Conducted a student focus group at a client today, and was amazed at their responses. They were suprisingly, almost shockingly negative about their experience at the school.
As they were talking, I was wondering to myself how much of it was the school and how much of it was the group. This particular group of kids work together all the time, and it was obvous in the stories they told and how much they knew about each other.
I believe that it isn’t just organizations or businesses that have a “culture” associated with them. I think groups of people - familes, friends, sports teams, classrooms - can similarly adopt an unstated sense of values, a framework through which they see the world.
Meetings like today reminded me that sometimes, a culture of negativity has a way of infecting each of its members. You take a cheerful, optomistic student and you stick him in this group and ask him to work with the others for 9 months, and I’m willing to bet you’d see a drastically changed person.
All the more reason to be extremely intentional in choosing the people you associate with. If you’re surrounded by angry, bitter, negative people who consistently make you feel bad and bring you down, you need to significantly reduce (or eliminate altogether) the amount of time you spend with them. This is especially true if you have goals and ambitions that you’re reaching for.
I heard a story once about catching crabs (the animal, not the medical condition.) As long as you have two or more crabs together, you can keep them in an extremely shallow container. Even though they could easily climb out on their own, the other crabs actually pull them back into the box.
It may take a lot of energy and it may hurt, but if you don’t do whatever you can to get out of that box, the end result could be the death of your spirit.
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