People will sometimes put each other in boxes and have biases toward one another because of what they look like or where they come from or who they are. But ultimately it’s up to us to decide who we are.
Rich Moore, a director of Zootopia, in a 2016 CBC News interview
We all live in boxes!
Sometimes our box is big, other times small. Your box may be rock solid, or it could be flimsy. Maybe your box is physical. Or it could be a metaphysical box.
My most identified box is a mix of brown, black, and white. Yours might be black, white, or many others.
That’s right, we all live in boxes. And each of us has a different set of boxes in which we live. Regardless of the shape, size, comfort, or discomfort we feel with our boxes, they all have one thing in common.
Our boxes serve to limit us
Our boxes limit how we think of ourselves. They limit us in our lives, restrict our collaboration with others, limit us in teams, and limit us at work. Some of those boxes are necessary, as Bill Clinton points out below. The trouble starts when we cannot reach beyond them.
You may have figured out by now that I am talking about more than the physical box of where you live. Your home may be the easiest of all your boxes to identify and manage. I am talking about the identities, roles, and responsibilities we take on, and the expectations that come with them.
At home, your box may be father, mother, husband, wife, son, or daughter. You will have boxes that overlap. You could be a mother, a wife, and a daughter all at once. In teams, your box might be captain, coach, attacker, or defender. At work, your box might be the one on the organization chart. You could be a janitor, a receptionist, or a CEO.
My ethnicity is a complex mix of African, American, Asian, European, and South American influences. Yours is different.
How do we get in those boxes?
We put ourselves in some boxes. We allow others to put us in other boxes. Society itself puts us in still others. Each of us is unique in that we live within an amazing collection of boxes.
As we think of our boxes, some of them make us proud. Others deliver so many negative feelings. We like to compare our boxes with others. We are happy with our box when we compare it to one we consider inferior, yet the same box becomes a source of embarrassment next to one we believe is superior.
The way out starts with seeing the box
Getting out of a constraining box takes three steps: see the box, think outside it, and change your situation. This essay is about the first step, because the hardest box to leave is the one you cannot see. Teams and companies get stuck the same way, and their way out starts in the same place.
Why is unboxing yourself so important?
Simple. Some of the boxes we find ourselves in are toxic, and they severely limit our potential. Boxes are used to keep things inside. Safer, we are told. Inside a box, we can’t see the whole world outside. We can’t see further than the light our box allows.
For many, the assumption is that the boxes we live or operate in are limits we have to learn to tolerate. We can dream of better possibilities, but those stay dreams. We can’t live in dreams, so our boxes become our reality.
But what if we could come out of that box? What if we could look back and recognize that we were in a box that never fit us? What if we could operate without that box? What would the world look like then? Where would we go?
The reality is that when we are in a box, we are on a fixed path. If you like that path, then fine, stay in your box. But if you want to change the direction of your life, your team, or your company, you have to change the path. First, you have to see the constraining boxes. Only then can you get out of them.
Think about how we all organise our lives in little boxes – man, woman, British, American, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Tory, Labour, New Labour, Old Labour, up, down – you know, everything in the world. I like red ties, I got a blue shirt on, you laugh about it, think about everything you define yourself by. Our little boxes are important to us. And indeed it is necessary, how could you navigate life if you didn’t know the difference between a child and an adult, an African and an Indian, a scientist and a lawyer? We have to organise that, but somewhere along the way, we finally come to understand that our life is more than all these boxes we’re in. And that if we can’t reach beyond that, we’ll never have a fuller life.
President Bill Clinton, The Struggle for the Soul of the 21st Century, Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC, December 2001
The problem for most of us?
We are in boxes, and the instructions to get out are printed on the outside. We can’t see a way out when we are stuck in the dark confines of a sealed box.
Someone outside the box could pull us out, someone who knows we are in a box. That takes a benevolent hand, and some of us are fortunate enough to feel it. But what if no one can see the box you think you are in, and so no one can reach in to pull you out? What if we are in a box and don’t even know it? Then we aren’t even trying to get out.
Ask yourself, do you put people you know into boxes, and then treat them in a limiting way?
- One of my Starbucks baristas was a Ph.D. student.
- A friend of my brother-in-law who came to help him paint our house was a refugee and the former mayor of a large suburb in Iran.
We put ourselves and others in boxes. It is convenient and natural. It makes the world easier to handle.
The thinking runs like this. I am in one tribe. I can trust those in my tribe. You are in another tribe. So I can’t trust you.
How limiting is the box in which we place others? And how limiting are the boxes placed on us, in reality or only assumed?
It is fair to say that many of the boxes we assume, and many of the limits they impose, are limits that have to be broken.
Seeing your boxes is the first step to unboxing yourself and finding out how far you can go.