To Me, By Me

Over dinner, my wife asked a simple question: “So what are you going to do about it?”

I was reminded of the to me/by me concept from, “the 15 commitments of conscious leadership”.

A to me response would be, “I can’t solve this problem because Steve isn’t doing their job properly”. The thing blocking what you want is in someone else’s control. You are a helpless victim of circumstance. The by me response would be, “I should help unblock Steve so that they no-longer block me”. It’s the same scenario, but reframed so that the control is in our hands. Blaming Steve feels good in the moment, but gets us no closer to achieving our goals.

Note: There are two further frames in the model, Through me and As me, but I’m focusing on the first two as they’re the most accessible and actionable.

Let’s look at another example. Your team is slammed with work, burnout is creeping in and mistakes are being made. A to me leader might say, “The team are making mistakes, my manager hasn’t given me the headcount I need, and product have given us completely unrealistic deadlines!”. A natural response, but staying there keeps you stuck. It’s all someone else’s fault. It’s all happening to me.

To take control of the situation, we need to reframe these gripes as a by me action. “I’ve accepted too much scope on too short of a deadline with not enough people and now my team are burning out and making mistakes. This is exactly the same scenario, the difference is, we can do something about it. We can more clearly see our levers. We can push back on scope, we can extend the deadline, we can request more headcount.

Of course, we could have done all those things regardless of how we framed our response. Nothing about our situation has changed, but our mindset has. We can more easily see our path towards fixing it. We’re not waiting for someone else to bail us out or change, we’re affecting that change ourselves.

I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like because I’m a new parent and that takes up a lot of my time. For the past year, I was seeing this from a to me point of view. By changing this to a by me point of view (which I wrote about last month) I have been able to find the time to write again without sacrificing any of the time I spend with my family.

The next time you catch yourself complaining about something that’s happening to you, try to reframe it to a by-you statement and the path towards solving that problem may become clearer.