I asked my boss for a pay rise and he just laughed at me...sound familiar?

I asked my boss for a pay rise and he just laughed at me.

The words written down above don’t really paint a picture of how it was.

No criticism was given nor offence taken.

I was a part time self employed practitioner and I had recently discovered I was getting £1 an hour less than another trainer.

(This is 15 years ago now, he’d also been there longer than me)

I asked if I could have an equal rate.

His reply was pretty simple, “Right now you only do the minimum requirement, fix that and we’ll talk”.

He was right.

I’d joined and there had been a lot of training to get up to speed.

He’d been an instructor to me and I’d been a learner and carrier outer of instructions.

It’s nobodies fault but that was the dynamic that remained.

That’s how habit works.

We learn which habits create survival in a new environment and then our brain runs that programme each time we enter it, like a plug and play.

We stop thinking.

The founders and early team become responsibility takers, those filling existing roles becoming instruction followers.

It doesn’t always work like that but often enough to call it a rule.

One day I saw the owner moving things around and I offered to help.

In a short space of time I went from being a resource with one function to someone who cared and was driven to make the company a success.

I see this a lot.

Founders don’t realise how much people are willing to give and employees don’t realise how much founders want them to gather all the responsibility they can.

That that is in fact what they are looking for, co-conspirators. People who “get it” and genuinely want to be a part of something.

And honestly, I think that’s MOST people.

But when that conversation is never taken people do what they were trained to do and switch off their brains.

While secretly looking around for a job where they can care and give everything they have to give.

We so often make the mistake of looking at behaviour and guessing at meaning.

That mindreading almost always results in our becoming more deeply entrenched in our current patterns.

And often all that is required is making these things explicit.

We too often get frustrated by what we aren’t seeing or experiencing and make up stories and then the conversation takes on a tone of criticism and frustration.

If we can remember that hard wired into every person is the desire to be seen and to matter and to feel a part of something bigger and start our interactions from that premise...

Our interpretation of the situations and what needs to happen is completely flipped on its head and is far more accurate.

Are you spending too much time mindreading and not enough time talking?

I know I was.