Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Anger

The Buddha Teaches: How to Empower Yourself in the Face of Criticism

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The Buddha Teaches: How to Empower Yourself in the Face of Criticism Within the Theravada Buddhist tradition’s Pali Canon, the Akkosa Sutta teaches the importance of non-reactivity in the face of insults and harsh words. It emphasizes that when someone insults you, you should remain calm and composed, like a mirror that reflects an image without being affected by it.

Akkosa Sutta: Anger Quelled with Patience and Compassion

Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, achieved widespread renown during his 45-year teaching mission following his enlightenment. His teachings resonated with many, leading to the formation of the monastic Sangha.

The Buddha’s reputation as an unprovokable and serene spiritual teacher quickly spread across the regions he visited.

A man journeyed hundreds of miles with the intent of testing the Buddha’s renowned composure. Upon reaching the Buddha, the man wasted no time in subjecting him to a barrage of criticism, insults, challenges, and deliberate attempts to provoke a reaction.

Remarkably, the Buddha remained unruffled. Instead, he calmly inquired, “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” the man responded.

With gentle wisdom, the Buddha asked, “If someone offers you a gift and you decline to accept it, to whom then does it belong?”

The man pondered and replied, “It belongs to the person who offered it.”

A serene smile graced the Buddha’s face as he said, “That is correct. So if I decline to accept your abuse, does it not then still belong to you?”

In the wake of a thoughtful pause, the man chose to walk away.

Managing External Perceptions with Grace

The Akkosa Sutta emphasizes a fundamental Buddhist principle: Non-Attachment. When confronted with criticism, it’s crucial to distance yourself from the need to defend your self-image or validate your worth. By not allowing the negative words of others to provoke an emotional reaction, you promote inner peace and detachment from external negativity.

When accusations trigger that defensive knot in your stomach, pause and engage in self-reflection. In such moments, there are only two possibilities: either the accusations are valid or false. If they hold truth, anger serves no purpose; it’s wiser to acknowledge the valid points, learn from the experience, and advance in life.

Conversely, if they are false, once again, anger is unnecessary. In this scenario, the responsibility for their emotions lies with the person who made the mistake. While you can’t control the actions of others, you have the power to manage your own reactions.

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Hate is Self-Defeating

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Hatred and anger are emotions that are ultimately futile and self-defeating. The Buddha taught that negative and destructive emotions toward others only harm the person who holds them. He said, “In this world, hate never dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible. You too shall pass away. Knowing this, how can you quarrel?”

Hate may seem successful when it binds perpetrators and victims in a cycle of mutual retaliation and destruction, but this is only a fleeting success. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught that hate often leads to more hate. He said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness.”

Idea for Impact: Choosing love over hate is the only way to defeat hate. You can deny hate even this fleeting success by modeling love in your speech, attitude, and actions. Look past people’s shortcomings and choose to accept, tolerate, forgive, and love. This is the wiser choice.

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How to Speak Up in Meetings and Disagree Tactfully

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If you find it challenging to speak up in meetings, especially when disagreeing, here’s a helpful framework:

  1. Restate the objective, even if it seems obvious: “Let’s clarify what we aim to achieve here…” This restatement sharpens the focus on the purpose.
  2. Paraphrase someone’s point: “So, if I understand correctly, you’re suggesting…”
  3. Express your concerns or alternative perspective: “I have concerns because…” or “While I see your point, how would we address…”
  4. Be the last to contribute: Your silence piques curiosity and makes your statement more impactful. Incorporate the best ideas expressed and avoid obvious mistakes.

Following this approach, you can tactfully express your thoughts with the right tone and words while seeking common ground.

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Thirteen Phrases Your Customers Don’t Want to Hear

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When spoken with a particular tone, specific phrases can instantly infuriate and frustrate customers. Here are some alternatives to consider:

  • Avoid: “I don’t know.” Instead, try “That’s a good question. Let me check and find out.”
  • Avoid: “Just a second.” Instead, try “It could take me a few minutes to get that information. Could you hold while I check, or should I call you back in ten minutes?”
  • Avoid: “Wait.” Instead, try “I haven’t gotten to that yet.”
  • Avoid: “We can’t do that for you.” Instead, try “That’s a tough one. Let me see what I can do.”
  • Avoid: “You’ll have to…” Instead, try “Here’s how we can help you.”
  • Avoid: “That’s not my job.” Instead, try “I usually don’t handle that area, but I know who can help you. Let me see if he’s available.”
  • Avoid: “It’s your fault.” Instead, try “The way this process works is…
  • Avoid: “Why didn’t you do…?” Instead, try “Our process expects you to…”
  • Avoid: “How’s that my concern?” Instead, try, “I understand how upset you are.”
  • Avoid: “I know!” Instead, try “Yes, you’re right.”
  • Avoid: “As I explained earlier… Instead, try “Let’s review the steps again.”
  • Avoid: “Don’t you understand?” Instead, try, “Am I understandable thus far?”
  • Avoid: “Are you done?” Instead, try, “Will there be anything else?”

