I once read that home is the place where we are treated the best, but grumble the most. I wonder if the same could be applied to our offices, and what we can do to tone it down.

There is something about familiarity that breeds contempt—not always, but it’s a proverb for a reason. Offices are filled with bickering: it’s only when we get close to people that we can see their deepest flaws, and it’s only when we get close that we open up about our own.

This general negativity is poisonous to teams, stunting their unity and growth, but it can’t just be avoided—nothing is ever made better through avoidance. 

If we want our home to be healthy and our offices and communities to be happy, we must nurture them.

First, we have to fight for our team. Sure, Billy Bob may be a selfish snake, and Jane may be a lying cotton-headed-ninny-muggins, but that’s not who they are, and it may not even be what they do consistently—it’s what you think they do. We have to fight to see the good in people, because we don’t know the full story. People’s flaws are much more understandable if you see them from their perspective.

Second, the closer we get to people, the more we feel like we can use and abuse them, emotionally. Just because someone is committed to you doesn’t mean you get to trample on them. Too many feelings are hurt from a selfish desire to vent. We have to fight to respect our co-workers’ own feelings and treat them like we want to be treated.

The irony is that it is good for us to get to know our teammates at a deep level, but the deeper we get to know them, the harder we have to fight to love them.

It’s the irony of adolescence. The teenager comes home and vents to her parents and abuses them by cutting them off, saying, “You have no idea what I’m going through.”

But they do know, and they listen anyway. And one day the teen becomes an adult and realizes how bad she sandbagged her parents, and for a while she feels guilty, knowing how much they loved her and how little she reciprocated that love.

What it means to be parents, or a leader of any kind, is to nurture an environment of home while actively seeking out and destroying the grumbling. You don’t stiff-arm relationships to avoid this tension, you dig in and skillfully navigate them, leading toward healing, restoration, and peace.

If home is where the heart is, then our closest “home” relationships become an image of who we really are. If we are selfish, our homes will become abusive and toxic. If we are complainers, then they will become blame-shifters and victims. 

It’s possible for you to love your spouse and abuse them at the same time, and the reason is because with them, you’re home; and home is just a reflection of who you are.

It’s no coincidence that here again, forces of evil are at work to destroy one of the most precious gifts we have.

Finding a way to positively engage in meaningful, beautiful, lasting relationships with peers, employees, spouses, and bosses may be the best way to fight for your home, anywhere you go.

“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” ~Maya Angelou

“He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.” ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe