The Cost of Passive Avoidance
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I’ve failed at many things. Anyone with a lot of success has also had plenty of failure. If a successful person denies this, they are lying.
Reflecting on my professional failures, some resulted from passively avoiding a situation. These are the ones I regret the most because my behavior is under my control. While I’m comfortable with confrontation, living in a work world of endless conflict and negotiation, it took me a long time to fully acknowledge situations where I was passively avoidant.
Today, I separate passive avoidance, which I now try never to do, from active avoidance, where I’ve deliberately decided not to deal with or address a situation. When I’m actively avoidant, I tell the people involved I’ve chosen not to engage with the situation. When I realize I’m being passively avoidant, I either address the situation directly or decide to be actively avoidant and state that to the involved parties.
In Give First: The Power of Mentorship, I have a chapter for each of the 18 principles in the Techstars Mentor Manifesto. One of them is Be Direct. Tell the Truth, However Hard, and in that chapter, I have a section titled The Cost of Passive Avoidance.
Following is an excerpt.
Recently, the concept of “the truth” has become elusive. While mistruths, lies, and deceit have been a foundational part of our species’ communication, a new level of misdirection and deflection around being direct and telling the truth became popular when the phrase “fake news” became part of our vocabulary.
In entrepreneurship, passive avoidance is a pernicious version of avoiding the truth. Every crisis communication playbook has a chapter on ignoring the crisis and pretending it’s not happening. This approach is related to deflection, another deeply destructive maneuver from the crisis communication playbook, which follows another strategy: attack.
There are moments when I’m too tired or frustrated to deal with a situation. Or, I disagree with a path a team is going down, but I have other things on my mind, and I don’t feel like bothering with it. Or I’m tired of arguing with someone, don’t care anymore, or feel defeatist about the situation. That’s passive-avoidant.
Reflecting on my past, I often regret when I was passive-avoidant. Many of my disappointments can be linked directly to being passive avoidant. When Amy challenges me about something at work, it’s usually about me being passive-avoidant. I feel anxiety when I’m avoiding dealing with something. And, when I look back at some of my depressive episodes, they often were triggered by an accumulation of avoiding things, including my own physical and emotional health, that I let build up until I couldn’t handle it anymore.
If you realize you are acting passive-avoidant, pause and consider why you have fallen into this behavioral trap. Step back and get to the root cause of what is bothering you. Apply the Five Whys to the situation. Once you discover the root cause, decide if you should take action to address it. Or, should you disengage? Either way, you are now ready to be direct about what you are thinking, feeling, and going to do.
Passive-avoidant behavior is occasionally inevitable. But if you do it repeatedly, it builds up. You start being unable to confront situations. You begin avoiding being direct. Consequently, the other person doesn’t hear challenging information that could impact their behavior. You stop telling the truth and get caught up in your deceit around a situation. You withdraw, where silence can do as much damage as
hostility and attack.
I put much of myself and my personal philosophy into this book. In addition to conceptual explanations, there are plenty of examples from my own experience, such as the section immediately following, titled Young Adult Lessons from Lying and Being Lied To.
I’m looking forward Give First: The Power of Mentorship being out in the wild and getting feedback on what rings true, what I could have explained better, and what doesn’t resonate.
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