Priorities
This is the trickiest source of cheating—and the one type of lie that might be most excusable – or even encouraged. It ultimately comes down to a matter of purpose. We are often caught in a dilemma where there are two (or more) priorities that are in conflict. Sometime this means that if we move in one direction there will be one beneficial outcome—but it will be at the expense of another outcome that is just as beneficial. We save money for our child’s education, but this means living with an inadequate health insurance plan. Our company is investing in a new software program but at the expense of an employee development program. These dilemmas can often produce polarities that lead to a dysfunctional swinging back and forth between the two pathways (Johnson, 1996).
It is a quite different, but equally as challenging situation, when one pathway requires that we cheat. We very much want our daughter to be able to attend her brother’s piano recital and decide to “fib” by sending a note to her school indicating that she is ill. Our organization is serving food to those men, women and children living on the streets in our city. A grant is available to help subsidize our program, but it requires that a licensed social worker be available to provide support services to the people coming in for a meal. We don’t have a certified social worker, but we do have an extraordinary person who has been providing support services for many years to our street people. We “lie” in our application for funding. The leaders of our nation bend the rules regarding disarmament to ensure that we are keeping up with our “enemy” (who we “know” is also bending the rules).
There is something more important in our life that always be law-abiding. We speed a bit in order to get to work on time. Is this excusable? We speed in order to get our wife who is in labor to the hospital. Is this excusable? There are competing priorities. Which ones justify cheating and the breaking of laws? As we seek out answers to these questions, the matter of facing dilemmas and managing polarities comes to the fore. How do we as a coach help our befuddled and torn-apart client enter into thoughtful problem-solving and decision-making in the face of these cheating challenges? It is to these coaching strategies that we now turn.
Addressing the Cheat and Purposeful Lie
Cheating has been with us a long, long time. It seems that human beings have a unique cognitive skill. They can lie—which means making up things that don’t really exist. As far as we know, no other animal has this capacity. They might be able to change colors or shapes (in order to hide), but they don’t display any tendency to direct our attention to something that doesn’t exist (at least at the present time)
On the one hand, this means that homo sapiens have the capacity to imagine attacking lions that aren’t really there—whether these lions be entities that might do us physical harm or lions that are represented in the behavior of an irresponsible teenager or pending corporate board meetings (Sapolsky, 2004) On the other hand, this also means that people can tell a lie to cover up a mis-deed or can imagine that there is no lion (e.g. no repercussions from adultery) when a real lion is ready to attack (spouse ready to file for divorce having discovered the adultery).
Given the universal presence of cheating and purposeful lying within human societies, there is an accompanying history of strategies for dealing with the cheat and lie. Essentially, over many centuries and there are three ways in which cheating and lying have been addressed in many societies. One way involves Emotional Reparation. The harm done to the perpetuator is addressed so that guilt might be relieved. The person who is cheating has become unfrozen and is ready to rectify their cheating behavior. The lie has been acknowledged and a change in behavior is promised.
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