Resilient Riot Reflections

Well it’s been a week of extreme emotions for many of us in the UK as people took to the streets and decided to riot, rob and destroy their local communities. Living in Ealing I felt firsthand the emotions of fear, anger and sheer frustration as to why people feel compelled to take this sort of action. I say ‘people ‘ as opposed to ‘youths’ as it has become clear that a large cross section of people of differing backgrounds and age groups decided to join in.

David Cameron today suggested the reasons for the riots were complex and I’m not about to throw down my own theory.

This morning my wife asked me to recall one of the stories from the Tony Robbins book ‘Awaken the Giant Within’ about the two brothers with the alcoholic abusive father. In summary each of the brothers had been interviewed independently in their mid years about their background and the impact it had on their life to date. One of the brothers had worked hard and had become a very successful business man whilst the other had taken a similar path to his father turning to drink and drugs.

Interestingly when each brother was asked what factors had influenced their path to date they gave an almost identical answer...

‘Well what do you expect when you had a father like that.’

The story really struck me at the time and I have often quoted it to clients and groups to help demonstrate how you really can ‘choose your attitude’ to life, work, or whatever....

... and I guess we have seen this exact same scenario being played out over the last couple of days with people from similar, often challenging backgrounds choosing their attitude and behaving accordingly.

It would certainly appear that many of the rioters don’t value other people’s property, feelings or sense of community. The most distressing image for me over the past few days was to see an independent shopkeeper sitting in his van, in tears next to his looted premises that he had steadily built up over a number of years.

I think it’s probably fair to say that most of us don’t find the time to take a step off the merry-go-round of our hectic lives and reflect on what is truly important to us as individuals..

 our 'core' values

... and how on reflection these values inevitably revolve around relationships, a sense of belonging and purpose, not material goods... and in business it is usually no different when observing  companies made up of resilient, dedicated and motivated teams.

Let’s hope that at least a proportion of those involved in the looting will take a look at their newly acquired Blackberry, Plasma TV or designer trainers and reflect on the impact their actions have had on their fellow human beings.

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