Updated: Feb 27, 2022
A couple of decades ago, my roommate Shirley didn’t like to deal with things she didn’t like to deal with. For some people that translates to pragmatism. For Shirley it translated to never-ending personal chaos.
One day I watched her peel a parking ticket off her car and throw it away. I asked what (the hell) she was doing and found out ignoring parking violations was just a thing she did. Normally. Like, she got them fairly often. In my mild horror I told her, “If you get a boot on your car, don’t even ask me for money”.
Her sincere answer completely threw me: “Why”?
To me it was obvious: if you cause something, you’re responsible for the effect.
In our physical world, the law of cause and effect is ironclad. The physics that regulate our lives on this spinning sphere are predictable and measurable. It’s possible those rules also apply to bureaucracy, hence my alarm regarding Shirley’s cavalier attitude toward her citations. However, in the world of interpersonal relationships, cause and effect can be a bit squishy. Cause can appear inadvertently, and effect can be unpredictable.
Interpersonal Cause and Effect is a big deal for voice teachers and other professionals whose workplace includes the inner recesses of their client’s psyche.
Too often voice teachers forget about the contex