Master the art of words and deliver customer service messages with a confident, sympathetic tone. Create a personalized list of “Do Say” and “Don’t Say” phrases, drawing from your own experiences.

Reflect on the pain points and communication barriers that specifically frustrated you as a customer during customer service calls, as well as the instances where representatives provided positive interactions. Identify effective approaches and avoid pitfalls when engaging with customers.

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External Blame is the Best Defense of the Insecure

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In the realm of excuses, accountability tends to retreat while blame takes center stage. You find yourself playing the “blame game,” swiftly shifting responsibility onto external factors to protect your ego.

When faced with challenges, it’s natural to become defensive and deflect responsibility onto your boss, a vendor, the weather, working conditions, a partner, economic downturns, or anything but yourself. However, this negative energy worsens the situation and weakens your self-perception.

Beneath the surface, though, lies a truth: externalizing blame always hinders real growth and progress. So, the next time you catch yourself falling into the trap of feeling like a prisoner of circumstances, making excuses, or pointing fingers at others, take a moment to pause and ask yourself, “What could I have done to prevent this problem?” and “What lessons can we derive from this situation?”

Idea for Impact: Assuming responsibility is a testament to your strength. It displays courage, even if it may not feel that way. Only the resilient can truly accept blame. When we externalize blame, we give up control and surrender our power to heal and improve ourselves. On the other hand, embracing accountability has numerous benefits: it strengthens relationships, enhances credibility, fosters happiness within yourself and others, promotes transparency, boosts self-esteem, facilitates learning, and ultimately helps resolve problems. Choose accountability over blame and pave the way for personal growth and success.

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How to … Communicate Better with Defensive People

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Any time you want to question something a person did or didn’t, phrase your question in terms of “how” or “what.”

Don’t ask “why,” especially when working with individuals who tend to be a bit defensive.

I’ve noticed that a “why” often pushes them over the edge—they feel threatened, or they feel their abilities are being brought into question. Defensiveness is usually a means of avoiding accountability and getting the other person to back off.

The “tell me more” invites them to engage in a conversation.

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How to … Stop Getting Defensive

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What Is Defensiveness?

Defensiveness generally stems from a consistent feeling that you need to protect yourself. There may have been a time when you were constantly questioned or felt unacknowledged. This can lead to a habit of turning on the fight response, even when it’s unnecessary. In other words, your defensiveness was perhaps useful at one point, but it’s less so now.

To learn graceful ways of coping with feeling defensive, try to pinpoint when, where, or with whom the defensiveness impulse typically occurs. Take a week to become aware of your behavior. Next, write down a few interactions you would have liked to conduct differently: do you wish you had stayed quiet and listened, asked questions, stood up for yourself, and asserted your position? Rehearsing alternative responses will help you react more calmly in future scenarios.

Time to “Go to The Balcony”

When you find yourself in a conversation triggering your self-protective, defensive impulse, take a moment to pause. Relax and think about what you are doing. Inhale slowly, gaze out of the window for a moment, or repeat a reassuring mantra in your head (“I’m feeling provoked,” “I’m annoyed by that comment,” or “I need to be centered.”) Slow down your response, so you have time to gain control.

Harvard’s William Ury, the author of such acclaimed books on negotiation as Getting to Yes (1981) and The Power of a Positive No (2007,) calls this process “going to the balcony.” It’s figuratively retreating to a mental and emotional refuge.

That’s a prudent response. When you’re provoked, one of the most significant powers you have is the power not to react but to go to a place of calm, perspective, and self-control. There, you can acknowledge your emotions. You can refocus on yourself, remind yourself of your deepest values, and reorient yourself on “the prize.”

Idea for Impact: Respond, Don’t React

There is a mighty difference between responding and reacting. When you respond, you’re using communication devices to express yourself and gain understanding. When you react, instead, you’re merely trying to fight back, win over the person or stamp out the other person’s allegation.

Reacting only creates conflict and escalates emotions.

It’s okay to become hurt by negative feedback, and it’s okay to disagree with criticism. However, learning how to respond calmly and soundly will provide you with an effective way to stay centered.

Teaching yourself to respond and not react may be hard at first. But it gets easier with practice. And in time, you’ll likely feel calmer. Commit and practice.

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Don’t Be a Prisoner of the Hurt Done to You

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The Irish philosopher and poet John O’Donohue writes in Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong (1998,)

Forgiveness is one of the really difficult things in life. The logic of receiving hurt seems to run in the direction of never forgetting either the hurt or the hurter. When you forgive, some deeper, divine generosity takes over. When you can forgive, then you are free. When you cannot forgive, you are a prisoner of the hurt done to you. If you are really disappointed in someone and you become embittered, you become incarcerated inside that feeling. Only the grace of forgiveness can break the straight logic of hurt and embitterment. It gives you a way out, because it places the conflict on a completely different level. In a strange way, it keeps the whole conflict human. You begin to see and understand the conditions, circumstances, or weakness that made the other person act as they did.

