Little Boy and His Dog

Little Boy and His Dog
Not really a strategy for handling conflict. But if you're ever upset, watch this to calm down and bring back your smile.

I'm Right, You're Wrong, Case Closed

My wife and I were arguing about who works harder and is busier. What began as a disagreement about who should walk the dog became a general “discussion” of who did more.

I had just finished writing an article about bullying and I suddenly realized that I was bullying my wife. I didn’t think of myself as a bully. I was simply being “assertive.” Then I realized how right I had to be in the argument and how similar I was to the bullies I was writing about.

I never thought of myself as a bully. I had always distanced myself by feeling superior to the school yard bullies I read about or the abusive bosses colleagues told me about or the stories I had heard from the battered wives at a woman’s shelter I had visited.

Coincidentally, on the same day, I heard an interview with Ken Ballen, the author of a book with the attention getting title, “Terrorists In Love.” The subtitle is “The Real Lives Of Islamic Radicals.” Ballen is a former Federal prosecutor, who spent five years trying to figure out what motivates Islamic extremists.

Ballen was asked whether, after spending so much time with these extremists, there was ever a point where their ideas made sense.

He responded that, within their belief system, what they are doing makes sense to them. He added, “They don’t see themselves as evil at all. They see themselves as saintly, not evil and they feel like they’re doing the right thing.”

Ballen’s comment impacted me personally.

I don’t think of myself as saintly (well, maybe I do) and I certainly don’t think of myself as evil (at least to myself). But for sure, when I have a conflict, I just know that I’m right.

Does this remind you of some of the “terrorists” in your life? Someone who is obstinate, opinionated, inflexible, insensitive and apparently determined to remain that way because they are in the right, “saintly, not evil.”

Could this be you, me and everyone else we know?

Just when I think I can blame someone else for not seeing what’s right, true and just, along comes someone like Ballen to remind me that, to the “bullies” in my life, I’m the bully. They must look at me and wonder, “How can he be so wrong?”

Ballen maintains that a completely militaristic response to ideas and beliefs will not defeat them. He asserts that they’ll simply continue to push harder for those ideas and beliefs.

Again, this fits with my experience. The harder I try to convince my wife (or anyone) that I’m right, the more resistant she becomes. No one wants to be a push over.

Tim Flannery, the author of “Here On Earth“ noted that, “We have trod the face of the Moon, touched the nethermost pit of the sea, and can link minds instantaneously across vast distances. But for all that, it’s what we believe that will determines our fate.”

So I suggest that an examination of our beliefs is in order. In a conflict, I guarantee that the root of the conflict is a belief that you’re right and the other person is wrong.

If you have this belief, consider the possibility that you’re wrong about that.

Of course, I may be wrong about that as well. To believe otherwise is to be a bully. 

Nothing Changes Until We Do

“The fly in your eye is keeping you from seeing the fly in your eye”

         from Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Think of a change you want to make in your life. Now consider five action steps to make that change.

See. I knew you didn’t need any advice. Neither do most people.

For example, if you don’t know how to lose weight, stop smoking, make more money and/or have more intimate relationships, you certainly know where to go to get the information (just for fun, I Googled “make more money” and got 304 million potential searches).

Yes, it’s often difficult to know what advice to believe, but the real difficulty arises in that word “believe.”

Breakthroughs into new ways of acting occur in one of two ways: Either we have to see what we haven’t seen before or we have to stop seeing what we think is there. Doing either of those requires taking a hard look at what we believe to be true.

A friend told me the other day of a Nobel prize winning physicist who, when asked why he won the prize when so many others were working towards the same breakthrough responded, “They believed their assumptions.” In other words, they wouldn’t stop seeing what they thought was there.

The classic example that we’re all familiar with occurred when it was observed that the earth revolved around the sun. This flew in the face of the previous observation that the sun revolved around the earth. The earth, of course, had always revolved around the sun. This fact wasn’t immediately accepted because people had spent centuries believing the opposite. In other words, they were seeing what wasn’t there and had a difficult time seeing otherwise.

The observation of gravity by Isaac Newton is another example. Gravity obviously existed before Newton “discovered” it. But it took awhile to see what had always been there.

I use the word “observation” rather than “discovery” because the history of human progress is nothing more than finally seeing what has always been there.

