Horriblelize or Horrible Eyes?

At my age, I am still a person who never gets tired of learning new things. I believe in continuous learning, whether it's about improving my competencies at work, or about leadership, communication and building relationships with the people around me. Indeed, I believe in continuous self-improvement.

So I decided to attend a workshop today on enriching relationships which is based on a best seller book "Leadership and Self Deception."

The moment I heard the speaker talk about self-awareness and how we regard others (whether as object or as persons), I realized the concepts are not entirely new. They're just the same old practical concepts on building relationships but are just being presented in a new framework. And besides, the application will still be the same, it would always be "to understand ourselves and others and on making the choice of getting out of the box and being responsive to people around us."

However, I stayed on because I know that at the end of the day, I would still learn something out of my paid attendance, not only from the presentation but from my interaction with the speaker and fellow attendees. And true enough, I did learn a few things and one of them only accidentally.

When the speaker got into the topic of "how we treat people as objects" he mentioned that by doing so, we "horriblelize" them. I did not exactly get what he meant but for the sake of following what he said, I wrote down in my notebook, "horrible eyes" and I thought I got it right.

However, when the speaker mentioned that he just invented the word and that it is not in the dictionary, I doubted what I wrote because I knew that both "horrible" and "eyes" do exist even in the most common dictionary. And so I asked the speaker, "excuse me, can you spell that for me please?" The he spelled "h-o-r-r-i-b-l-e-l-i-z-e" which he explained as "a way of treating a person horribly."

But even after getting what the speaker actually meant, I decided not to erase the words "horrible eyes" which I initially wrote in my notebook for one reason: because these two words which I mistakenly wrote actually made my mind drift away from the discussion for a while and got me into thinking what they may mean to me.

In my mind, having "horrible eyes" may mean so many things: It may mean not being able to see the good things in a person but rather seeing all his/her flaws and weaknesses instead or not being appreciative of whatever good deeds others try to do for us. It may also mean comparing people with each other and identifying always who's good or bad and likewise being judgmental and not giving others a chance to show the goodness in them. Lastly, it could be that with "horrible eyes" we are not seeing the magnificent nature around us and not realizing that we are all blessed to be in this world with our caring loved ones and friends to share our lives with.

At the end of the day, after the workshop, aside from a few more tips on building better relationships, I walked away with two questions in my mind: In my daily life, do I treat people around me horribly or do I look at them with horrible eyes? My answer is certain: No, I don't and I will make sure that I will not be guilty of any of these two. No, never.