By now, most – if not all – of you have enjoyed a lively conversation with someone who shares an opinion dissimilar to your own. Pick a topic; politics, race, immigration, climate change, or the best breakfast joint in town, if you don’t agree, then you not only disagree, but VEHEMENTLY so. Statistics, empirical data, science, or the quality of locally-produced eggs be damned, we’re going to stick with our belief and defend it to the death. Hopefully not literally.

Like Wile E. Coyote taking a square hit from an anvil (Acme) in a scheme to capture the even wilier Road Runner, I suffered a temporary setback only to emerge much stronger.

Based on the belief that shirking responsibility is somehow rooted in the emotional center of our brains (the limbic system), I’m guessing that we don’t like the repercussions of having screwed up. We’re afraid of being punished, yelled at, chastised, publicly shamed and losing our jobs. If leaders were so capable of holding people accountable in ways that drive engagement, productivity and innovation, would people be so afraid?

Have you even considered that the decades-old ways we recruit and vet candidates isn’t so great? And that asking candidates to play the resume game, where keywords and phrases need to match the job posting, just to get a phone screening, are only selecting for candidates who are great at the resume game? Perhaps there’s too little correlation between resume game skills and job success to keep doing it the old way.

…treefrogs are sometimes eaten by snakes and birds. If you’re a Green Treefrog, you will be easily seen—and eaten—if you’re living on the bark of a tree vs. on a green leaf. Therefore, nature would favor genes that enabled Green Treefrogs to survive on leafy habitats, leaving the Gray Treefrogs to enjoy the habitats that are predominantly tree bark. You get eaten; you don’t get to make baby treefrogs.

So, if we are wired to feel pleasure when being loved or liked, why do leaders sometimes behave in unlikable ways? Have they over-subscribed to the notion that you can’t be liked by everyone, so they don’t bother trying? Did we learn in business school that it’s not important to be liked, or even, it’s better if you’re not liked (feared)? Did we, as leaders, forget how we felt about our own bosses when we didn’t like them?

Consider “not taking yourself so seriously” as a euphemism for all the terms we’ve had in mind—and maybe even voiced—for how we’ve felt about bosses we’ve disliked. Hopefully you’ve resisted the temptation to call the boss a jerk to his or her face, as it might feel good for only one (or less) second. In fact, if job preservation is somewhere on the list of priorities, I suggest doing EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to SHUT THE HELL UP.

When we give ourselves too much credit a lot of bad things happen, mostly pertaining to our relationships with others. Confidence is one thing, but arrogance and super-inflated egos are another. I think we work awfully hard to differentiate ourselves from our primate brethren residing on the other side of the cage walls at the local zoo.

I have come to the realization that, even though I won’t be reading my own obituary, epitaph or eulogy, I do want those words to reflect that I did something good with my life, that I impacted the world and people positively, and that my surviving friends and family would consider my past existence as a model for a life worth living.

Diving into the world of organizational development, leadership and culture has been a real eye-opener for me. One might think that my past life of influencing change in surgeon clinical practice, while navigating the economic and regulatory conundrum that is the U.S. healthcare system, was challenging. Trying to show people that they’re taking themselves awfully seriously – way harder! I should have gone into the cat obedience business.

In late September of 2015 I found myself in opposition to Pope Francis. Don’t get me wrong; I’m crazy about this guy, the first pope I ever really loved, let alone paid much attention to. He’s enthusiastic, warm, authentic and humble, all attributes of leadership that I espouse in my doctrine for highly-evolved leadership.