The serious companies with whom we consult worldwide have all spent time, and usually a lot of money, crafting a “vision-mission-values” statement. There seems to be some confusion about why. Sometimes, it seems, they’ve made one because that’s what everyone else does.  Something’s just not “clicking” – or maybe I’m just on another planet with this issue?

Clearly it’s difficult for a large organization to stay focused when people don’t have a shared picture of where they’re going.  What are we in business to accomplish?  To avoid confusion, let’s call this the “What.” Most mission statements I’ve seen have some clarity around the What:  To be the best bank in someplace.  To deliver world-class hospitality.  To deliver technology solutions supporting key government programs.

Then it seems valuable to at least have an idea of strategy – how we’re going to do that (but in my experience good strategy changes rapidly with changing circumstance).  This is the “How.” How sounds like: By maximizing lending through blah blah.  By touching the heart.  By integrating robust services for rapid deployment.  These are interesting, sometimes important, but rarely powerful.

The tragically missing ingredient is the WHY.

I am most often invited to do leadership programs for senior executives or for high potentials (upper level but usually younger managers being groomed for senior leadership positions).  Occasionally I get to work with both groups in the same organization, and it’s fascinating to see how these groups each relate to the mission-vision-values statement.  Often the senior leaders are excited, they’ve been involved in the creation and it has meaning, significance, to them (though sometimes it’s “just something HR did”).  I’ve never seen a group of high potentials likewise touched by these documents.

Some executives, particularly finance types, seem very excited about phrases like “being the best in,” and perhaps that is a big enough WHY for them.  Perhaps encoded in that phrase is something deeper than financial gain?  But it doesn’t seem to translate to a compelling purpose for middle managers, and it certainly leaves me flat.

One of most powerful human drives is to belong to something worthwhile; so perhaps leadership is about enrolling people in a truly significant purpose.  To tap this power, we need two ingredients:  significance and belonging.

What constitutes significance?  A start is “value above and beyond utility.”  Something can have non-utilitarian value because it’s beautiful or impressive or makes us laugh.  A great statue, an impressive building, a winning team or a compelling story all have value above and utility. That’s part of the human experience from time immemorial and not a bad touchstone for motivation. Maybe “being the best,” if it really happened, would have significance.   I suspect that companies that change their domains, like Apple has done with mobile computing, carry significance because of that groundbreaking experience.  But there’s still something deeper: meaning.

If significance is about value, then meaning is about purpose. “Purpose above and beyond utility.”  In other words, a real answer to WHY.

I suspect that I’m a bit of an extremist in this regard.  For me, “to make money” doesn’t qualify because that’s not above and beyond utility.  “To be the best” doesn’t qualify because that’s not a purpose (it’s a recognition of something).  “Giving 1% of profits to charity” doesn’t work for me because that’s a byproduct of the organization’s success, not the focus in and of itself.  When I seek meaning, I am looking for a profound commitment where the work of the organization is threaded in the very fabric of life.

In itself, this kind of purpose, a “real WHY,” is tough to find.  But even more difficult is keeping it real in a growing, dynamic organization.  I’ve heard there are some that have done this, but in the hundreds of companies where I’ve worked, and in the many thousands my colleagues and I have touched, I’m hard pressed to think of more than two – and both of those are nonprofits where the WHY is clear, but their HOW isn’t!

How depressing.

Or maybe – what a great opportunity for us?

Daniel Pink’s video about his new book, DRIVE, provides a fun and clear way of talking about this essential topic:

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Here are a few other pieces from our blog about this topic…

About “pursuing” a noble goal

The purpose of a noble goal

Purpose and the generation gap

Putting it in action today

Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” about Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

We’ve talked before about emotions being contagious. Well, here’s a study that was done at the University of Chicago about social networks  that discovered that lonely people actually spread that loneliness to others around them – friends, neighbors, anyone they come into contact with. The most interesting thing about this study for me is that they talk about the mechanism for the spread – they reference a gradual ‘fraying’ at the edges of society. They also showed that this phenomenon was more pronounced among friends than family, and for women than for men. None of this surprised me but I was thrilled to see a little of the ‘how’ come to light. I wonder if there are other good studies about emotional contagion out there? Anyone know of any?

