I recently read a humorous piece about how a man could keep his wife happy. It said a husband only needed to be a friend, a companion, a lover, a chef, an electrician, a carpenter and 50 other things. Well, it made the job of keeping a wife copy sound an impossible task. But, when I read this, I wondered whether we are not trying to do this to many people in our life.
If you are a boss, you just can't be a boss. You have to be a friend, a guide, a companion, a sympathetic listener, a confidant, an understanding person, a helpful person, a kind person and so on. This is what many of us think. We also try to play diverse roles in order to keep the other person happy so that he or she will do the things expected of him or her.
It is a noble ideal to be everything to everyone but it's an ideal all the same. In reality, we can't be everything to everyone. We have to play our roles. A policeman can't be a friend to the person he is interrogating. A boss can be a friend but only within limits and only during certain times.
Life will be much simpler and rewarding if we realize that our behavior is circumscribed by our roles and if we don't keep ourselves within the limits, we will go out of the sphere of our operation. We could neither reach our goals nor keep others happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment