Congruence

The most important C to keep in mind when becoming a Change Agent is Congruence.  All of the C’s are importance, but I feel that Congruence ties them all together in the fact that you can know all of them, and maybe even practice most of them, but without Congruence an individual is not going to last long as a Change Agent.  At Beta’s version of CPLI, we talked about what Guyland is and how difficult it is for someone to put up a façade for an extended period of time.  It really wears a person down trying to act one way if their beliefs steer them in a different direction.  Being congruent is a challenge because it asks you to be willing to be the bad guy and to bring up the uncomfortable issues that maybe others want to address, but have not been vocal about.  It is where the rubber hits the road; knowing your values isn’t good enough if you will not do anything with that knowledge.    

Part of the chapter on Congruence that sticks out to me is the section on content (what is the end goal?) versus process (how is that goal reached?).  It points out that in general we make the mistake of putting too much emphasis on content, rather than process.  Keeping with the Gandhi example provided in the book; what if he had resorted to violence, but still achieved the end goal of liberation, would the victory still be as meaningful?  I think what we would see in that scenario is similar to current day examples of liberation through violence, and that is continued violence and power struggle.  By changing the process the victory is only temporary.  If the process is valued as much as the content then when the end goal is reached it will be more complete and meaningful.

The Trouble in Being Congruent with Self

The text defines congruence as “thinking, feeling, and behaving with consistency, genuineness, authenticity, and honesty toward others.”  This sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of stumbling blocks in attempting to achieve Congruence.  The biggest issue I face is that there are different “me’s,” and I do not think that I am alone in this.  For example, I learned at a very young age that behaving a certain way was appropriate for different circumstances (in class you needed to be quiet and attentive, but during recess being as loud and as rambunctious as you wanted was okay).  And a little bit of that has carried over to how I act today.  The “thinking” and “feeling” parts of the definition do not give me any problem; it’s “behaving” consistently.  Your thoughts and feelings aren’t going to change, but the way you present them can based on who you are talking to.  Suppose I am talking to Sharell, or Tyler, or someone from our General Fraternity, the same thought is going to go behind what I’m saying as though I was talking to anyone else, but things like my body language and my word choice will be different.  And consciously or sub-consciously I think most people do this; they approach the same situation from a different angle depending on who they are talking to and the influence that person has over the situation. 

                One other thing I wanted to touch on was the concept of burning out.  I have certainly felt burnt out at times this quarter and I think the quote at the beginning that “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another,” does a great job of explaining where a burn out comes from.  Having big goals is great, you always want to dream big and hope for the best possible outcome, but if you don’t give yourself smaller goals and checkpoints along the way then that big goal can really start to weigh down on you.  I am finding that celebrating the small victories and focusing on what good has been accomplished rather than what good hasn’t been really makes this job a lot less daunting and at the end of the day helps you to breathe a little bit easier.

What is Collaboration?

Collaboration transcends aiding one another in achieving individual goals to working together to accomplish a mutual goal.  In working collaboratively responsibility, influence, and the group’s successes and failures are shared.  Without collaboration individuals can be marginalized, the creativeness of the group is limited; communication does not always happen effectively and on the whole the group cannot be as successful. 

The book defines competition as adversarial and can only result in one person succeeding.  I disagree with the text on this point and while competition does encourage labels of winning and losing there is a lot more to it than that.  It goes on to say that winning is “extrinsically” motivated; in this case I think that there is too much emphasis being put on the method and not enough on the individual.  For example, we have the Greek Awards every year and I would be willing to gamble that Beta will not be winning Chapter of the Year.  Now, does that mean that I won’t do my best to improve the chapter during the year and work at making it a better chapter than it currently is? Absolutely not, if anything the fact that Beta is not a “winner” should be motivation to get better.

I will admit that this is a very individualistic approach to looking at the issue; say for example instead of working towards being Chapter of the Year we worked to better the entire Greek Community and did so with other chapters.  Working collaboratively like this would give us better end results than everyone striving to be the best Chapter.  But at the same time, is it really realistic to imagine no one wants to be the best?  If FIJI, Beta, FarmHouse, Sammy, DTS, etc. all decided today that we would work only towards improving Ohio State; don’t you think we would still be competing with one another?  I would still want my Chapter to have better grades, to recruit better guys and to be the best.  If no other Chapter was on campus, I would still want the best and I’m sure every other Chapter President would say the same.  This is because our drive to succeed is internal; we put the pressure on ourselves to make our Chapter the best.