• FIGHT is characterized by power where the goal is the be right OVER another; emotions such as anger are signals of power and sorrow are signals of weakness.
• In FLOW being right or wrong are less important; the goal is to connect in a purposeful, significant way.

The film Avatar illustrates this choice on several levels.  Perhaps the most vivid moment is when protagonists Jake Sully and Neytiri meet.   Sully is in danger on an alien world and, as night falls, he makes a torch/spear and attacks the threatening wildlife.  Forest savant Neytiri saves him and throws his torch into a puddle, plunging them into darkness.  At first Sully is… not thrilled… by this “help.”  But eventually he sees differently.

In the darkness, Sully finds something else — the luminescent beauty of the world is revealed.  While he’s in the FIGHT mode he’s cut off from the world around him, literally blinded by his own weaponry. Forced to give that up, he begins a journey to encounter the world a different way.

We all do this — when we’re in FIGHT we tell ourselves that’s the only way, and we’re fighting for our survival.  Often actually creating more peril, but it’s all we can see.  It takes a leap of faith (or a push from someone else) to drop into FLOW.  There’s a huge AHA! as we see that where there used to be one option, now there’s the liberty of choice.

On March 2 & 3 the Cunningham Center for Leadership Development hosted the Fifth Annual Women’s Leadership Conference in Columbus, Georgia. Its Leadership Institute has as its purpose: “to develop and empower generations of leaders with the integrity and skills to respond effectively to the evolving challenges they will face.” This year the theme for the 2010 Women’s Leadership Conference was Learn. Connect. Achieve. Some of the presenters at the conference were Claire Shipman, Senior National Correspondent, ABC News, who spoke about her new book, Womenomics, Virginia Ann Holman, Group Executive, Global Corporate Marketing and Communications, TSYS, who spoke on “The Art of Communication and Unintended Consequences”, Felicia L. Hamilton, Success Strategist, Coach, and Trainer who spoke on her book, Real Women Wear Stilettos.

Other speakers included:

Debbie Frame, The Leadership Essentials Group on her topic of, “5 Things You Must Master to be a Great Leader”
Jenny Lynn Buntin, Former Aide to First Lady Laura Bush on her topic of “Connecting By Displaying Honor in Corporate Culture”

The conference is an annual event for female leaders–from entry level to the most career experiences and accomplished. The conference explores specific steps organizations can take to cultivate the leadership potential of women, affording participants an opportunity to interact and share experiences with other successful women executives.

“This week I was struck by a comment at a faculty in-service day recognizing the packed schedule left little time for reflection and processing. This is our kids experience every day, and they come home to more work. Do our young people have adequate time to process what they are learning each day?”

Yes!! Such a relevant point. Adding a portion of time in any cycle, (even life?), for reflection and processing is SO important. This is a recurring theme in Six Seconds trainings, especially the courses where the cycle of change is the main focus. How do we make change or forward progress if we don’t build in the time to process our previous experiences? How can we ask our kids to keep going and make good choices and judgments without this same reflective period? In what ways are we selling ourselves short by not valuing that portion of the process?



http://www.eyalohana.com/axolotl/

http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol21/?pg=23

Anyway, there are some fascinating things happening here. The article describes the piece as inspired by Julio Cortazar’s short story about a “man’s emotional obsession with aquarium life.” I’m not sure, exactly, if what is happening here in this setting is really based on emotions, although it certainly makes sense that the story would inspire this piece. Clearly, artificial beings elicit an emotional response in us as we interact with them, but as the technology becomes increasingly more sophisticated, what happens when our emotional state begins to influence them? For example, our car may be a computer and may elicit an emotional response in us, but isn’t trying to manipulate us (advertising aside, of course!) Isn’t an artificial creature ‘emotionally’ responding to us always going to be entirely contrived? Do we need artificial emotional intelligence?

I’m curious what others think…

http://tinyurl.com/cr3p2x

I just scrolled though them and had several distinct reactions. First off, I felt the pictures were a little contrived. They’re all beautiful photographs designed to elicit reactions. However, I noticed about halfway through the set that my heart rate was elevated and I was breathing kind of quickly – even anticipating what might come next. It was as though my body had taken over from my mind and had something to say about what it was seeing. It was powerful that even when I was feeling skeptical in my mind, I still had an intense reaction in my body!

The other thought I had while looking these over was about the importance of context. Similar to the exercise where you look at a picture of a face, think you grasp the emotion there, and then see successive pictures zooming out that give you more of the story, these pictures demonstrate that  context changes everything. The lesson here isn’t that there’s one correct interpretation of emotion, or that if we have enough information about the situation we will all come to agreement on the emotion, but rather that we will always all see and feel different things even in the same situation.  There’s no right answer to what an emotion is, just our answer.  And our ability to recognize that and describe that feeling to ourselves in order to harness it’s power.

We carefully didn’t say anything to the kids because we didn’t want to worry them.  But on the day Patty went for the biopsy, Max asked me in a quiet, serious voice:  “Does Mama need surgery again?”  (He was about 4 when she had surgery before.)

I was stuck by his ability to observe and “read between the lines.”  And, by the way this cancer fear stayed with him.

I suspect that in general kids see far more than we want them to.  From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense – there’s survival value in being able to read subtle cues.  Left to themselves kids will take those cues and make their own meaning, sometimes accurate, often exaggerated… but it’s important to remember that fear creeps in the absence of information.

What else are they seeing?  And what meaning are they making?

PS.  Patty’s biopsy was totally negative – which was a relief!  This was days before we were leaving for Borneo and South East Asia for six weeks, so it was fabulous to get this resolved before we went!

Here’s the link to the website. The trailer is on the site and on youtube, too.

http://www.racetonowhere.com/

Regardless of how you feel about education in the U.S., the film brings up some almost irrefutable issues that we need to think about as a nation and decide whether they matter to us or not. The ways our children are hurting as a result of their journey through K-12 education are almost entirely social and emotional, with some significant physical stresses heaped in there, too. The issue isn’t necessarily that they can’t finish high school or go to college, it’s also about what state of mind and body they’re in when they get there and how they feel about themselves along the way. It’s a question, really, of community values. Do we value our children or do we value their successes?

Daily I encounter the question of what it takes to enact change in our schools. Why is there such a difference between what we know and what we do? We know a lot of what we put our kids through isn’t good for them. Why don’t we choose a different path? The most common answer to this question seems to be fear. Fear that our children will miss out on some future opportunity if we don’t push them hard enough to keep every available door open for them. I do agree that fear is a huge factor. However, how about the fact that we don’t know for sure that doing something different will really work? All we know right now is that what we’re doing isn’t going so well. What if we showed successes in the schools that are trying different things? What if we showed what these kids look like as successful adults? At 25? At 45? Put the evidence out there for everyone see that it really does work, that we really can produce happy, productive and successful adults without using a high pressure, cookie cutter method that defines a narrow version of success.

Why is this so complex? Why is there such a difference between what we know and what we do?

The stakes in keeping the system the same are often high, including the economic stakes of educational testing companies, colleges, and private tutors. There are also significant socioeconomic factors at play. There is also a legitimate lack of knowledge by parents, educators and policy makers about current research around how kids learn and how their brains work. There are legitimate differences in what we collectively view as success. I’m sure we can all think of many more reasons to be resistant to change.

I would argue that although all those obstacles exist, the most relevant question to ask here is, “What will happen if we do nothing?” To enact change will take either slow and steady progressive decision making or an all-out revolt. I think Abeles is hoping for the revolt and honestly, so am I.

On a fortunate side note, Abeles ultimately ends up highlighting extraordinarily well some of the things that go right in the system – great teachers, homework that is relevant but not crushing, engaged families and several more, by contrasting with the negatives. What truly shines are the indomitable spirits of the kids she talks to in the film.

Abeles is clearly able convey that the responsibility for asking hard questions lays with all of us. A series of suggestions and relevant points at the end of the film targets specific groups one at a time – administrators, teachers, parents, students – aimed at engaging them in their share of the effort.

After the screening, the most common questions audience members had all involved one word. How. “How do I…?” “How do we get other people to…?” “How do we effect change?” “What can I do tomorrow or next week?” I think it’s time we worked hard to answer the ‘how’ questions and help people to see that they themselves are the actual tool for change.

