1. Ego – we have a tendancy to interpret an opinion different from our own as an indictment, that we must be wrong. Our egos don’t like to be wrong.
2. The way we talk to each other – We study many things, but rarely to we put the same amount of effort into learning how to give candid, constructive feedback, or in how to receive such feedback. We pride ourselves in speaking our minds, but we seem to disengage our minds before speaking.
3. Unprepared leaders – While there are a number of excellent leaders in the Pagan community (locally and beyond), there are just as many, if not more, who are leading without the skills, experience, and wisdom to handle themselves and situations that arise appropriately. Keeping your head when you’ve been offended or helping a student/covener keep theirs takes skill and strength that, unfortunately, we don’t all have.
4. Short fuses, sensitive triggers – We all bring our experiences with us into the community, background events that may make us more sensitive about things than our unsuspecting community may expect. When someone trips our trigger, we go off with a boom, sometimes shooting ourselves in the foot and almost always blowing a hole in the fabric of the community.
5. Assumptions – We – and not just Pagans – tend to assign motives, meanings, and goals to statements that just aren’t present in the words. Instead of asking, “What do you mean?” or, “Can you elaborate?”, we jump to conclusions and fill in all the blanks, between the lines, and on the back of the page with our own story, right or wrong. Then we’re off and running, reacting to what we made up instead of what was really said or what happened.
What can we do?
1. Train better leaders. Pay as much attention to preparing a person to lead as to teaching them witchy skills and techniques.
2. Learn to speak to each other more effectively, with respect and candor.
3. Stop making up stories. Listen to the words someone says. If you can’t pinpoint their meaning without assuming anything, ask for clarification, have a conversation, LISTEN.
4. Use assumptions wisely. The only really good use for an assumption in community relations (or relationships of any kind) is to assume the person has good intentions until absolutely proven otherwise. No jumping immediately to offense. Take the position, “If you want to offend me, you’re going to have to work very, very hard.”
5. Tame our egos with self-knowledge and confidence. Become grounded enough, sure enough of our own right to believe as we will, our own ability to choose our paths,. that someone else’s choice will not feel like an indictment. We don’t feel as compelled to defend what we don’t believe needs defending.
Ok…so I wrote a book anyway. Sorry…the subject is near and dear to my heart. Thanks for asking.
I'm not going to go into great detail on this here because I need to sleep soon. But I'm going to get it off my chest before laying down for the night. Maybe I'm the only one ...
Give me your top five reasons for why pagan communities have so much in-fighting. You don’t have to write a book here. One word will do, a sentence if you want to make sure no one makes a noose of a semantic.
Millie Fee |
Friday, 17th July 2009 at 9:12 AM