I woke up trying to figure out how to ruin someone's life, or so it seems...

Think of a garden, where a gardener has planted some seeds, with the hope that they will grow to produce a yield of healthy plants.  One of the things that the gardener has to do after the seeds have been planted, among many things, is to make sure that weeds don't grow in the same area as the seeds, because weeds have the potential to overrun the garden and negatively affect the yield the gardener desires.

Think now of the workplace as the garden, with the supervisor being the gardener, who carefully selects seeds (good employees) and plants them in the garden (the workplace), with hopes that they provide a bountiful yield (productivity, efficiency in the workplace).  Think now of the bad employees, and how they are like the weeds, that can overrun the workplace and decrease the potential yield (by decreasing productivity).

Now let's go back to those weeds...Do they not come from seeds?  Do they not also have a desire to thrive and produce a yield?  Weeds are plants with life spans and ambitions as well...!

Let's probe deeper...Are the "good" seeds not affecting the yield of the weeds?  After all, if the "good" seeds were not planted, the weeds would be able to spread and thrive throughout the entire garden.  Instead, because other seeds were planted and growing in their space, their potential is affected too.

So often we think in terms of "good" versus "bad."  So often we label people who do things we don't agree with as "bad seeds."

Let's work to remove labels such as "good" or "bad"...We may think of ourselves as inherently good because we don't wake up in the morning, wondering how we can ruin the lives of the people we co-exist with...Remember that the "bad seeds" in our workplaces don't wake up trying to ruin people's lives either.  They want to thrive just as anyone else does.

Remember that sometimes people make bad choices, and that sometimes people do things that we don't agree with, but that doesn't make a person "bad."  The choices and actions may be "bad," but I believe most people desire to be at least a little happy in their daily lives, and how they react to things other people do may be ineffective, causing them to act out in ways that can be problematic to others. 

In my opinion, there are indeed some "bad" people out there, but we don't work with them, for the most part.  The truly "bad" people include those, for example, who think that killing Americans or other people who support the United States is a good thing.  They figure if they can kill women and children on top of it, the better the kill.  Those are truly bad people, who wake up wondering how they can ruin the lives of others.

So before you go around labeling others as "good" or "bad," try to appreciate the person behind the potential label.  Try to view them as a mother or father, or whatever way you can step into their shoes and try to appreciate what kind of world they live in.  A lot of people simply live to get through the challenges of each day the best they can, and sometimes living in a "survival" mode makes people do things that are pretty desperate and irrational to others.  It doesn't mean they are "bad."

Try to focus on actions and behaviors rather than people, and it will put you in a better position to empathize with others, communicate effectively, and work to collaborate with others.

Best wishes,

Victor