Fairness and Dignity

Here’s a secret you must know:

You will never regret offering dignity to others. Never.

There’s another secret:

You can never overdo fairness. Never.

But how sad it is that in the moments when it matters the most — we drop our power to act with dignity. In the moment of stress, we fail to be fair.

Treat others the way you want yourself to be treated. Right!

• Is being treated with dignity your choice?
• Is being treated with fairness your choice? ***

Offering people the chance to be treated the way we’d like to be treated benefits us too. It goes around.

But then there is a false perception of scarcity. Somehow, we’ve come to believe that keeping people out of our space, our competition, our sight with make things easier. This might have been true in past, but this is far from being true in this age. The age of exponentials. The age of abundance.

Coaching people and working with leaders — I’ve realized something. We all know dignity and fairness is good. But somehow, fairness and treating others with dignity doesn’t come to us as convenient.

Modernity has caused us to subscribe to convenience!

• We’ll spam in the name of marketing — convenience.
• We’ll put fake ads for more clicks — convenience.
• We’ll ignore performance conversations before review — convenience.
• We’ll give expensive gifts instead of personal time and attention — convenience.
• We’ll shout, scream and penalize recklessly instead of dignity and fairness — convenience.

That’s a shame.

That’s disgusting.

That’s inhuman.

It’s nothing to be proud of.

But then — it’s true.

So, I assert — it should be our job to make fairness and dignity convenient.

Here are few examples to do so:

• Publicly acknowledge someone from disagreeing with you;
• Balance him/her with her/him in your speech;
• Visit a not-so-happening college or university for your next campus drive;
• Use your contacts to give platform to an artist who you know might never be able to get attention;

Fairness and dignity might not be more convenient in the short run, but in the long run — it’s magical for heart.

*** I want all humans to treat me with fairness. I try to be fair with people. But I pray that may Allah never be fair with me. I only seek his forgiveness and mercy — not fairness and justice.