65% of the pressing issues are on the people side, 35% on the financial/technical side (but in 2007 it was 76/24). Even in the current economy, the people issues were seen as 30% more significant than the technical/financial issues.
The most pressing challenge today is maintaining a healthy culture under intense economic pressure. Respondents identify several aspects of leadership as the key to this, especially vision, feedback, and communication.
Getting and keeping good people – especially “people people” – will make the difference.	(graphic made with Wordle.net)
89% of respondents said feelings are highly important or essential in solving the problems they face.
Only 8% of respondents report that they’re fully trained to deal with the issues they’re seeing.
92% see the value of EQ — but only 33% say their organizations do likewise. Those that do see EQ as critical for their culture. Hospitality, T&D, Education, and Finance lead the way — Medical and Technology trail the pack.

Agree?  Disagree?  Take the survey yourself and ask 5 colleagues to do likewise.

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♦

“Emotions are not add ons that interfere with cognition.”

“The message from social and affective neuroscience is clear: no longer can we think of learning as separate from or disrupted by emotion, and no longer can we focus only at the level of the individual student in analyzing good strategies for classroom instruction.”

“…help educators move beyond the oversimplified “neuromyths” that have abounded in education (Goswami, 2004, 2006), replacing these with a set of strategies for fostering the sound development of academic emotions (Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry 2002) through the use of emotionally relevant and socially contextualized educational practices (Brackett, Rivers, Shiffman, Lerner, & Salovey, 2006). “

Academic emotions. What a key concept ripe with possibilities! I don’t have fully formed reactions to this yet but what a great area to spend more time on. Can’t resist mentioning too that it feels significant to me that words and language are being used here as a tool to reframe this discussion. Simply describing the phenomenon, combining the words ‘academic’ and ‘emotions’, helps paint a picture of the combination of two disciplines which is very powerful.

I included her link here the other day but here it is again. This page links to her publication page.

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~immordin/

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Joshua_Aronson

One particularly interesting side note of his talk is what he describes as the social nature of intelligence. He said, “We are as many people as we have social contacts.” By this he means, of course, that our interaction with each person we encounter in our life is unique and makes us a particular version of ourselves for the duration of that interaction, dependent on the biological feedback mechanism that occurs in their presence. We can’t simply separate our social selves from our biological selves. Why are we so articulate when we are in the presence of some people and why are we so tongue-tied with others? Why does that relationship often persist, even when we work to change it? In some part, it is because of this ’stereotype threat’ (not always a true stereotype of course, just that we understand we are being perceived in a particular way) which has a physiological basis for impairing or strengthening our abilities, including our conversational abilities.

Dr. Aronson does talk a little bit about mitigating this influence. It turns out that just giving people the knowledge that it is happening has a positive effect and helps to improve performance, whatever that means in a given situation. I wonder a lot about social and emotional intelligence and how strengthening those skills could perhaps help to mitigate the effects, or at least allow us to perform the way we want to in a social context. It would be fascinating to spend more time on this in the educational arena, especially around testing. Can we minimize the impact of the stereotype threat that lowers test scores by employing emotional intelligence? If so, this would be one more compelling reason to promote the development of these skills in as many children as we can as often as possible.

Karen McCown, Six Seconds’ Chairman, handed this article to me several years ago. It’s stuck with me as a powerful set of guidelines for being impeccable with words. The children, Patty and I have discussed the “three gatekeepers” often over the last years; we started when the kids were 4 and 6 years old and have carried it forward. I highly recommend you put this one into practice!
- Josh

Because we can’t see them, we throw words around without much consideration for their effect. But words leave lasting impressions. Dr. Wilder Penfield, the great Canadian neurosurgeon, describes vividly the experiments that demonstrated how easily words we thought were long forgotten can be revived by electric stimulation of the brain. It’s all still there, recorded deep in consciousness – emotional depth charges ready to explode when they are triggered.

That is why the Buddha considered Right Speech to be as important as Right Action. I think he would have liked the Arab proverb that everything we say should pass three gatekeepers: “Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?”

Any little remark that fails these tests – a joke, a wisecrack, thoughtless gossip, an unverified “fact” or tightly-clenched opinion – can wreck a relationship, destroy trust, even cost a job. But the most glaring violation of Right Speech is the everyday quarrel. We just don’t seem to know how to disagree without being disagreeable.

