Say it Better

Where Do You Want People to Focus Their Attention When With You?

Doggles. You’ve got a winning product name when people smile when they hear or read it, want to say it out loud – and repeat it – especially when the name is a spot-on reflection of the product benefit.  Amazing how one single thing can fix our mind on how we view a product, person or situation. 

And, as Victoria Moran points out, even one small change in what we wear can make a big change in what people notice. 

What to Do When a Friend Betrays You

Last month two friends broke trust. One offered to do something vital, didn't and didn’t tell me. Another shared private information about me with a stranger. I don’t know which felt worse. I do know it’s a sign to re-learn lessons. Remember when you felt betrayed?

"Trust is the glue that holds relationships together." ~ Price Pritchett

Recall that hot flush of recognition when you first realized that someone you knew would act one way and didn't?

What to do? How not to become bitter or wary? Funny how one betrayal is closely followed by another wrenching experience -- or so it seems. Even if one's life is on a fairly even keel, one trust-breaker situation makes the second one hit harder- if we let it.

"Sometimes you cannot believe what you see; you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too -- even when you're in the dark. Even when you are falling." ~ Morrie Schwartz, quoted in Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom.

My first reaction was to re-run the wrenching situation in my mind, over and over, digging a deeper rut in my memory. Dumb, right? Those scenes dominated my thoughts more than the recent, joyful times. 

Consequently I viewed others through a cautious, constricted-heart lens. That begets a self-fulfilling prophecy. People feel put off.

"No idea will work if people don't trust your intentions toward them." ~ Marcus Buckingham, Now, Discover Your Strengths

We’ve all faced mind-grabbing breaks of trust, and will again. Conversely, we have betrayed another's trust and dodged rather than rectified the situation.

"You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don't trust enough." ~ Frank H. Crane

For more than a decade, I've studied, taught, and written about focusing attention on the positive parts of every interaction. Yet, like breathing, it isn't a one-time practice.

"Character is what you really are. Reputation is what people say you are. A person of character is trustworthy. The other kind looks for an easy way out." ~ John Wooden

Getting back to equilibrium means letting go of a better past. Every negative action comes from the root feeling of fear.

 “Trust is the heartbeat of every significant relationship"  ~ Cynthia L. Wall and Sue Patton Thoel

 That does not mean we have to stand in the street and let the same car hit us again. 

The next time you lose trust, try taking these steps forward towards equanimity for yourself:

1. Let the full emotional effect of the betrayal sink in and don’t re-run the scene more than three times.

2. Step into the other person’s shoes to see the interaction their way. Is this a pattern in his behavior towards you or is it an anomaly?

3. Look to the part of that person's potentially positive intent, especially when he appeared to have none in that situation. You will see the whole picture more clearly and calmly.

4. Praise the part of that person’s behavior you want to reinforce and to flourish. (Ironically, this is one of your most self-protective tools in such moments.)

5.  Ask her for a time to talk. Then, in factual, non-blaming language, describe the specific behavior that bothered you. Next describe your feelings. Then wait for a response. 

6. Listen closely and with an open heart and mind to the answer.  If your picture of her actions was accurate, and if she is solely defensive –without offering a change in behavior, then you have learned a lot.

7. If someone breaks trust with you twice it is highly likely there’ll be a third time so why place yourself in that position? 

My friend, Paul Geffner says we gather many friends and acquaintances over our lifetime. The key to living well with them is to recognize the right distance in which to hold them.  Those you enjoy and trust you bring closer. 

Asking someone to change behavior after you have described its ill effects on you, will seldom lead to positive change. More likely it will engender defensiveness and avoidance.  Unfortunately, the relative power in the situation (who needs whom the most) will determine how you two communicate in the future. But it doesn’t have to determine the safe distance you choose to have with that person.

8. Choose your distance. You always have three choices in any situation: Change how you act towards that person, accept her behavior or leave (avoid future contact.)

"No idea will work if people don't trust your intentions toward them." ~ Marcus Buckingham, Now, Discover Your Strengths

The lesson: Sooner, rather than later, take these steps. Choose what you can do positively for yourself rather than against another. The more quickly you'll climb out of that negative "re-run" rut of thoughts and toward the positive part of that person, the more likely you’ll return to an even keel – and the more likely you’ll be able to preserve a properly distanced relationship. 

Childhood Photos Are Predictors of Success in Marriage

Those who usually frowned in photos when they were children and teenagers are five times more likely to get divorced later in life than those who smiled in their photos.  The more intensely you smiled in childhood photos, the less likely that you’ll divorce later in life. (I’ll bet parents are going to examine their kids’ photos, reading this.)

That’s what psychology professor Matt Hertenstein concluded from his study.  Wonder what it means that he looks faintly uncomfortable as an adult in this photo.

Yet Matt’s team also concludes that this finding does not necessarily support the notion that happiness is contagious.

Also smiling for photos does not necessarily cause a good marriage, yet bright smiling and an enduring marriage are somehow connected.

