The importance of trusting the world

“If you lose your ability to trust, you are going to lose peace.”

Question: I am 30 and my team members are 24, there is lot of difference in values. Nobody speaks to me and I am fighting it alone. I can’t change myself for them, how to get along with them.

Answer: 30 to 24 is not a big age difference but see where we have brought the world to. Your success on the job depends so much on your relationship with people off the job. This issue of value compatibility that you are facing cannot be solved on the job, cannot be solved. There is no way it’s going to get solved but it can be solved off the job, it’s a perceptional clash.

You think they don’t want you and they think you will not fit there, it’s purely a perceptional clash. Enjoying a tea with a colleague of yours, a few minutes in the bike park before you leave at the end of the day, an appreciation here, a compliment there, a lunch together once little little gestures and very soon you will find one here, one there another one here…another one, they are not only become your friends but they also become your agent of goodness into the other 24 year olds, and very soon you will know it makes a difference, I am giving you this because you are only 30.

Now you are going to be sitting in so many different leadership positions in your organization and at every stage you are going to see this gap, the higher and high you go the younger and younger is the team and there is always going to be this age difference, there is always going to be this value conflicts.

Our sameness brings us together and then we become aware of our differences, this is the rule of relationship. If you are already married because you are 30 what you felt was common between you and her, same religion, same language or IT professional, both wanted to be in one city whatever.

You expected that height and she was that height, she expected this height, she expected this C2C, you expected that qualification whatever and you got married because you saw lot of sameness between you and her, having got married we will come to know of our differences.

Our sameness brings us together and we become aware of our differences and the spice of relationship is this differences. The excitement what is interesting about life is these differences. Now don’t try to all the time resolve the differences sometime enjoy the difference. Sometime appreciate the difference. Sometime know that there is another view to the whole thing.

In my home my son will listen only to English music. My mother will listen only to carnatic music, my wife listens to only all the song sung by super singers.

Same song, original song comes also she won’t listen it has to be sung by one of the super singers and my daughter likes to listen to only hindi songs now if you try to resolve the difference you will only disintegrate the family but when you start celebrating these differences, I know you want to ask what you prefer, silence and how do I seek silence in an environment where MS Subbulakshmi from one end, Shreya Ghoshal from the other end, and some names I don’t even know in English who keep singing from the other end and she has a series of favorite singers previous year, year before that….and you celebrate these differences but part of your job always remember your success on the job depends on the quality of relationship you share with your colleagues or team members or boss off the job.