Further to my earlier post on How to deal with Criticism, here are the two disciplines that I personally strive to practice. Over the past week I have had the pleasure of discussing and sharing these, and it has made me more conscious of them, and the need to consciously apply them. If you mechanically practice these two disciplines, then you can appear like a highly emotionally intelligent, sensitive person. After some time of doing this, you start to get some realization, and the behaviour becomes more natural.
Inasmuch as I’ve been able to practice them, and increase in my practice of them, I’ve gotten better and better results. Of course we can always point out the instances where I haven’t followed them, but those failures also serve to illustrate the need and benefit of these disciplines. I apologise to those who read this and say: “Why couldn’t he have done that with me?” My realization and its application in my life is a work in progress.
Discipline #1: Always Listen, Never Defend
Scaled Composites is a company that recently won the long standing $10 million Ansari X-Prize by becoming the first privately owned civilian company to put a spacecraft outside the Earth’s atmosphere.
As part of their development in relation to safety they used a policy of “always question, never defend”. The idea was that through a rigorous process they would uncover any flaws in the design and implementation, and avoid the development of organizational “blindspots” based on assumptions or a silent conspiracy of avoiding the uncomfortable questions.
The first discipline is modelled on this idea, and it is called “Always Listen, Never Defend”.
Whenever anyone levels criticism against us, our first instinctive response is to defend. It’s natural. However, adopting a policy of “Always Listen, Never Defend” does a number of things:
- If we have misinterpreted a cry for help or a show of love as an attack, we risk launching a counter-attack (from our perspective) that is actually a pre-emptive strike (from the perspective of the other person).
- It stops the situation from escalating further by robbing the exchange of the energy it needs to do so.
- It allows us to develop a sense of what is behind the criticism - what the person is experiencing internally, and what we can do to help that.
- It validates the other person by allowing to feel that they have been listened to. Sometimes that’s all they need.
- It enables us to hear valuable feedback that we might otherwise miss. Sometimes people do give us valuable feedback, even if it’s not always “valid”.
I’d like to expand a little on that last point.
In the Vaisnava tradition we talk about anarthas. The word anartha means “unwanted things”. Artha means value or valuable, and an-, as in Greek, is a negating prefix. These anarthas are conditioned behaviours that arise as reactions to previous experiences, or samskaras, that contribute to self-sabotage and dysfunctional ways of relating to others.
In the Christian tradition these are thought of as demons or evil spirits. I think the beauty of the Christian perspective, leaving aside the medieval implications and complications, is that it embues these anarthas with consciousness.
A synthesis of these two views is to think of anarthas like viruses - on a shadowy border between the living and non-living world. These things infiltrate cells and hijack them, and fight a rear guard action against the body’s immune system.
In the same way anarthas invade our consciousness and hijack our decision-making process in what could be interpreted as a conscious attempt to prevent us expelling them.
What we find is that these anarthas remain as patterns in our consciousness because we identify with them so strongly. We think that the anartha is us. We actually resist giving up unproductive behaviours and patterns of thinking because we mistakenly think that we will be giving up our very selves.
Oftentimes when someone tries to help us to see something that we need to work on it’s the anartha influencing our response - the devil sitting on the shoulder whispering in our ear: “How dare he say that!” “Who does she think she is!”
By adopting a blanket policy of “always listen, never defend”, aside from robbing the situation of emotional energy that will fuel its escalation we also rob our anarthas of the energy they need to defend themselves. Then in the dark of the early morning, when all others are sleeping, we can reflect and pray for guidance on the wisdom of the observations and how we should best deal with them.
I’d like also to expand a little on the second to last point, about validating the person.
We do not want to win on points. The other day someone approached me to arbitrate in a ongoing situation of conflict involving them and another person in our community. They had a list of points and a final score which showed them coming out ahead.
I gently made the point that actually we do not want the case to go to court. If it ever does, we have lost. In a community, and in a volunteer organization, everything is based on personal relationships. If we win the engagement, and destroy the relationship, what have we won?
Sun Tzu said: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War 3.1-2
The real Art of Peace is not to sacrifice a single one of your warriors to defeat an enemy. Vanquish your foes by always keeping yourself in a safe and unassailable position; then no-one will suffer any losses. The Way of a Warrior, the Art of Politics, is to stop trouble before it starts. It consists in defeating our adversaries spiritually by making them realize the folly of their actions. The Way of a Warrior is to establish harmony.
- Morihei Ueshiba, The Art of Peace
In order to avoid things coming to this situation, of direct conflict, we often need to remove our consciousness to operate on a different level. However, we wouldn’t be in the situation of conflict in the first place if our consciousness were at a different level. Therefore I strive to adopt the second discipline which I have a found a useful tool for creating this situation.
Discipline #2: Zero Complaints
My first job in the tech industry was working on an assembly line putting 486 PCs together. One day a company sent in a couple of old 386s to be upgraded. I replaced the motherboards with new 486 ones and we shipped the machines back to the customer. The 386 motherboards, obsolete a few months after they were purchased sat unwanted on one of the benches in our work area.
A few days later, out one night with a few people from work, I played devil’s advocate with the head of the service department (I was in production). I told him about the motherboards, and said that I had taken them home as no-one wanted them. He argued that they were company property and I could not remove them. I countered that no-one knew they were there, or cared about them, or would do anything except throw them out if they did know they were there.
We argued back and forth in this way (this was back in my pandit arguing for arguing’s sake phase), and then I went home. The next morning an irate Megan appeared in the assembly area. Megan was our highly strung red headed twenty-something sales rep. She started yelling at me about the motherboards, demanding that I produce them. I pulled one out immediately, and was hunting around for the other one when my manager walked in on Megan throwing a hissy fit.
“What’s going on here?” he demanded. Megan started carrying on in a highly excited manner about the motherboards. My boss looked at me and said: “Where are the motherboards?” I showed him the one I had and said: “The other one is around here somewhere.”
He immediately sized up the situation and launched his counterattack. “How dare you come in here and talk to my people like this! If you have an issue then you bring it to me! Now get out.”
After this we stepped outside to have a chat. I explained to him how the situation had come about. He looked at me and said: “Listen, you’re a really intelligent guy, but you’re a loose cannon.”
The import of this is: “You’re good, but you’re not that good - you’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
Our value to an organization or a community decreases as we cause more disturbance to others in that organization or community. Regardless of our individual contribution, it is the combined operation and contribution of the overall system that is more important.
It doesn’t matter if you are “right”. You should be right and not get any complaints.
In South America a lot of people complained about me. They even complained to me: “You’re not pleasing the devotees”. Of course, one of the reasons I was sent there was because the BBT operation was not being carried out properly, something that was not pleasing to senior management outside South America. I managed to contribute to fixing up that situation, however I wasn’t expert enough to do it in a way that didn’t ruffle people’s feathers. I may have been “right”, but I wasn’t right in the right way.
Since I’ve come back I’ve adopted a policy of aiming for Zero Complaints.
We don’t want to defeat people, we want to defuse them. We want to disarm them. We want to seek out the path of harmony, the win-win situation in the language of Stephen Covey. That can only be achieved by undergoing a paradigm shift. By adopting the discipline of Zero Complaints it forces you to do the hard work involved in shifting paradigms.
Complaints are a form of criticism. Unable to modify your behaviour by influencing you personally, the customers try to exert force on you through an authority structure. By aiming for Zero Complaints you start to work at the level of disarming the situation before it can develop. It forces you to go deeper into the context of what is going on.
It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter how you feel - what matters is that the goal is to get Zero Complaints. Swallow your pride and do the needful. You’ll be surprised at what can happen when you adopt this discipline.
