It seems many of us are born to be bullies because we bully people from a very early age. But the truth is, bullying is learned just like everything else we do. Sometimes there are psychological or mental problems that cause us to develop with certain traits but most of the people learn to become bullies because of how they are treated.
Why do bullies exist? Because the strong do dominate our little physical world until the intelligent can figure out a way to stop from being bullied. I am sure clubs were discovered to beat the bigger caveman who was always the stronger man and always got his way. Then along came all of the other inventions that make the smaller man into the bully by way of those same inventions. And the reason again is that, if we are treated a certain way we will become a certain way.
So why do bullies still exist? because we continue not to train all of our people from infancy how they should treat others. We don't teach them how to relate, interact, communicate. We don't teach them how to succeed in negotiations and how important it is to be able to give and take to achieve maximum results. We should be teaching children what a loving relationship looks like in kindergarten and elementary school and on into high school and even college. We should be training the children on how to succeed and how to love and how to manifest goodness and greatness through cooperation.
And still, because of our innate nature some bullies would still exist but what they would find is that they would not be in power like they are in today's world. They would not stand a chance against the bond of the group and they would find themselves outside the circle instead of in control of the little circle the command by their bullying.
And I recently read some things about bad language and it reminded me once again how we lack the skills to develop much of this. It was about a school book that contained bad language and yet it was allowed to be used in grade school and the majority of thought on the subject was, "they will hear, already hear language and words like that. What's the big deal?"
And the big deal is, we don't expect more out of one another as much as we settle for less. We don't expect the cream of the crop as much as we will settle for the dregs and say, this is acceptable because it exists this way and we should accept it as it is.
The problem with accepting things as they are is that we will always settle for a little less each time. We will always allow the circumstance to digress a little each time. We will always continue to fall a little further from the pinnacle and keep telling ourselves, well, the last person stopped here to it's ok if I don't make it to where they stopped.
And that is where and why we find that bullies still exist and will continue to exist. We don't expect them not to.
Steve Sapato is a speaker and author on Bullying from schools to offices and also teaches how to become a Great Manager to corporations looking to excel.
