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Make things better by making better things.
The teacher that is demanding her students to be compliant is exercising her status.
The boss who is requesting for everyone to come in on Saturday to submit the TPS reports is leveraging status.
And when parents say, “Because I said so…” they are, again, using status.
Status is everywhere.
When trying to get what we want, our first instinct is to use our status.
And the reason that there is so much conflict with teens is not that they are hormonal or difficult to work with; it is because they want to be seen as someone with higher status.
“I’m not a child anymore,” says pretty much everyone at that age.
The good news is that someone doesn’t have to lose in order to win. You can raise the status of others around you without lowering someone else in the process.
It’s important to understand that much of our conflicts are formed around this tug-o-war of status:
Who’s up? Who’s down? Who gets to eat first? What is the pecking order?
We can simply decide to play a different game, one where status isn’t won or lost after each interaction.