Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Social Skills

You Need a Personal Cheerleader

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Many people credit some of their success to others who believed in them and urged them on when their confidence waned.

A personal cheerleader could be a companion, friend, or family member who believes in you, takes an eager interest and encourages you, and helps lift your self-confidence, even if they raise some practical questions.

This cheerleader could indeed be a mirror through which you can see yourself. Somebody who encourages you to process and think through your experiences and reframe mistakes as opportunities to learn. Somebody who can help you notice things you do well, however small.

Idea for Impact: A personal cheerleader is pivotal to a meaningful, resilient life. Curtailing negative self-talk is difficult when you’re trying to build your self-confidence.

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You Always Have to Say ‘Good’

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“How are you?” is usually meant less as an actual question and more a greeting-on-autopilot—a casual call-and-response.

The unwritten rule of conversation is that you’re expected to reply with nothing more than a declaration of utter satisfaction with life.

People aren’t usually interested in hearing the real answer. Responding with a “Well, to be honest, I’ve been kind of down today. Had a bad day at work” could be a faux pas. You aren’t supposed to burden every interlocutor with your situation, particularly with people who aren’t close.

So “how are you?” isn’t a bad thing to say at all—most of the time. But, there’re occasions, readable with empathic awareness, when you shouldn’t ask someone how their day is going unless you’re going to listen to their response with genuine respect and interest.

Idea for Impact: Showing that you care about people can do wonders, but if you don’t care, don’t feign that you do—people can see through it.

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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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  3. A Short Course on: How to Find the Right Relationship
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A Short Course on: How to Find the Right Relationship

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  1. Know yourself—what you want and what you don’t want. Having clear goals can help save you from being caught up in the moment and disregarding what it is you really want and need.
  2. Have good boundaries—they’re how you should take care of your needs. Identify what’s healthy and what crosses that line.
  3. Appreciate your value, and expect respect. Faults become thick when respect wears away. Assess concord in how you both approach openness, sincerity, and conflict resolution.
  4. Get out there and meet a wide range of people. Be persistent in your search for the right relationship. Give people a fair chance. No one can be perfect. So, think about how you’ll work around their imperfections.
  5. Don’t put people in a box, especially when there isn’t actually a box that characterizes who they are. Let yourself and the other person be who you each are. Don’t deny their individuality; be open to being surprised.

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Let Go of Toxic Friendships

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Friendships are an integral ingredient of happiness, and they often help you feel better—but not always. Some friendships are just bad for you.

Occasionally, you can fall into the trap of hanging onto unhealthy relationships because they’re familiar—even when you’re constantly let down. Worse yet, ‘ambivalent relationships’ can cause you more anxiety than being with people you actively dislike.

It takes two to define a friendship. Relationships are grounded in social exchange, and with unbalanced friendships, the other draws more from the “friendship bank” over time than they care to put into it. If you’ve set clear expectations and boundaries, and the other isn’t consistently sticking to them, perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate your relationship.

What you get out of your friendships ultimately affects your physical and emotional health. It pays to focus your attention on strengthening healthy relationships and letting go of toxic friendships.

Luckily, most friendships are not too difficult to escape. Downgrade the friendship. Make yourself less accessible. If the relationship isn’t very close, merely drift apart.

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How to Reliably Tell If Someone is Lying

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There isn’t one reliable behavioral cue that consistently reveals that a person isn’t telling you the truth, but the most expected sign of dishonesty is evasiveness.

Does the other person evade answering direct questions or declare, “I don’t know,” “that’s about it,” or “I don’t remember doing that?”

Instead of making direct denials, do they seem to have been caught off guard and take more time to think up a believable response?

Idea for Impact: To detect a lie, listen and pay attention. If lying is nothing more than communicating false information, dwell on what’s being said. Does it make sense? Does it align with other facts you’ve mustered or anecdotes you’ve heard? Do the answers to your probing questions stand up to scrutiny? Does the story begin to shift?

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No, Reason Doesn’t Guide Your Politics

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“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” observes the American political scientist Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012,) a captivating voyage of discovery of the social psychology of politics and ethics. Haidt makes a compelling case for why reason and logic aren’t what people use to contend with problems and steer through to the right answers.

Most people’s politics tend to be ill-informed. People don’t engage in deep causal thinking about the consequences of their favored political positions. Information and analyses tend to provoke—not calm—their preconceived judgments.

Reason is Motivationally Inert

As the Scottish philosopher David Hume noted in his masterful Treatise on Human Nature (1739,) “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Reason becomes subordinate to the passions that have come to life in people’s tribal allegiances and their confirmation bias. People are prone to making decisions derived from instinctive, emotional, and fast thinking of psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s “System 1,” not the slow, logical deliberations of “System 2.”

Most people feel good about sticking to their guns, even if they are wrong. They tend to read newspapers, periodicals, blogs, and social media feeds to settle ever more comfortably into their preexisting beliefs. They use their tribes’ “notice boards” not to reassess their established opinions but to have them validated, comforted, legitimized, and intensified.

On the rare occasion that they do converse with someone or read something they may disagree with, they don’t revaluate their judgments, let alone change their minds. They merely use reason as a weapon to discredit contrasting evidence, spot others’ flaws, and convince them that they are wrong. Consequently, reason doesn’t bind but drives differing people apart.

