series, where we will explore what happens to the people or organisations that are below the line a lot of the time.