Forgiveness begins with recognizing that the pain wrought upon you by someone else stems from her own deep suffering.

In other words, forgiveness is opening up to the insight that, while you are the victim of another who has caused you some suffering, she herself is also a victim of suffering. A set of circumstances—often beyond your understanding—have influenced her to perpetuate the hurt upon you.

When you adopt this enlightened state, you’re not condoning or justifying aggression, abuse, or violence. Instead, you’re responding with such kindness as to equip you with a substantial emotional breakthrough towards giving up resentment, harsh judgment, and revenge against the person who caused hurt.

Responding with the understanding that suffering stems from suffering can progressively offer you emotional freedom from the second-order suffering that comes from replaying that hurt repeatedly.

Idea for Impact: Forgiveness is for you—not for anyone else. Append your grievance story to remind youself of the heroic choice of realizing that forgiveness was hard—but you found a way to forgive anyway. Holding onto the anger and resentment will, then, no longer carry the same weight on you.

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How to Be Better in a Relationship: Assume Positive Intent

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One secret to good relationships is to assume positive intent.

This applies to all sorts of personal and professional relationships—even chance relationships, such as customer service dealings.

Whenever you’re upset—even repulsed—by somebody’s off-putting behavior, try to push yourself to allow for the possibility that the perpetrator’s intent was fair, well-meaning, and wholesome. In other words, seek the least malicious explanation for their behavior.

Instead of getting irritated and judicious, if you pause to reflect and reconsider their actions by stepping into their shoe, you may see if you’re misconstruing what they’re saying or doing.

Assuming Positive Intent Can Herald a More Informed Vantage Point

When you assume positive intent, you get more insight into their actions and choices. Stepping mentally outside of whatever is happening to you right now allows you to assign it some context and mull over its significance. Possibly the other person is having a bad day. Maybe they are culturally or emotionally tuned to think and behave in a particular way. Perhaps the situation harks back at an earlier incident where they’ve been hurt and, therefore, are trying to protect themselves?

Assuming positive intent overcomes the human tendency by which we judge and rationalize our actions versus others’: when we make mistakes, we often blame the situation’s circumstances rather than take responsibility for the error. When others make mistakes, we tend to over-emphasize their role in mistakes—we blame them quickly and challenge their intentions.

You Can’t Change the Past, But You Can Change Your Perspective About It

Giving people the benefit of the doubt helps you identify the details of their situation. Assume the person causing your problem is giving it their best shot. Seek to understand. Empathize. You may be surprised to learn something that you hadn’t expected.

Your whole outlook on a problem transforms when you follow this approach. Becoming aware of your unconscious responses can allow a calmer, kinder response to conflict and frustration. It makes it easier to assimilate information and commiserate with people you’d rather not listen to.

How many misunderstandings, disputes, frustrations, and misgivings could be forestalled this way!

Idea for Impact: Assume Positive Intent. It’s the Foundation of High Trust. It’s a Huge Game-Changer.

Until proven otherwise, assume positive intent as you go about your day—even when somebody cuts you off in traffic. Misunderstandings will happen and can be resolved with reality-testing and understanding, grace, and dignity. Assuming positive intent allows you to retreat from the narrow, restrictive perspective that can aggravate the situation into two negatives fighting one another.

Now, then, assuming positive intent does not mean naïve goodness or unassertive deference to everything that’s happening to you. Beware blind optimism. Don’t overlook patterns of deliberate ill intentions and fundamental incompatibilities with their outlook on life.

Being pleasing and agreeable and wishing the best for everybody could blind you into refusing to accept the bare facts of an unfortunate situation and overlook others’ excesses. A noble view of the world is not always helpful. Sometimes problems are best nipped in the bud.

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Change Your Perspective, Change Your Reactions

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From the eighth-century Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryavatara (“Entrance to the Path of Awakening,”) a translation from Stephen Batchelor’s A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (1979:)

Where would I possibly find enough leather
With which to cover the surface of the earth?
But just leather on the soles of my shoes
Is equivalent to covering the earth with it
 
Likewise it is not possible for me
To restrain the external course of things
But should I restrain this mind of mine
What would be the need to restrain all else?

A powerful reminder that you can’t magically make the whole world and its people run smooth and easy, but you can reorient your heart and mind to change your perspective and endure the bumps that you’ll encounter.

Idea for Impact: If something isn’t to your liking, change your liking or find something else of your liking. The willingness to adjust is perhaps the single most critical human faculty.

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