It starts simply enough: someone says something we disagree with, and for some reason we get angry. (Why? I have never seen the connection.) Or, of course, we say something they disagree with and they get angry. Either way, after just a few words, tempers fray and language starts deteriorating.

How many times have I heard even educated people begin an emotionally charged dialogue with the best of intentions: “We won’t quarrel. Let us confine ourselves to the subject at hand.” Within five minutes one is saying, “That’s not what you told me last Saturday in front of the Wide World of Shoes!” And the other replies – see the absurdity of it! – “That wasn’t in front of the Wide World of Shoes. It was the Narrow World of Shoes.”

Anything to quarrel, anything to contradict.

After that, the quarrel has nothing to do with the subject. It is mostly “You must have done this even as a child” and “I’ve heard stories about the way you behaved in high school.” We may know we are being foolish, but by then we are caught; we can’t escape. All of us have been in arguments like this.

I used to ask my teacher, my grandmother, “Granny, if you found yourself in a situation like this, what would you do?” It took years for me to understand her simple answer: “Son, I wouldn’t get into a situation like that.”

This is very practical advice. Even if somebody is being rude to you or unkind, it doesn’t help to be unkind in return. It doesn’t help them and it doesn’t help you. The more unkind you are, the more angry the other person is going to be – and then the more angry you are going to be, until two people have ceased to be human beings and have gone back to a previous stage of evolution.

Out of control
If we could see what happens in the mind at times like these, we would be embarrassed. The mind simply slips out of control, like a speeding car that careens all over the road. Only when we have some say in where our attention goes can we keep our hands on the wheel.

That is what meditation is for. Then, when we see the mind beginning to break loose, we can brake a little, check the words that are about to burst forth, and choose speech that is kind, constructive, and respectful instead.

If we were to ask the Buddha why we lose control at times like these, he would give a precise diagnosis. First, he would say, the mind never was really in our control. The very nature of the mind is to be fickle, distractable, constantly in motion – in a word, to do whatever it likes. For it to behave the way we like, we have to train it through meditation.

But the real problem, he would say, is self-will: the fierce attachment to our little personal self, our opinions, our ego, that insists on having its way whatever the consequences to others. We just can’t bear to be contradicted, so we get angry and lash out with hurtful words. Most of us would be chagrined to see the underlying message: “You aren’t worth my respect. My ideas are superior; you don’t count.”

Bear with others
To break this cycle, we have to learn to be patient under provocation. “Suffer hard words,” the Buddha says, “as the elephant suffers arrows in battle. People are people, most of them ill-natured.”

There you get the Buddha, who really knows human nature. He doesn’t try to idealize. He doesn’t say, “Everybody is beautiful. Everybody is divine.” He says, “Factually speaking, most people lack courtesy.” This is the characteristic touch of the Buddha, standing firmly on the ground and then trying slowly to help us rise until our heads touch the stars.

For an Indian audience, the elephant is a familiar illustration. The elephant is the mightiest creature on earth, so tremendous in strength and endurance that in battle he ignores his wounds and goes forward gallantly even when his body is bristling with arrows. But he is also a very gentle creature. If you offer him a peanut on the palm of your hand, he will take it without even touching you.

The Buddha’s audience would have grasped the message immediately. Shrug off the daily darts and arrows that life sends, he is telling us, but never shoot such arrows at others. Never upset people, never be unkind to them, never hurt their feelings or treat them with lack of respect, how-ever they might behave themselves.

“In other words,” he says, “in personal relationships, be prepared for a certain amount of impoliteness and discourtesy – not because people are bad, but because they have self-will and can’t control it, just like you.”

This is one of the curious fallacies of self-will. We expect others to show courtesy to us, but we also expect them to bear with us if we happen to be a little unkind. We expect to have our way, but why should others have theirs?

It’s good, I think, not to get upset if you find somebody not showing respect to you, for the simple reason that you may well not be showing enough respect yourself.

Here the Buddha asks a simple question: If you get displeased when others are unkind to you, why don’t you get equally displeased when you are not kind to others? In other words, there is no mystery about these things. You don’t like anyone to be unkind to you. Why don’t you remember that the other person is just like you? Like you, he doesn’t like unkind words. Like you, she appreciates courtesy and respect.