Idea for Impact: The Opinions You are Blind to Could Be Your Own

Be conscious of the internal conflicts brought on by your passions. Seek and assess the counterevidence. Incorporate these counterarguments and strengthen your positions.

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Avoid Blame Language

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Refrain from using the terms “always” and “never” when you’re in a disagreement.

Making statements like “You never think about anyone but yourself” or “You always ignore how I feel!” provokes defensiveness because of the apparent exaggeration.

The actual conversation gets abstracted because the other person understandably resists the all-or-nothing argument.

Making negative judgments or proclamations about the other in extreme, absolute terms gives no wiggle room because making global attacks on their entire personality.

Idea for Impact: Try to voice your concerns in a way that focuses on your own feelings and how the other’s behavior affects you. Try “I” statements, such as “I feel neglected when you make plans without me.”

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The Right Way to End a Meeting

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Many meetings fail to produce tangible results because they lack closure.

An effective coordinator synthesizes everything she’s heard from the participants, incorporates the best of what’s been discussed, and distills all the inputs into a course of action.

A good closure sounds like this: “Let me see if I can go over the main points. Our objective is to achieve [Goal] by [Due Date.] In light of what [Emily] and [Ryan] have said and the concerns that [Mark] has raised, it seems that we agree about [PointX] and [PointY]. We must watch out for [Risk] and incorporate [Possibility] into our contingency plan. Therefore, the consensus seems to that, we proceed with [Decision]. … Have I missed anything? … Is everyone OK with this decision? … Here’s what we’ll do before the next meeting … .”

Without a concrete plan for moving forward, even the best outcomes of a meeting can languish as the initial enthusiasm and commitment fade away.

The foremost goal of a meeting organizer is to steer participants towards a decision and nail down the specific commitments, deadlines, and follow-up timetables.

There’s another key benefit of encouraging everyone’s involvement and piloting a meeting to closure. When each participant feels that their opinion has been fully considered, they are more likely to feel ownership of the group’s decision, even if it’s not the entire outcome they hoped for.

If a meeting can’t come to a decision, it’s reasonable to hold off decision-making. Still, distilling the key points, assigning ‘homework,’ and defining what’s expected of everybody before the next meeting constitutes an effective closure.

Idea for Impact: Closure is, more often than not, the missing link between meetings and impact. Steering a consensus at the end of the meeting gives a sense of closure that participants will find most valuable.

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How to Mediate in a Dispute

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In mediation, the parties in disagreement work out a mutually acceptable solution with the help of a neutral, third party mediator.

If you’ve been called to serve as a go-between in a dispute, here’s what you can do to help promote mutual understanding and resolution:

  1. Set ground rules. Agree on how much time you’ll give to the mediation meeting. Keep the meeting close-ended. If there’re more than two parties, each with different views of a dispute, engage more than one mediator.
  2. Have each party prepare a brief summary of their positions before the mediation and send them to you, and, ideally, to each other. The brief can explain positions, rationale, and motivation. The brief can also contain each party’s summary understanding of the opposing party’s arguments and counterarguments.
  3. Insist that the each party have a clear understanding of their underlying intentions. What’s their best understanding of the basic objectives? What do they want to achieve? What’s rigid? What’s flexible? What are they willing to bargain?
  4. At the start of the mediation meeting, remind each party that mediation is a voluntary process. Your role is to help the parties reach an agreement, not to reach an agreement for them. Say, “Nothing lasting will happen unless each of you participates in the solution. Any agreement you’re able to reach must be your own.”
  5. Announce that your intention is to foster the interaction by helping each party understand one another’s perspectives and expectations. Encourage them to consider a wide range of solutions and to shun false dilemmas (“either-or” approach.) Push them to understand the other party’s underlying interests, not just their stated positions.
  6. Outline how they’ll work together during the process. Get them to agree that they’ll deal with matters in a non-confrontational way and be open-minded about what the other wants.
  7. Let each party make a preliminary presentation without interruption from the other parties. Then, encourage each party to respond directly to the other’s opening statements.
  8. If the communications break down completely, restart the mediation process by separating the parties and talking to each party separately. Go between the two rooms to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each position and to exchange offers. Continue the interchange until you’ve helped define an agreeable compromise.
  9. When you’re talking to each party separately during a break down in the discussions, help each party hear the views of the other and identify areas of common ground for a resolution. After independent caucuses, if possible, bring the parties back together to negotiate directly.
  10. Don’t stop each party from venting their frustrations, but try to keep them under control. If there’s rambling, gently pull the conversation back. Refocus on what needs to be achieved. Encourage them to remain open to persuasion.
  11. Even with a well thought-out approach, some disagreements turn ugly. Re-focus the dialogue on the future. Remind the parties that they can’t fight over something that’s already happened, but they can set a course for going forward.
  12. If the parties come to a resolution, draft the terms of a binding agreement and have both parties review it and sign it. Make sure the parties own the resolution, because they’re the ones who’ll live with the consequences.
  13. If the parties don’t reach an agreement, help them decide whether it’d be helpful to meet again later, use a different mediator, or try other ways to resolve the issues.

These books are most helpful in negotiations, either when you’re the mediator or one of the parties in conflict: Roger Fisher et al’s Getting to Yes (1991, 2011; my summary) and Kerry Patterson et al’s Crucial Conversations (2011.)

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