This has profound ramifications for why we don’t change when we say we want to. No matter how many times I may coach someone that there is nothing to fear when delivering a presentation, it makes no difference if the person believes there’s plenty to fear. In other words, they continue to be fearful because they see something that isn’t there or don’t see something that is.

I know that resolving conflict is easy: Simply give up being right and making others wrong. Refusing to do so is the source of all wars, violence and unhappy relationships.

But knowing this makes no difference when we are sure that we’re right and the other person is wrong. In other words, when we are committed to seeing what isn’t there.

There are many people afraid to call someone and ask for a date, a job, a sale, etc. That fear is a product of seeing something that isn’t there or not seeing something that is.

The other day, I asked a friend who is in the pool remodeling business why he was so successful. He said he makes dozens of cold calls per day. I asked if he was afraid to do so. “Why should I be?” he said. “I’m not getting any business from them now. The worst that can happen is that they’ll say no and I still won’t have any business from them.’

My friend was seeing what was there, not what wasn’t.

Consider the possibility that if you’re not getting what you want it’s because some blind spot is keeping you from seeing the obvious. This is why we all need people in our lives who will tell us the truth about reality. Or at least a different version of the truth than the one we are believing.

Then the really hard part occurs: We have to give up our belief so that we can see what’s always been there. If we don’t do that, we are doomed to keep repeating the same behavior over and over and over again, looking for something that isn’t there or believing that something is there that isn’t.

Conflict Resolution Training: Willful Blindness and Bullying

I write and speak about conflict resolution and I’m sometimes asked about handling bullying behavior. Bullying, of course, has been a major topic of conversation for quite some time and the recent crimes at Penn State represent a particularly tragic example of the willful blindness that allows bullying behavior to continue.

Consider the case of Steve Raucci (pronounced “Rossi”).

Raucci was head of maintenance for the Schenectady, New York public schools, a job he held for 23 years right up until the time he was arrested and ultimately convicted of arson, planting bombs and vandalizing the homes of people that he and his friends had problems with. In June of 2010, Raucci was convicted and is currently serving a sentence of 23 years to life.

With the exception of the arson, bombings and vandalizing Raucci was considered a model boss (irony!), beloved by the Schenectady school Board. After all, unlike the teacher’s union, some parents and, occasionally, the voters, the Board never had to deal with complaints from anyone on the maintenance staff. For 23 years.

There had been rumors and complaints of Raucci’s bullying of his staff. But these were discounted as merely the ramblings of disgruntled employees who, in any case, had been transferred to other school districts. After all, the much trusted Steve Raucci had transferred them and certainly the beloved Raucci had good reasons for doing so. Obviously, the disgruntled employees simply refused to take responsibility for their poor performance.

Willful blindness occurs in families as well. I remember reading about a man whose daughter had been expelled from high school for bullying. Rather than support the school, the father, an attorney, sued the school district. Bullying was, evidently, an inherited trait in that family.

My wife, Carol, has many stories of the “beloved” football coach at the high school where she taught before I knew her who made it a practice to put his hands on the body of any female teacher who wasn’t fast enough to run away. When Carol complained to the Principal, he asked what she had done to provoke the coach.

Plainly put, bullying exists because those who run organizations (and families) tolerate it. They tolerate it because the bully is “too important” to be let go or the bully “makes my problems go away” (as one marketing executive told me) or because those who complain are often labeled “whiners” and ignored (or sued in the case of the attorney and his daughter).

An organization (or family) takes its cue from those in authority as to what is permitted. The “I didn’t know” defense cuts it for only so long. As with Steve Raucchi (and Penn State), someone will complain, an incident will be observed, a rumor will emerge.

That’s why it’s important to listen to all complaints without dismissing them. Every complaint contains the seed of an unmet need. The complaining individual always has a reason for doing so and it’s important to listen to those reasons to determine if action is called for. Yes, some people complain just to complain. Smoke doesn’t always lead to fire, but there is certainly no fire without smoke.

Like so much else in life, blindness to bullying occurs willfully. We choose to be blind. Or we choose to take action. We have that choice and, beyond that, the responsibility.

If you’d like to hear the Steve Raucci story, you can do so at  
 http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/419/petty-tyrant