Oddly enough, the person who usually gets upset is the man who expects extreme courtesy for himself, the woman who finds it easy to be discourteous to others. The realist is the mystic, who says, “Well, the world is like that. It takes all sorts.”

In The Imitation of Christ – a marvelous book of spiritual inspiration for any religion – we often come across this same counsel: “Bear with people. Don’t answer back.”

Believe me, for those of us who have lived in the world of education and had our intellect sharpened to be sarcastic, it’s very difficult to restrain oneself. At a meeting when you’re being criticized or attacked, it’s considered part of your academic responsibility to answer back with compound interest.

I, too, was in the habit of doing that, until I began to understand that if somebody attacked me, there was no need for me to get exasperated. After all, most people are capable of using their judgment. So I started just repeating my mantram silently – Rama, Rama, Rama – and keeping quiet.

It was not at all easy. To make things worse, it was sometimes misinterpreted. Somebody who used to keep quiet would think I was at a loss for an answer and join the others in jumping on me. It was difficult training, but very soon I began to see that I was getting detached – not from my colleagues, but from my own opinions. When they were criticizing somebody, they weren’t criticizing me. They were criticizing a statue they had sculpted and set up in the corner. Why should I be bothered if they threw darts at a statue they themselves had made?

This doesn’t mean making a doormat of yourself. Just the opposite. It is training. You are getting your mind under control. First you learn to break the connection between stimulus and response. Once you have a measure of detachment, you can reply to criticism without identifying yourself with your opinions or the other person with hers. Then you are free to choose words that are kind, respectful, and to the point.

The more self-willed and insensitive the other person is, the more reason for you to alert your mind to be calm and compassionate – and, if necessary, to face opposition firmly but tenderly.

We aren’t helping self-willed people when we give in to their demands or let them walk all over us. It only feeds self-will to let them have their way. We have to learn to show respect by opposing them – tenderly, nonviolently, but firmly.

This is a lesson all of us need to learn, and it’s not at all easy. Particularly in personal relationships where people are insecure, they will feel resentment but they will not try to oppose tenderly. When self-will gets inflated, you look upon others as part of your own ego – a kind of ego-annex. This is very common today, especially between parents and children. In such cases it is particularly painful – and all the more necessary – to learn to oppose tenderly, with detachment and respect.

The mental attitude
Criticism, of course, can be useful only when it is constructive. Comments can be useful only when they are friendly. Persuasion can be useful only when it is loving. Even from the point of effectiveness, then, unkind comments only add to the problem. Disrespectful criticism makes the situation worse.

Often, of course, it is necessary to make a constructive comment or suggestion. It is the mental attitude – the tone, the respect, the loving concern – with which we put forward ideas op-posed to others that makes the contribution effective.

I would suggest that whenever you feel you have to make a suggestion opposed to someone else’s, take time to get a little detached from the situation by repeating the mantram silently. Then, when your mind is calm, offer your suggestion in a friendly, warmhearted manner with great respect for the other person. This takes practice, but you will find that it works. It is effective.

Here it helps to remember the Buddha’s observation: most of our problems arise from inflated self-will. And one of the surest signs of inflated self-will is in an inability to see the person’s point of view. It is not that we have to accept the other person’s point of view, but under no circumstances should we refuse to acknowledge that the other person has a point of view – one that deserves to be listened to with respect and evaluated with detachment.

Everyone acknowledges this in principle, but in practice it is all too rare. On campuses I have found even the best-educated scholars sometimes unable to concede that others have a cogent point of view.

This is the intellectual climate I was trained in. It took years of retraining my mind through the practice of meditation to learn to listen with respect to utterly opposite points of view and yet retain my own.

When you are able to do this – to be completely loyal to your ideals and yet not reflect on other people’s integrity – often the other person begins to respond. What matters is the friendliness you show, the lack of ill will – and, more than anything else, the complete absence of any sense of superiority. The more spiritual you become, the less superior you feel to others because the less separate you feel from others. The superiority complex is most rampant where separateness is inflamed.

Right Speech
By making Right Speech part of his Eightfold Path, the Buddha is giving us a precious clue. Right Speech is not just a nice way to behave. It is a spiritual discipline, part of a very skillfully designed path for self-realization.

