These Difficult Times

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January 30, 2007

Pessimists & Optimists

The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; the optimist, the opportunity in every difficulty.

— L.P. Jacks

Posted by Rob at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2007

Working With You Is Killing Me: A Book Review

Introduction

We suffer from a variety of difficulties in life today, but the trickiest difficulty is also the simplest — other people. It seems the clever technology we’ve invented over the past ten-thousand years doesn’t stop other people from irritating us, particularly those who you sit next to in your office for forty hours a week. Aside from the health of you and your family, what factor of daily life could possibly be as important as the people surrounding you at work, many of whom drive you insane? Not one can supercede this paramount factor. At work, it’s crucial you collaborate with other people successfully, yet we possess little technology directly aiding us in doing so psychologically.

About a year ago, I came across a new development in this issue — a book called Working With You is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself From Emotional Traps At Work (or WWYIKM) which you can learn more about here.

Its authors, business strategist Kathi Elster and psychologist Katherine Crowley, wrote it to present many of the personal dynamics which cause you to go crazy. They identify several different profile types of crazy-makers commonly found in our workplaces, and this book could easily have been named Handling Difficult People. WWYIKM covers a timeless topic and was helpful enough for me to share with you now my thoughts on it.

What This Book Accomplishes: It Presents a New and Useful Metaphor

WWYIKM identifies a social dynamic everyone feels at one time or another: being so upset, furious, and enraged you can’t even think. To identify this wretched situation and its various manifestations, Elster and Crowley present a metaphor of extreme utility:

• being hooked

The metaphor of “being hooked” forms the meat of the book. This is the engine around which they build a complex and thorough coping system. The techniques and tools presented by the authors spring forth in bold relief after identifying this phenomena.

Being Hooked

Far and away the most important idea proposed within WWYIKM is the metaphor of “the hook.” This metaphor contains the image of another person actually hooking you with a big fishing hook and dragging you around. When you become “hooked” by someone, it means you’ve dropped your guard and become unhinged. This image tells you you’ve lost control of yourself.

The mere mention of this phenomena of hooking is helpful. It articulates this universal sensation — somebody driving you nuts — in a language which poetically rings true. I am an aficionado of metaphors, and from this nice one stems my effusive admiration for their work. To me, Elster and Crowley’s acts of inventing and presenting this new and powerful metaphor is a huge achievement. Once the metaphor for hooking is available, we can articulate ways to unhook. How do you unhook yourself? WWYIKM presents details of four steps for this:

1. Unhook physically
2. Unhook mentally
3. Unhook verbally
4. Unhook with a business tool

Elster and Crowley are very thorough in explaining the different methods of unhooking from difficult situations. But when situations get really bad and you emotionally go beyond the point where the basic unhooking techniques function, you’ve entered another worse stage of distress — the ledge.

The Ledge

When you repeatedly become hooked by the various hookers in your workplace, you may enter a deeper state of distress which Elster and Crowley call “the Ledge.” (Note: this metaphor isn’t discussed in WWYIKM. I attended a lively book reading they did at a nearby Barnes & Noble during which they prominently mentioned “the ledge” metaphor. This, too, fascinates me.)

The metaphor contains the image where you actually stand on the window ledge of a high building or the ledge of a cliff, ready to commit suicide. What an incredible image! Here’s how it works: An event triggers you to become furious and upset so you cease to function properly and go “on the ledge.” This ledge identifies a state of deep emotional distress where, metaphorically speaking, you become suicidal. Then if you can defuse the difficulty, you may talk yourself “off the ledge” or bring yourself “down from the ledge,” where you return to normal, back to your state of functioning properly.

WWYIKM lays down a well-rounded system for how to prevent being hooked in the first place, what actions you can take when you get hooked, and how to talk yourself off the ledge.

WWYIKM Covers a Broad Area

Elster and Crowley’s book covers an incredible expanse of territory. It highlights the importance of boundaries. It discusses how we define them and how to use them as protection at work. Also discussed are critical descriptions of the various difficult types of people, or archetypes. In this area, Elster and Crowley are very thorough and present a complete round-up of the different difficult characters you’ll encounter on your travels.

