Article One: The Work Behind the Work
THE HUMAN CONDITION, what a lifetime of working with people has taught me about myself and human behavior
By Newman
"What continues to interest me is the considerable distance that can exist between what people understand and what they are prepared to do with that understanding."
I have encountered people who can describe their circumstances with extraordinary accuracy while continuing to participate in patterns they recognize as unhelpful. I have observed organizations acknowledge operational problems without taking the necessary steps to address them. I have also watched people make significant changes once they were able to recognize something about themselves that had previously escaped their attention.
And I have not been exempt from any of these observations.
My interest is not in determining why some people succeed and others fail. It is in understanding why the relationship between awareness and action is so complicated, even when we genuinely want something to change.
Understanding is not the same as responding
We tend to place considerable value on understanding. We encourage people to become more self-aware, examine their motivations, identify their difficulties, and recognize the patterns influencing their lives.
These are worthwhile pursuits, but understanding does not necessarily produce a different response.
Psychological research has long examined the gap between intention and behavior. In a 2006 meta-analysis of 94 independent tests, researchers Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran found that people were more successful in pursuing goals when they developed specific plans identifying when, where, and how they would act, rather than relying on intention alone.
A later meta-analysis, published in 2021, examined a related strategy involving the identification of obstacles alongside specific plans for responding to them. Across 21 studies involving 15,907 participants, the researchers found a small-to-moderate improvement in goal attainment, while acknowledging methodological limitations and possible publication bias.
These findings concern goal-directed behavior. They do not explain every emotional or interpersonal difficulty, but they support an important distinction: recognizing what we want to accomplish does not necessarily prepare us to accomplish it.
I have encountered this distinction throughout my professional life.
Someone may recognize that a conversation needs to happen without being prepared to have it. An organization may acknowledge that its procedures are inadequate while continuing to operate under those same procedures. A person may understand that a particular relationship or responsibility has become overwhelming without knowing how to respond to that understanding.
Sometimes the difficulty involves fear, uncertainty, competing responsibilities, or a lack of practical resources. Sometimes the person has not yet decided whether the consequences of change are preferable to the familiarity of their present circumstances.
And sometimes we simply do not know what to do next.
That is an important distinction because it prevents us from interpreting every failure to act as unwillingness.
The person and the circumstances
One of the things I have learned from working with people is how easily we can become occupied with evaluating someone's behavior without adequately considering the circumstances in which it occurs.
We observe a decision, a reaction, or a pattern of behavior and begin developing explanations. We may assume that the person is being difficult, irresponsible, resistant, or unwilling to help themselves.
Sometimes our observations identify a genuine problem. But an observation is not a complete explanation.
People respond to circumstances through the combined influence of their experiences, expectations, relationships, available resources, physical condition, and emotional state. We may see the response without understanding everything that contributed to it.
I find this particularly relevant when someone appears to understand their situation but continues behaving in a way that seems inconsistent with that understanding.
It is tempting to conclude that they simply do not want to change. Yet the situation may be considerably more complicated.
There may be consequences they are not prepared to face, relationships they are afraid of losing, or responsibilities that make an otherwise reasonable decision difficult to carry out.
There may also be something about their circumstances that I do not know.
That last possibility deserves more attention than we sometimes give it.
My experience may help me recognize a familiar pattern, but it does not give me complete access to another person's life.
What experience does and does not teach us
Experience can provide valuable perspective, particularly when we have worked in environments where similar problems appear repeatedly.
It can also make us impatient.
When I recognize an organizational problem that I have encountered many times before, I may already have a reasonably clear idea of what needs to happen. The people involved, however, may be encountering the problem for the first time or may understand it through an entirely different set of experiences.
My familiarity with the situation does not mean that they have arrived at the same understanding.
This is one of the challenges of helping people.
We can become so focused on the solution that we overlook the process another person may need to go through before they are prepared to consider it.
We can also become attached to being the person who recognizes the problem.
That possibility requires self-examination.
There is a difference between contributing useful experience and expecting other people to accept our interpretation simply because we have encountered something similar before.
