Imagine this: You. A polar bear. On an ice flow…
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Whatever’s going on for you right now, it’s hard to imagine a situation that would make you quite as anxious as the one reported in the Canadian papers today.
An Inuit teen, separated from his uncle while hunting, finds himself trapped on an ice flow with a polar bear and her two cubs. He resorts to shooting the adult bear when it gets too close, stays as far away from the two cubs as possible, and eventually gets rescued suffering a little hypothermia and, no doubt, a great deal of relief.
Yesterday – and I’ll make the connection in a moment – one of my newsletter readers wrote to tell me I was ‘so naive that he just wanted to shake me sometimes.’ It’s a comment that has been rattling around in my head.
Certainly, faced with a polar bear I’d be in trouble. And I know that we all face the metaphorical equivalent in our organizational lives from time to time. How do you handle that? It’s you, one on one, with a dangerous creature.
Do you have to meet force with force or is there another way to manage those difficult situations? Let me know what you think and what tactics and strategies you use. (I’ve got some naive ones… but want to hear what others do.)
To give you the answer you need, somewhere – yes – look on TED under play – Stuart someone – I think, you will see some dogs who were chained up and easy dinner converting a confrontation with a polar bear to play.
You may be naive – one of the the characteristics of people who like to coach is that we over-trust. We have to – that is our job.
Equally, we exercise the Pygmalion effect in our favour (and in our group’s favour).While the shrewd people of the world get what they want but also bring about the very negative situation they expected.
The real test is whether we can keep up our goodwill when faced with the snarling polar bear. At that point, we would really like a coach to help us override our fear and whisper in our ear “play, play, try play first”!
Thanks, Jo – great reply.
I know the TED talk of which you speak. It’s fantastic to see the dogs playing with the polar bear.