Of particular importance in WWYIKM are the interpersonal zones of difficulty. When dealing with difficult people, you’ll undoubtedly encounter a complex fogbank of issues. To clarify and organize these issues, WWYIKM identifies five primary zones:

1. You. These are your personal issues within you. This zone applies to how you assume roles at work and how these roles cast you into positions which cause you difficulty by hooking you.
2. Your Peers. These are issues within your peers which affect you. This zone applies to how others assume roles at work and how your co-workers cast themselves into positions and create difficulties for you. One interesting aspect of this zone is how the power dynamics between you and your peer is symmetrical.
3. Your Boss. This zone applies to the relationship between you and your boss and how its power dynamic is often of striking asymmetry. You could be fired on the spot! Your boss can hook you by assuming a role which causes you an incredible amount of difficulty. This role may tap into your personal issues and feed off the role you assume while at work.
4. Your Employees. This zone applies to the people who work for you and how you relate to them. They are not your peers, they are in positions of power under you, and for whom you play an important and dominant role in their daily lives.
5. Your Company. This zone applies to the overall culture of the business you work in.

Below is a graphic I created to conceptualize the minefield of difficulties which can arise around you. Quite a minefield, these ubiquitous perils, mmm?

The Five Zones of Interpersonal Difficulties
In the Business World

WWYIKM Offers a Coherent Coping System of Extreme Utility

WWIKYM builds upon the interpersonal zones and creates several fascinating systems:

• A set of archetypes for each zone: WWYIKM identifies and explains the details about each archetype.
• A system for how to cope with various difficult archetype at each zone: You might’ve inadvertently assumed one of the archetypes at work, and the authors present a variety of ways how you can defuse the archetypically difficult co-workers.
• A procedure with which to deal with each difficult archetype: (a) Detect, (b) Detach, (c) Depersonalize, (d) Deal.

In short, WWYIKM delivers a complete framework for dealing gracefully with difficult people.

Other Goodies

This book presents several other useful tools. My favorites are two questionnaires presented at the end of the book: the Personal Inventory and Workplace Appraisal questionnaires. These allow you to assess the culture of the company you work for, and they blew my mind. After looking at them closely, they make a lot of sense and are so obvious I’m amazed no one else thought of it before. Another huge achievement.

In Conclusion

When I see them, I look very carefully at books which deal so directly with difficulties, as WWYIKM does. The topic of difficulty is highly competitive and many authors and thinkers have entered the fray, and I have read many books on it. That said, I’d also like to tell you how special this book is.

WWYIK is a work of thought without flaw — a very rare diamond — and I was immediately fascinated with it. I tracked its sales performance on Amazon’s Sales Rank and watched it sell briskly from the very start, and at one point early on, it enjoyed a high rank in Amazon’s business bestsellers section: the mid-fifties — an astonishing performance. Today, depending upon what day of the week you look, WWYIKM sits between the comfortable mid ten-thousands all the way down to the two-hundred thousands. Why it seems to have fallen out of favor remains to me inexplicable.

But allow me to change gears. Think about our technological culture for a moment, and note the myriad of handy doohickeys we use. Sure, we enjoy a smorgasbord of telecommunication technology, but:

• Do we possess technology that keeps us calm ourselves in the face of difficult people? Nope.
• Does telecommunication technology allow new avenues for us unhook or bring us off the ledge? Well, yeah, it does — the telephone, fax, email, VoIP, text messages, and video-conferencing can potentially all be good unhooking tools. But unless you know you actually need to unhook, how could these tools help protect you and what good can they do? Not much.
• I say we suffer from a distinct lack of tools for dealing with difficult people. Does our telecommunication technology resolve this deficiency? Not specifically, no. Does technology complicate it? Yes. It certainly does make dealing with difficult people more complex. The issue at hand here is: these technologies were not explicitly designed to help you unhook, although you can use them for this. I believe technology doesn’t aid us in dealing with difficult people. Generally, it just gets in the way. You have to do it not digitally but analogly.

There is a gaping void in technology for helping us interact with troublemakers; We lack tools to handle difficult people. This is why WWYIKM becomes so important. Elster and Crowley take us a huge step forward by tackling what technology ignores. Their book is as close as I’ve ever seen to a manual on how to handle difficult people. And this book presents a coherent coping system of extreme utility.

BONUS ROUND

A few extra questions occurred to me which I pose to you for intellectual stimulation:

• Is it possible to apply the metaphors of being hooked and Elster and Crowley’s techniques toward entities larger than corporations, i.e. on a cultural level?
• Would they work on specific ethnicities?
• Would they work at the level of nations?
• How would a center for international-affairs benefit from these ideas?

Something to think about anyway.

Posted by Rob at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2007

Defusing Difficult Customers: The Bomb Squad Techniques

It gives me great pleasure to announce to you my inclusion of, to me, a very important document — Defusing Difficult Customers: The Bomb Squad Techniques, which you may enjoy at your leisure here. Please note that I encourage you to print out this document, to email it around to people who might need it, and to add any suggestions you think prudent. We all experience extreme difficulty when it comes to other people, and any tool for mitigating the anxiety and suffering they bring is beneficial, to put it lightly.