Research on self-awareness in organizational settings makes a related distinction. A 2023 review in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior examined how self-awareness develops through reflection, feedback, and interpersonal learning. The authors also addressed the limitations of excessive introspection and the importance of understanding ourselves in relation to others.
I find that relationship between internal reflection and external feedback particularly relevant.
We can spend considerable time examining our intentions while remaining unfamiliar with the effect our behavior has on someone else.
We may believe we are being helpful when another person experiences us as intrusive. We may believe we are being clear when someone else experiences us as dismissive. And we may believe we are respecting another person's decisions when, in reality, we have simply become unwilling to remain involved.
None of these possibilities can be resolved by examining our intentions alone.
We also have to consider what happens when those intentions encounter another person.
The challenge of being useful
I enjoy helping people. I have spent much of my life doing it, both professionally and voluntarily.
But I have also learned that enjoying the opportunity to help does not automatically mean that my involvement is necessary or appropriate.
This becomes particularly challenging when I recognize something that I believe could be improved.
I may have the experience, the practical knowledge, and the willingness to contribute. Yet the person or organization involved may not want that contribution.
I have sometimes found that frustrating.
There have also been occasions when a direct observation, a difficult question, or what I jokingly call a little pinch has helped someone recognize something they had overlooked.
But I have to remain aware of the difference between offering assistance and assuming responsibility for another person's decisions.
People are entitled to make choices I would not make. They are also entitled to decline my help.
And I am entitled to decide whether I want to continue participating in circumstances where my involvement is no longer useful.
These boundaries are not always comfortable, especially when we care about the people or the work involved.
They are nevertheless part of participating responsibly.
The observer is also a participant
Perhaps the most important thing I have learned is that observing human behavior does not place me outside the human condition.
I can recognize resistance in someone else while remaining resistant to something in my own life. I can identify an organizational problem while overlooking the way my own approach contributes to the difficulty of addressing it.
I can also become so interested in understanding another person's behavior that I neglect to consider whether understanding it is actually necessary.
That is an uncomfortable possibility for someone who finds people as fascinating as I do.
But it is worth considering.
There is a difference between being curious about people and becoming preoccupied with explaining them. There is also a difference between recognizing a problem and assuming that every problem requires our participation.
Self-awareness must include the willingness to question our own observations, not simply become more confident in them.
This does not require us to distrust everything we know. It requires us to recognize the limitations of what we know.
We can have substantial experience and still misunderstand a situation. We can offer useful guidance without having the complete answer. And we can learn something important from a person whose experience is entirely different from our own.
I find that possibility encouraging.
It means that experience does not have to make us increasingly certain of ourselves. It can also make us more willing to recognize what remains unfamiliar.
What the work has taught me
Looking back over the different environments in which I have worked, I have come to appreciate that the most challenging part of working with people is not necessarily their behavior.
It is the relationship between their behavior, my interpretation of it, and the circumstances in which we encounter one another.
The same is true of my relationship with myself.
I may understand why I respond to something in a particular way without knowing whether that response remains appropriate. I may recognize a familiar difficulty without immediately understanding what the present circumstances require.
And I may discover that the most useful response is not to do more, explain more, or become more involved.
Sometimes it is to listen. Sometimes it is to act. Sometimes it is to reconsider an assumption. And sometimes it is to recognize that another person's experience belongs to them, even when I believe I have something useful to contribute.
I do not think a lifetime of working with people has given me a particularly reliable formula for understanding human behavior.
It has given me something I value more: a continuing interest in examining the relationship between what we understand, how we respond, and what happens when our understanding encounters the reality of another person's life.
That interest includes my own life.
And it is where this continuing conversation about the human condition begins.
Research referenced in this article
1. Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.
2. Wang, G., Wang, Y., & Gai, X. (2021). A meta-analysis of the effects of mental contrasting with implementation intentions on goal attainment. Frontiers in Psychology, 12.
3. London, M., Sessa, V. I., & Shelley, L. A. (2023). Developing self-awareness: Learning processes for self- and interpersonal growth. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 261–288.
Editorial note: This article is a personal reflection informed by professional experience and relevant research. It is not a formal scientific study, and individual experiences should not be interpreted as universal conclusions about human behavior.