Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

3. Understand people and help them succeed. You can influence people more effectively if you understand them and try to help them achieve their goals in ways that also help you achieve yours. The empathy practices in Chapter 7 plus the compassion practices earlier in this chapter will help you with understanding and helping people. Your knowledge of the neuroscience of the social brain learned from the last section will also help you greatly.

4. Serve the greater good. While remembering to take care of your own self-interest, never forget to go beyond just serving self-interest. Act also for the good of the team, or the good of the company, or the good of the world. Inspire the same in others. When your goodness inspires others, you can influence them more effectively. The practices in Chapter 6 on motivation, and the compassion practices in this chapter, will help you develop your instinct for serving the greater good.

If there is a single word that summarizes all the practices that help expand your influence, I think that word is goodness . Goodness is very inspiring, and it inspires in a way that changes people. That is why, for example, Mahatma Gandhi was and still is so influential.

How Goodness Can Change a Man’s Life in Ten Minutes

One touching example of how goodness can change a man’s life was a personal story told to me by famous psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman.

Paul has had a very successful career as a psychologist. In fact, he was named by the American Psychological Association as one of 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century. Paul, however, suffered a very difficult childhood, so he grew up to be a very angry adult. He told me that every single week of his life, he experienced at least two episodes of explosive anger that led him to do or say something he would later regret.

In 2000, Paul was invited to speak at a Mind and Life Conference held in India in the presence of the Dalai Lama. Paul was reluctant to go because he did not take Buddhist monks seriously; he thought of them as a bunch of funny bald men in robes. His daughter, Eve, had to convince him to attend.

On the third day of the five-day conference, something very important happened to Paul. During a break between meetings, Eve and Paul went to sit with the Dalai Lama and spoke to him for about ten minutes. For the duration of that conversation, the Dalai Lama held Paul’s hand. Those ten minutes had a profound impact on Paul. He said he experienced an abundance of “goodness” within his entire being. He was transformed. By the end of those ten minutes, he found his anger completely fading away. For many weeks after that, he did not experience any trace of anger at all, which for him, was a huge life change. Perhaps more importantly, it changed the direction of his life. Paul was planning to retire, but after those ten minutes of holding the Dalai Lama’s hand, he rediscovered his deep aspiration to bring benefit to the world, which was the reason he entered psychology in the first place. After some slight prodding from the Dalai Lama, Paul canceled his retirement plans and has since been giving his experience and wisdom to scientific research that may help people improve emotional balance, compassion, and altruism.

Goodness is so powerful that even experiencing it for just ten minutes can change a man’s life. It does not even matter that the experience may be entirely subjective. In Paul’s case, for example, the Dalai Lama claimed he did not do anything special, suggesting that the goodness Paul experienced came more from what Paul himself brought to the situation, with the Dalai Lama being merely a facilitator. Either way, the lesson is unmistakable: if you want to influence people, there is no greater power than goodness.

(Confession: I am comfortable using the word goodness only because Paul uses the word himself. If the word goodness is good enough for Paul Ekman, it is good enough for me.)

“Okay, now try projecting influence without using the Jedi mind trick.”

Communicating with Insight

Empathy is a necessary ingredient for effective communication, but empathy is not always enough. I have seen even empathetic people get themselves into very frustrating conversations. The missing element is insight, specifically insight into the often hidden elements of a conversation, such as the identity issues involved and what impact was caused versus what was intended.

In the next section, we look at a framework from Harvard for conducting difficult conversations that will help us develop the necessary insight.

Difficult Conversations

Difficult conversations are conversations that are hard to have. They are often important, but because they are hard, we would usually rather avoid them. Two classic examples of difficult conversations in the workplace are asking for a raise and giving a valued employee critical feedback. It does not always have to be so drastic, however. Sometimes, even something as minor as asking your neighbor to not bring out the trash on non-trash days can be a difficult conversation.

Conducting difficult conversations is a skill, an extremely useful one, indeed. According to the authors of Difficult Conversations , who make up part of the Harvard Negotiation Project, there are five steps to conducting a difficult conversation. Here is my brief of those steps:

1. Prepare by walking through the “three conversations.”

2. Decide whether to raise the issue.

3. Start from the objective “third story.”

4. Explore their story and yours.

5. Problem solve. 9

Prepare by Walking Through the “Three Conversations”

A powerful first step in improving our ability to conduct difficult conversations is understanding their underlying structure. In every conversation, there are actually three conversations going on. They are the content conversation (“What happened?”), the feelings conversation (“What emotions are involved?”), and the identity conversation (“What does this say about me?”). The identity conversation almost always involves one of these three questions:

1. Am I competent?

2. Am I a good person?

3. Am I worthy of love?

This step involves understanding the structure of the three conversations and preparing for them. Sort out what happened as objectively as possible, understand how this is impacting you and the other party emotionally, and identify what is at stake for you, about you.

Decide Whether to Raise the Issue

What do you hope to accomplish by raising this issue? Is it a productive intention (for example, to solve a problem, to help somebody develop themselves) or is it a nonproductive intention (for example, just wanting to make someone feel bad)? Sometimes, the right thing to do is not to raise the issue at all. If you decide to raise the issue, try shifting into a mode that supports learning and problem solving.

Start from the Objective “Third Story”

The “Third Story” is the way things happened from the perspective of a disinterested third-party who is aware of the whole situation. For example, if Matthew and I are having an argument, each of us will have our own version of what led to this argument. The narrative from our co-worker, John, who knows everything that happened but is totally uninvolved, is the third story.

The third story is the best one with which to start a difficult conversation. It is the most objective and the one with which you are most likely to form a common ground with the other party. Use this third story to invite the other party to join you as a partner in sorting out the situation together.