Think about who is obnoxious to you. What are they telling you about yourself? This week’s edition of By Your Life encourages you to look in the mirror and learn from those who annoy you the most.

Mass Readings Audio
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/18_09_23.mp3

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time – September 23, 2018

Welcome to the twenty-sixth episode of By Your Life. Thank you for joining me. If you haven’t already, please subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, or on the right side of the page so I can send you notifications when each new episode is posted. And please forward to a friend you think would benefit from By Your Life.

My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular, business world. It is my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace, and to trust that it is good for business. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.

In this edition, we will focus on the readings for the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time. In the first reading from the Book of Wisdom, the wicked find the just one obnoxious. (Wis 2:12) He is obnoxious to them because he points out their faults. I can relate.

As I reflected on this, I thought about who those who are obnoxious to me. Who are they? Well, I think those who are self-promoting are obnoxious. But why would I think that? Whether you are an individual or a company, you can’t survive in business and not promote yourself. Heck, I have to do it. So, it isn’t just self-promoting people that are obnoxious to me. It is those who I feel are my competitors and are more successful at promoting themselves than I am. They are the ones that are obnoxious to me. This really says more about me than it does about them, (but I’ll come back to this thought later.)

It is hard to be in business and not worry about our competition. They are out there working hard to take our customers and our good employees away. Our competitors are innovative. They come up with new and creative solutions to our customers’ problems. Our competitors are better funded than we are. They have more resources to invest in human and capital resources. Our competitors have advantages of size, so they either are big, have economies of scale and a cost advantage or are small and are quick and more responsive. Our competitors benefit from laws that give an advantage to some classes of business owners. Our competitors are obnoxious to us.

If our competition is obnoxious to us, it is because they reveal to us our shortcomings. Instead of focusing on how we can become better by studying the competition and learning from them about what they do well, we complain about them.

St. James points out, “where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every foul practice.” (Jas 3:16) In my experience, “disorder and foul practice” that is founded in jealousy and selfish ambition flourishes within organizations too. Instead of focusing on the competition outside, employees waste a lot of energy competing with others inside. Heck, even the disciples suffered from this problem. They argued among themselves about “who was the greatest.” (Mk 9:34) Jealousy and selfish ambition disrupt teamwork, cause division, expand silo-thinking, and ultimately get in the way of achieving goals.

This in-fighting is quite common and takes on many faces. Sales wants to satisfy the customer’s needs and then complains that operations can’t deliver. Operations wants to deliver quality products and services but can’t do so when sales makes promises they can’t keep. HR wants to invest in employees, but finance is cutting budgets. Finance wants to make sure that the company is investing its resources wisely and it is hard to measure the ROI of soft HR investments. Customer service wants their request handled first and manufacturing has 100 other custom requests to prioritize. They are all complaining about how the other department is preventing them from accomplishing their own, perhaps selfish, functional goals. Or, as the first reading put it, they complain about how “he sets himself against our doings.” (Wis 2:20) They are obnoxious to each other, so they throw up roadblocks. They resist.

Not only do different departments compete with each other, in-fighting occurs within work groups. I’ve had several different people tell me how they struggled in their job because they brought new energy, new methods and new expectations to their roles and their coworkers didn’t like it. The old guard didn’t want these people to work harder, be more productive, or deliver better results because it would make them look bad. Anyone who was trying to raise the bar met with resistance from those who wanted to get by doing less.

Resistance is the main problem leadership faces when they are trying to create a cultural shift in an organization. I see it all the time. The interesting thing is, people actually want the new and improved culture the leadership is trying to create, they just don’t want to be the ones who have to change. Or, they are so busy pointing the finger at everyone else who needs to change, they forget to look in the mirror.

I’ve actually started bringing a mirror with me when I work with people on their personal development or with teams on transforming their culture. When I hear comments about how “he” or “she” or “they” need to change, I point to the mirror and ask, “and what part of it do you own?” It is so much easier to point to flaws in others and resist the changes we need to make in ourselves. Or as the old quote goes, “I asked, ‘Why doesn’t somebody do something?’ Then I realized, I was somebody.” (This quote is more recently attributed to American actress Lily Tomlin, but the original source is unknown.)

Confronting this resistance to change is no small challenge because it can be deceptive. In his book, Resisting Happiness, Matthew Kelly says that “resistance wears a thousand masks, many of which are so effective we don’t even recognize resistance is behind them. Laziness, procrastination, fear, doubt, instant gratification, self-loathing, indecision, escapism, pride, self-deception, friction, tension and self-sabotage are just some of the ways resistance manifests its ugly self in our lives.”

It makes no sense to resist happiness or to resist the changes we need to make to achieve it. God wants the happiness of all, but selfishness and pride can make that impossible. But, what are we really resisting? What are we—you and I—truly avoiding? We are resisting an honest look in the mirror.

I mentioned that those who are obnoxious to me says more about me than it does about them. What did I mean by that?

There is a song that we sing at Mass quite often by Tim Hughes, and performed by Chris Tomlin, called “Here I am to Worship.” I am often brought to tears when I hear the lyrics “I’ll never know how much it cost to see my sin upon that cross.” I mention this song because in the first reading from the Book of Wisdom, we hear what “the wicked” say. This reading so obviously foretells what the chief priests and the scribes are going to do Jesus, that I am tempted to think that “the wicked” being referred to are those people, not me. But, I know that I too am included and it is my sin that too “condemn(ed) him to a shameful death.” (Wis 2:20) I hate that I am one of the wicked.

Until we each face up to the ugly truth that we contribute to the problems, we will not be able to find solutions. As long as we are defending our position, as the disciples did, arguing about who is right, the best, the brightest, we cannot grow and develop. Until we look in the mirror, we’ll not be able to see the world clearly.

The other day, I was driving to an appointment and I could tell that I had put my contact in inside-out. I do this from time to time and it is amazing that I can still see, but it is annoying every time I blink. When I got back to my office, it was still irritating me. So, I took my contact out, flipped it to the right side, and tried to put it back in my eye. But, because I was sitting at my desk and I didn’t have a mirror. It is almost impossible to put a contact in your eye without one. It is impossible to grow and become the person you are capable of becoming without being honest about where you are. You have to look in the mirror.

The competition, or any of “those people” who are obnoxious to us, can be a great mirror. The first step is to change your attitude. Nabil N. Jamal PhD, author of The Second Harvest: 40 Short Stories to Inspire Your Self-Improvement, said, “Competition in business is a blessing, for without it, we wouldn’t be motivated to improve.” And, he’s right.

Competition is a blessing for us and our customers. Without it, we can become complacent and complacency does not contribute to us developing more of our potential. A new attitude of abundance and potential allows us to recognize that there are customers to be served that our competition can’t serve well, and when we look at our strengths, we can begin to figure out who they are and how we can serve them better. Everyone wins. But, if we make excuses about how the competition must have some unfair advantage, the truth is, we are jealous of them.

Instead of fearing how they show up our weaknesses, let the competition (whether they are external or internal) present us with an honest assessment of how we need to grow and become better. With this clarity, we can begin to make the changes we need to make in ourselves, not so that we can become like them, but so we can become better versions of ourselves.

In the scheme of eternity, we are not in competition with anyone. There is plenty of room in our Father’s House. Our goal should be to be the last one in and help as many as we can find the way there too. As Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” (Mk 9:35)

Let us ask the Holy Spirit to help us to grow in holiness and help others to do the same.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.

May God bless you abundantly and may you glorify the Lord by your life.  Amen

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