When Reality Includes Us

In the previous article, I explored what it might mean to make room for more reality, resisting the temptation to reduce what we see to what already fits our understanding and instead remaining open to what else might be there.

I have continued to think about that, partly because there is something rather comforting about the idea when the reality we are being asked to consider lies somewhere outside ourselves.

Perhaps I have misunderstood someone else. There may be a perspective I have not considered, an experience I have not encountered, or something happening within a system that has remained outside my view. These discoveries can certainly challenge us, but they also leave something important largely undisturbed. I am still the person doing the considering. I am looking outward, trying to understand more fully what is happening around me.

But what happens when the additional piece of reality is me?

What happens when what I am being asked to consider is not simply that I have missed something, but that something I have said, done, supported or failed to notice has contributed to the very thing I would ordinarily say I am against? I have been sitting with that question because I suspect this is where consideration becomes considerably more difficult.

It is one thing to say we should remain open to reality. It is quite another when reality threatens something we believe about ourselves. Most of us carry a story about who we are. I imagine we need to. We understand ourselves as caring, competent, fair, thoughtful, inclusive, responsible, perhaps even courageous. These stories are not necessarily false. They have been shaped by our choices and experiences, by what others have reflected to us, and by the values we have tried to live by.

The difficulty arises when something happens that does not fit.

Someone tells me that something I said caused harm. A decision I believed was fair produced an inequitable outcome. A colleague experienced my leadership very differently from how I understood it. Something I thought I had handled well turns out not to have been handled well at all.

Suddenly I am holding realities that do not sit easily together:

• I believe I am a caring person, yet I caused harm.

• I believe I am fair, yet I participated in something unfair.

• I believe I am someone who listens, yet someone is telling me that I did not hear them.

I wonder whether part of what makes these moments so difficult is that we experience the second reality as cancelling out the first. If I caused harm, perhaps I am not caring. If I participated in unfairness, perhaps I am not fair. If I failed to listen, I may not be the person I thought I was.

It then becomes remarkably easy to stop reflecting on what has happened and to begin defending who we are.

I recognise this impulse in myself. The almost instantaneous search for the missing information that will slot the source of my discomfort into a version of events I can live with. I want to explain what I intended. I remember the circumstances. I notice what the other person did. I find the exception, the misunderstanding, the bit of context that has somehow been overlooked.

Sometimes those things genuinely matter. Context, intention and people’s actions matter. Consideration does not mean automatically accepting every interpretation offered to us as the complete truth. I believe there is a difference between bringing more reality into the picture and using additional information to make an unwanted part of reality disappear. That distinction feels important.

If our primary objective is to preserve a particular understanding of ourselves, there will always be realities we cannot afford to see.

This becomes even more complicated when we attach our identity to something we care deeply about. If I have committed myself to justice, inclusion, compassion or some other expression of human flourishing, evidence that my behaviour has contradicted those commitments can feel especially threatening. The stronger my conviction that I am not among those who do that, the harder it may become to recognise the moments when, in fact, I do.

Perhaps this is one of the strange ways our perception of our goodness can get in the way of our growth. Not because our values are unimportant. Quite the opposite; they give us something towards which to orient ourselves. But there is a difference between being committed to a value and needing that value to be an unquestionable description of ourselves.

The first can invite examination. The second may make examination threatening.

This keeps returning me to several thoughts about failure. We tend to treat failure as evidence of deficiency, something to hide, explain away, or distance ourselves from. Yet failure can also contain information. It can show us where our understanding was incomplete, where our capacity was insufficient, where a system behaved differently from what we expected, or where the consequences of our actions exceeded our intentions.

That does not render failure harmless. Nor does it remove accountability for what happened. It simply changes our relationship with what failure can reveal.

What would happen if discovering we had caused harm did not default to a decision about whether I was a good or a bad person?

What if I stayed with what happened for a little longer?

What if I allowed another person’s experience to tell me something about the consequences of my actions without making my intention irrelevant?

What if I acknowledged my intention without using it to erase the impact?

What if I remained curious about the parts of myself I would rather not face?

I think this is where another capacity begins to matter, one I had not previously connected so strongly with consideration: compassion and other forms of kindness. I have often associated compassion with how we respond to other people. It’s becoming clear that we also need sufficient self-compassion to encounter ourselves truthfully. Not niceness. Not indulgence. Not an escape from responsibility. Something closer to the ability to remain in relationship with ourselves when the reality we encounter is disappointing.

Shame does something peculiar to our gaze. It can make what we have done seem so enormous that it becomes the only thing we can see. Instead of I did something harmful, the story becomes I am harmful. Instead of opening us to responsibility, that collapse can make responsibility seem impossible. We defend, disappear, blame, counterattack, or become so consumed by our own distress that the person who was harmed somehow ends up caring for us.

Dr Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion offers something useful here. By practising kindness towards ourselves while embracing the realities around us, including our own, we create space to approach shortcomings with a healthier optimism rather than becoming caught in patterns of negativity, fear and isolation. Perhaps this also leaves us less compelled to defend ourselves or to displace blame. During times of difficulty, self-compassion might allow us to recognise: Yes, I did this. It’s important and matters. There may be something here I need to understand. And I am still capable of choosing what I do next.

Perhaps that is why I am interested in our capacity to recognise misalignment, learn from it, and find our way back to renewed practice. We will get things wrong. We will sometimes behave in ways that contradict what we say we value. We will fail to see people, protect things that should be questioned, and participate in systems whose consequences exceed our awareness. If humaneness depends on never falling short, I am not sure any of us has much hope.

The more useful questions may concern what happens when things become visible.

Can we turn towards what has been revealed rather than away from it?

Can we repair what can be repaired?

Can we allow the encounter to change how we participate next time?

And can the people and systems around us make such a return possible?

That last question matters because this is not only an individual struggle. Organisations also construct identities. We are an inclusive organisation. We care about our people. We value openness. We are committed to equity. These stories can express genuine aspiration and practice. But they can also make it remarkably difficult to receive contradictory information.

What happens when an employee’s experience does not align with the organisation’s self-understanding?

Does that experience become information?

Or does the person become the problem?

The more an organisation needs its values to describe what it already is, rather than what it is continually striving to become, the more threatening contrary experience becomes. It may be easier to question the person, isolate the incident, or explain why the experience is not representative than to allow what happened to disturb the story.

Perhaps this is why our relationship with failure tells us so much about a system. Not because humane systems do not fail, but because failure reveals whether the system can learn from realities it did not want to face.

This may be true of us too.

Making room for more reality is easy to admire in theory. The real challenge comes when some of that reality implicates us.

Can I remain open when what I discover about myself is unflattering?

Can I hold the discomfort of contradiction without rushing to resolve it?

Can I allow what I encounter to broaden my understanding of myself rather than threaten it?

Perhaps consideration requires this kind of grace. Not the kind that lets us off the hook, but the kind that allows us to remain on it long enough to learn.

The alternative is rather limiting. If I can only consider realities in which I remain innocent, I will eventually have to stop seeing. And I suspect that what we are unwilling to see in ourselves will eventually become something other people must carry for us.

This is the fourteenth article of a broader exploration into what happens after awareness—how we stay open to complexity, deepen connection, and move toward meaningful collective action.