Probably the most common comment or question I get from clients of all kinds is, “What's wrong with them?”. I go all geeky on it. Because if you've ever heard of the bell shaped curve, it looks like a bell. And what it means is that any attribute of any kind, initiative ... motivation ... follow through, is represented in the population in a bell shape, meaning there's a few high outliers and a few low outliers and everything in between, with a lot in the middle. And the mistake that all of us seem to make is we look at the world through our own egocentric lens, i.e. where we are on a bell shaped curve.

So let's say I'm high initiative. Then I have a tendency to look at everybody else and say, well, what's wrong with them? And the answer is, there's nothing wrong with them. They are where they are on the bell shaped curve.

It's called acceptance, the ability to let people be where they are.

The question that we need to be asking is not what's wrong with them. But, what's wrong with our viewpoint of them, or as my longtime mentor master Samwise used to say, "Ron, the problem's not with them, the problem is with what you think of them.” That is truer than any of us might imagine. But, we're so egocentric, we can't see that we think we are normal, and everyone else is abnormal.

If you want to change your relationship to pretty much everybody in the world, stop wondering why they're different. Start wondering why your viewpoint needs to be different. That'll change your experience of everyone, all the time. It'll let them be them and make you work far more effectively with them.

Give it a shot, see what you can do with it. It'll be worth it.