There is a wonderful line in one of Susan W. Albert’s books that says, “…under certain circumstances, almost anyone can be driven to almost anything.” True? Or are you going to attempt to take the moral high ground and state – ‘Not me!’? Sadly, it really is all too true. Sure we can say, ‘… we’re only human.’ But that really is no excuse. And to be cavalier about this is asking for trouble.
Do you know your blind spots (yes, you can know at least some of them), ‘pet peeves’ and sore points? Sore points are those comments and/or ideas expressed that hurt, distress, upset you. Typically only those close to us know them, regardless they are ‘areas’ that can – drive you. Typically the place that you get to when ‘driven to’ is one that you really don’t like since you may do or say something that you wished you hadn’t. For me, when I get to that driven place it typically forces me to go back because I need to apologize.
So the issue really is – what to do about those ‘driven to’ places? How can we control them rather than being controlled by them? I do believe that if we don’t recognize and understand our own places then more often than not we will be driven to do almost anything to reduce the impact of what’s occurring. None of us handles pain that well. Unfortunately and somewhat understandably typically we react without thinking, almost blindly, to alleviate our condition.
Often it is our ‘blind spots’ that cause us the greatest problems. Getting blindsided is always extremely uncomfortable because of its unexpectedness. How we react is critical because for some reason, it’s these situations that seem to always occur in front of an audience. So, once again we are talking about a character issue. When these types of ‘driven to’ situations emerge, it is our character that will ‘take over’. In hindsight, is this good? bad? or being worked on…