Looking back at my childhood photos I often had a mild smile and that deer in headlights look.  Without seeing the photos Matt conjectured that might rate me a 5 out of 10.  In other words smack dab in the middle of the “smile intensity scale.” And I am divorced.  

If You Want Your Life to Matter…

70 years ago tomorrow contralto Marian Anderson stood before 75,000 people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She sang outdoors, invited by Eleanor Roosevelt after The Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her appear at Constitution Hall. Roosevelt resigned from the DAR.

“In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free,”  said Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, when introducing Anderson notes Alex Ross in The New Yorker.

“Genius, like justice, is blind. . . . Genius draws no color line,” said Ickes.

Years later, Martin Luther King, reinforced his call for change when he stood in the same place delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech, as did our president this year when he was sworn into office.

Tomorrow, mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves leads a concert at the Lincoln Memorial in tribute to Anderson on the seventieth anniversary of that Easter Sunday concert.

From Ross’s thoughtful article, I pulled these vignettes. They remind myself of the power of returning words and acts of anger or hate, not with bitterness but with grace:

• When the Nassau Inn, in Princeton, New Jersey, refused to give Anderson a room, she spent the night at the home of Albert Einstein.

• Although she refused to sing in halls that employed “horizontal segregation”—that is, with whites in the orchestra and blacks in the galleries—for many years she did accept vertical segregation, with whites on one side of the aisle and blacks on the other.

Anderson usually took her meals in her hotel room, in order not to cause complications in restaurants. “I always bear in mind that my mission is to leave behind me the kind of impression that will make it easier for those who follow,” she explained in her memoir.

• In Birmingham, Alabama, during the Second World War, she had to stand outside a train-station waiting room while her accompanist, the German pianist Franz Rupp, went to fetch a sandwich for her. Sitting inside was a group of German prisoners of war.

How to Change Hearts and Minds: Lessons Learned from Marion’s Life Story

When you disagree with someone’s actions or words or hope to persuade others to believe and act differently:

1. Don’t just speak up but also take significant public action that reinforces your stand.  Roosevelt resigned from the DAR.  

2. If you or someone else is unfairly denied an opportunity, find a way to make a greater opportunity available. When Roosevelt invited Anderson to sing outdoors she created a very public, world stage upon which Anderson could demonstrate her talents.

3. Turn others’ personal insults or injustices into public lessons from which a larger group can learn.

4. You lift us up to better behavior when you don’t just speak against a wrong but also speak for a greater right. Describe a specific way we can act, not just what we did wrong. As Adlai Stephenson once said, “When you throw mud you get dirty.”

5. To make it easier for people to see the situation your way or to agree, invoke the Power of Previous Precedent. Refer to similar earlier situations or decisions so that you are not asking people to do something new or different. You make your suggested action the obvious choice.

How you want to be viewed or what you are asking others to do is “merely” a continuation of what they or others have already done before or what has happened in the past.  When King and then Obama chose the Lincoln Memorial, they chose that place - not just a U.S. stage but a world stage, open to all people, calling for a new era, just as Anderson did 70 years ago tomorrow.

6. Most of all, whether you are poor or rich, famous or unknown, you have the priceless power of describing a situation so vividly that others instinctively remember and repeat your description. With just words your belief can catch fire and spread, becoming the most familiar view of that situation and eventually sometimes, the assumed truth. Ickes labeling of Anderson’s talents are so vivid they continue to be cited years later.

Whoever most vividly describes a situation most influences how others see it, then feel, think and talk about it and act on it.

Quotes for Enjoying a Richer, More Meaningful Life

Actor, Tommy Lee Jones paraphrased someone whose name he could not recall, in an National Public Radio interview, saying he, “sometimes felt like a Buddhist soul in a Calvinist World,” then when asked for his definition of faith, said, “Faith is what you know to be true, whether you believe it or not.”

"Ideas are a capital that bears interest only in the hands of talent."

~ Antoine de Rivarol

“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”

~ Victor Hugo

"Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food."

~ William Hazlitt

“A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it."

~  Marcel Proust

“My problem is I say what I'm thinking before I think what I'm saying.”

~ Dr. Laurence J. Peter

 

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

~ William Butler Yeats

 

“Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.”

~ Chinese Proverb

 

“When asked how she coped with all the burdens she had to carry, Lena Horne, said, "It's not the load that breaks you down; it's the way you carry it."

 

“Write injuries in sand, kindnesses in marble.”

~ French proverb

 

“Pain is a perfect compass, if I can take the time to watch where its needle aims.”

~ Jim Burklo

 

“I wanted a perfect ending... Now, I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. “

~ Gilda Radner 

 

"Grief shared is half grief. Joy shared is double joy."

~ Honduran Proverb

 

“Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?” 

~ Marcel Marceau

 

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, I was wrong.”

~ Sydney J. Harris

 

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in long shot.”

~ Charlie Chaplin

 

“In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back.” 

~ Charlie Brown

 

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge, that myth is more potent than history, that dreams are more powerful than facts, that hope triumphs experience, that laughter is the only cure for grief.”

~  Robert Fulghum

 

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous”

~    Ingrid

 

“Love: When the heart loses its mind.”

~ anonymous