Once we grasp this, every disagreement becomes an opportunity for spiritual growth.

Facing anger, for example – your own or others’ – is one of life’s best opportunities for training. It’s very much like learning to lift weights. You start by lifting chairs, then tables, then a desk, and after a while you’re lifting a VW Bug. You can pick up a thousand pounds, raise it over your head – what do they call it? “clean and jerk” – and then drop it onto the mat with a lot of noise.

It is the same with anger. You start with those absurd little quarrels about the Wide World of Shoes. As you learn to be patient, you get confidence. Next time, when a bigger outburst comes, instead of retaliating, being unkind, making sarcastic remarks, you use the incident for training the muscles of your mind by repeating the mantram.

Just as we admire people who can lift a thousand pounds, we all benefit by being with somebody who can be patient under attack, kind when opposed, and detached enough to see the situation clearly and compassionately. This is not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength.

Daily review
Athletes, I understand, often keep a daily record of their training. In the same spirit, I take a few minutes every evening to get a bird’s-eye view of training my mind and see where I can improve the quality of my daily behavior.

This is not a negative survey. You are not finding fault with yourself. You are asking, “Where can I be a little more patient? Can I be a little more loving toward Amelia tomorrow? Can I be a little more helpful to John?” These are the positive ways in which we can improve the quality of our daily living tomorrow in the light of what we have done today.

Interestingly enough, this makes every day new. Tomorrow is never the same old day. There is always something more to be done: one or two more steps to take on the path upward, some greater care to avoid the mistakes that all of us make in some small way. Instead of repining over mistakes or being resentful over them, I would suggest taking every possible care not to repeat those mistakes tomorrow and make at least a little improvement in your daily behavior.

This is why we have been given the competitive instinct: not to compete with others, but to compete with ourselves. Every evening you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, “You did a pretty good job today, I agree. But watch out! Tomorrow I’m going to outdo you.”

Original goodness
When you refrain from unkindness, you are uncovering your real nature. That is the real meaning of the Buddha’s word nirvana: the removal of every shred of the selfish conditioning and self-will that brings such sorrow to us and others.

When we have removed all anger, what remains is compassion. When we have removed all selfishness, what remains is selflessness. When we have removed all hatred, what remains is love.

This is the glory of the mystical tradition: We don’t have to make ourselves loving; we have only to remove hatred from our hearts. Those who have learned to be kind even when others are unkind move in the world with freedom. Their love flows to all around without any question of “Is he being nice to me? Is she being kind?”

Life holds us hostage with such questions. But when we are free – when we attain the stage where there is no possibility of my dancing to your tune or making you dance to mine – all sorrows come to an end.

“You cannot add to the joy of such a man,” the Upanishads say. “You cannot add to such a woman’s security. Whatever life gives, whatever life takes, they are always full.”

I was listening to Linda Lantieri, Director of The Inner Resilience Program and part of CASEL, speak about what it looks like, in real and practical ways, to put social and emotional skill acquisition into schools. She started talking about directly teaching SEL skills. I had my initial reaction to this which I always have which goes something like this, “Okay, okay, yes sometimes there’s no other way to teach it but come on, really? Is that how we really want to do it? Wouldn’t we rather strive to have SEL modeled all throughout our school or workplace? Make it something we don’t talk about, something we just alwasys do?”

And then it hit me. Wow! Of course there are very good reasons to teach the skills overtly. The first and foremost one is that it gets us all to TALK about them! What they are, why they are iimportant. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, it gives us a chance to PRACTICE them. This, too, is key! How can we expect anyone, I don’t care if you’re an adult or a child, to use these skills in the real world when the going gets tough and things get dicey if we haven’t practiced them in better, more ideal conditions? If we haven’t said the words out loud, gauged others’ reactions, practiced reading body language and gained confidence in ourselves and our abilities?

I know. See? Duh. But to me I had always envisioned that we were striving towards creating environments where these lessons weren’t necessary. Perhaps that’s still my dream but this seems like quite the practical way to get closer to that, especially when combined with that modeling, integrated approach I like so much. Using both approaches at the same time suddenly seems like a great idea to me. Hmmmm…