Barefoot Corporate Warrior
Me? Naïve? You Bet! Have we become an overly-suspicious mob? Have the fake news, scams and unrelenting news cycle of bad robbed us of one of our essential human traits?
I am working on re-capturing some natural naïvety. Especially when I meet someone for the first time. Particularly if that someone has no expectation of getting something from me i.e. in non-transactional encounters. While I have been around the barnyard more than a few times and certainly had my fill of untrustworthy cads and bounders, I have decided to resist the cynical or disbelieving default when a new person comes within my orbit.
Unless I have a tip-off from a trusted source, hear something which doesn’t gel with known facts during the conversation or my life’s experience, or detect some strange body language ‘vibe’ then I am determined to believe what they say.
I am channelling Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story series – naïve, earnest, sincere and trusting. No matter what happens he maintains his disposition- completely admirable. Yes I know, this is a fictional children’s character unblemished by a real life of knocks, setbacks, letdowns and rip-offs. A guileless hero created by a scriptwriter but I think you get the drift.
Why doubt someone unless there is a reason to do so? Certainly it makes for more attentive, non-judgemental listening and for a happier disposition and better inter-human relationships.
Consciously bringing this attitude at least forces us to a higher state of self-awareness and, dare I suggest it may lead to a more harmonious and happier society?
Most people are honest and trustworthy. Most people are not seeking to deceive you… just some people. So, when I talk about naïvety I am talking about moving beyond the dangers of ignorance to a state which proactively shuns cynicism and that world-weary demeanour which taxes the spirit.
Children are the great teachers when it comes to how an experienced adult might wilfully adopt a posture of natural naïvety. While there is an element of world-ignorance in their naïvety there is also the awe, wonder and mix of real and imaginative worlds which brings a freshness to all interactions.They believe everything you say, yes everything, until experience teaches them otherwise. Their world experience filters have not kicked in. It is charming, loveable and life-affirming to see.
I have been (seldomly, of course) guilty of telling children and grandchildren convincing, fantastical tales about the world and history. I once had one of my grandsons convinced that a real dragon lurked under a playground not far from our house. A stormwater pipe with a vent grate was beside the playground and if you bent down and put your ear over this grate a sound resembling the rhythmic breathing of some large creature could be heard. You could imagine the breath moving in and out of massive nostrils although the beast was always out of sight, asleep in its lair.
Of course it was a friendly dragon and meant us no harm. He enthusiastically accepted this and checking on the dragon became a fun moment of our regular visits. Now I understand these joke fibs could be held up as serious and cruel deceptions. The very cause, I hear you say, for disappointment and the development of a suspicious nature later in life. If children can’t trust their own family members then who can they trust?
For my part I contend that these flights of fancy, myths and imaginative jokes in early childhood are magical moments and memories – comfort food for the mind as we find ourselves buffeted and tossed about by our unfolding passage through life. We still, for the most part, buy-in to Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
Feeding a developing imagination and the creativity which springs from it has driven civilization’s progress since humans first developed self-awareness. It is also interesting how many children cling to these naïve childhood stories and myths even when they intuitively know them to be false. Comfort in innocence.
I don’t think I am alone in this misanthropic counter-revolution. Most people I meet seem to adopt the same approach most of the time. My training in journalism and decades in business and corporate circles have armed me with a pretty good intuition when it comes to reading people.
This is a skill worth honing through life but I think we need to resist the slide into a kind-of pessimism when it comes to the honesty of our fellow humans. It’s hard in the current world, assailed as we are on all sides by tales of unkind cheats who leave a trail of damaged goods and people in their wake.
While we can never recapture that childhood innocence, I feel it is worth cultivating as wilful action for a self-aware adult. I stress that this cultivated naïvety should apply to actual interactions with humans who are physically in front of me, not coming at me from a cyberspace littered with opaque influencers, negative and manipulating algorithms seeking to mislead and misuse. I shed my naïvety when I enter the digital world and when dealing with business and financial transactions.
Bringing naïvety to interactions with actual people with no pre-conceived agenda or judgement will, I feel, lead to more positive energy, allowing us to develop feelings about each other and (naïvely)… a better world?
A bit too much naïvety for a corporate warrior? I’ll let you ponder that while I get back to looking for dragons.
