STREET DOGS

From Dolly Chugh associate professor at the Stern School of Business, New York University:

Many of us care deeply about feeling like a good person and being seen as a good person.

But what if I told you that our attachment to being good people is getting in the way of us being better people?

And what if I told you the path to being better people just begins with letting go of being a good person?

We perhaps are overestimating how much our self-interest is driving our decisions, and perhaps we don't realise how much our self-view as a good person is affecting our behaviour, that in fact, we're working so hard to protect that good person identity, that we're not actually giving ourselves space to learn from our mistakes and actually be better people.

It's perhaps because we expect it to be easy. We have this definition of good person that's either-or. Either you are a good person or you're not. Either you have integrity or you don't. Either you are a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or you're not. And in this either-or definition, there's no room to grow.

And by the way, this is not what we do in most parts of our lives. If you needed to learn accounting, you would take an accounting class. We talk to experts, we learn from our mistakes, we update our knowledge, we just keep getting better. But when it comes to being a good person, we think it's something we're just supposed to know, we're just supposed to do, without the benefit of effort or growth.

Why wouldn't we give ourselves that? In every other part of our lives, we give ourselves room to grow - except in this one, where it matters most.