85. You Teach What You Tolerate
Concept
Having dinner one evening with a colleague and his wife, she said, in the midst of the conversation, “You teach what you tolerate.” I was struck by that insight and its truthfulness. When we allow a behavior to continue, we are, in essence, teaching that behavior. Tolerance is reward.
This is true, I believe, for children, students, employees, and executives. When we, whoever we are, permit others to continue doing something, it is likely to persist. The year 2017 was when sexual harassment came to fore in American society.37 It became front page news how much our society had tolerated over the decades in terms of sexual harassment— almost totally men on women.
The issue of tolerance-as-teaching relates ...
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