Story
I’d like to tell you a little short story, and I want to tell it to you in a few different versions. First, we’re going to start with a very surface level version of the story, and I ask you to dive into it and look for the truth in what’s happening. I’m sure we’ve all related to this story in one version or another about road rage behind the wheel.
Imagine that a man is late for work and he’s driving down a single lane highway doing his best to make up time. This is a very important day for him at work as he’s to give a presentation first thing in the morning that all the management staff will be present for. Around the fourth lecture that he’s giving himself about how much trouble he’s going to get in if he’s late to this meeting, a person pulls out in front of him only doing half of the speed limit. Now on this particular road there is no opportunity to pass this person and no alternative route he can turn off and take. He has merely been sentenced to drive half the speed he normally was behind this person who is refusing to yield or speed up.
The rage in him builds as he starts to honk and fiercely shake his fist in the window cursing the person for the punishment he’s about to incur for being late to his presentation. The person in front of him perseveres and for the next 10 minutes holds their speed at half the posted speed rate. As they finally reach the place where their two paths separate, he immediately drops the accelerator all the way to the floor for the rest of his drive, barrels into his work parking lot, walks in the door with about 30 seconds to spare out of breath clearly frazzled, and delivers one of the worst presentations of his life.
Now we could drag out the story a little bit further but let’s stop there for a moment and just keep it isolated to this section. I want you to go over the below questions one at a time, very slowly and please don’t rush through them. Take two to three minutes per question and really think it through as it pertains to the above example.
Who do you relate to in this story?
How were they feeling?
Why did they feel that way?
Were they assigning fault to something or someone?
What could they have done differently?
Now I want you to repeat the above questions from the other person’s perspective.
In that short story the context was clearly written from the man’s perspective that was late for work. I intentionally left out the context behind the second driver. Now let’s add that piece to the story.
I want to tell you about a lady that was in a horrific car accident. She was the driver of the car that carried her best friend as they were going for lunch. A truck came out of nowhere and T-boned the car on the passenger side. The fault for the accident was clearly the truck driver’s and no charges or blame was laid at the lady’s feet. For almost a year this lady was unable to drive not because of injury but the fear rooted so deep inside of her about getting back behind the wheel was enough to paralyze her and remind her on the day that she lost her best friend. The day of this story marks the one-year anniversary of her friend’s death to which she decided to celebrate her friend’s life and force herself to drive the same route that she drove that horrible day. She could not bring herself to go anywhere near the speed limit but her only goal was to complete the route successfully.
Now let’s go back through those questions one more time. Does that second part of the story change any of your answers?
What if we added into the story about why the man was late. What if he was out partying all night and woke up hungover? Does it change any answers?
When I first came upon this exercise every piece of the pie that I added to the story inherently changed my answers and this really puzzled me because the incident itself didn’t change, only my context and understanding of the instant is what’s changing. We will never look at the context of an event unless we have the space to think it through and come off of autopilot. In that moment when the slower car pulled out in front of the man. He had an opportunity to react and lay all the blame of why he was late against another person who clearly was doing nothing to him, quite the opposite she was having her own moment until he happened upon her. There also can be the case made for the added stress that he needlessly put on top of her as she is trying to heal from her trauma and the list can go on and on and on. Though without space to think through why we want to react the way we do, we are left with these emotional discharges full of blame, and rage, and ego captaining our ship.