Posted by Rob at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2007

How To Hold A Grudge

What does it take to successfully hold a grudge for long periods of time?

I have held a few long-term grudges before, and this question interested me, so I decided to give it some thought. What I came up with is an easy system for framing these quirky fixations that afflict us, sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot. I begin with a rundown of the cast of characters in a grudge situation; then I flesh out the general, all-purpose components of generic grudges; and finally I wind down with some ways you can put your old grudges to bed and, better yet, to good use.

The Cast Members

• The PERPETRATOR. He who causes the grudge.
• The CRIME. The act by the Perpetrator who induces the grudge. The crime may range in severity from petty crime (slights, insults, and misdemeanors) all the way up to larger crime (felonies and man-slaughter). This crime must remain be unpunished for any grudge to form, and it must cause a sense of injustice in the Victim.
• The VICTIM. He who carries the grudge.
• The GRUDGE. The Victim’s reaction to the crime. The grudge appears metaphorically similar to “emotional baggage.” These emotional bags may appear to other people as “personal issues.”

What Ingredients Are Required, Within Victims, for a Grudge to Occur?

In grudge situations, all Victims share the same general ingredients, or characteristics. A Victim must have several key attributes for a grudge to form and be retained over time. The Victim must:

• Have a very good memory of the crime.
• Have a heightened sense of indignation.
• Be energetic.
• Accommodate his grudge within his identity and actively defend it from forces of grudge-erosion.

1. The Victim must have a very good memory of the crime.
Having a good memory of the crime is, bar none, the most important attribute. People lucky enough to possess good memories are ironically the most predisposed to forming grudges.

Along with possessing a good memory of the crime, the Victim must also regularly recall it and its Perpetrator. He must recall them by three methods: by intentionally reminding himself of the crime; by placing triggers that regularly remind him of the crime; or by being around objects or events that trigger memory of the crime.

If a person is forgetful, he is not likely become a Victim. Grudges simply don’t function without the Victim vividly recalling the crime. If the Victim’s recall of the crime becomes infrequent or vague, his grasp upon the grudge weakens, and the grudge withers away. Without visualizing the crime, the Victim forgets why he carried it in the first place. He loosens his grip upon the grudge; he forgets the crime, forgives the Perpetrator, and the grudge drops away. However, possessing a good memory of the crime and recalling frequently isn’t enough…

2. The Victim must have a heightened sense of indignation.
He must be enraged by injustice. This predisposes the Victim to hold grudges. Indignation is critical to the phenomena of grudges: the stronger the indignation, the longer the grudge lasts.

A dynamic exists between a Victim’s indignation and his identity. They are umbilically joined together. So if a crime affects a potential Victim’s identity, a grudge forms and he officially becomes a Victim. The grudge feasts upon the connection between identity and indignation, and it garners lasting strength against indignation by perpetually threatening the Victim’s identity. Whenever this connection is present, it makes it unlikely the indignant person will ever be grudge-free.

Easy-going or passive people never carry grudge or turn into Victims. People with no indignation don’t respond to the Perpetrator’s crime. A grudge is unlikely to form when a crime fails to threaten the Victim’s identity.

A Perpetrator who is well-acquainted with his Victim’s personality may be able to capitalize on this identity-indignation connection and leverage it into a long-lasting grudge. A sophisticated trouble-maker knows what crime will successfully assault his Victim’s identity, and he executes this crime upon his Victim and exacts heavy damage by creating a custom-tailored grudge with a harmful, lasting effect.

In other words, if the Perpetrator knows his Victim has a heightened sense of indignation, he may be able to “really stick it” to this Victim and create a memorable crime of long-term residual power and fuel what may potentially become in the Victim an ancient grudge.

3. The Victim must be energetic.
The sheer mental exertion needed to maintain a grudge requires sustained endurance. The bigger the crime committed by the Perpetrator, the more energy required from the Victim to carry the grudge. The Victim must be energetic enough to “carry” the emotional burden of his grudge. Some people simply don’t have the mental energy to carry grudges long distances through time. Without this energy, the Victim must “let go” of the grudge, which means he loses grip upon his grudge.

A strange dynamic occurs between the severity of the crime and the energy a Victim exerts in maintaining the grudge. Logically, you might think a little grudge would be easy to carry for long periods of time and a big grudges would be harder and more prone to be dropped early on. But this is not the case. The opposite occurs. A Victim easily drops a little grudge, but he fights tooth-and-nail to maintain a serious one. The greater the crime committed, the more the Victim spends energy in defending the grudge and in feeding it.

4. The Victim must accommodate his grudge within his identity and actively defend it from forces of grudge-erosion.
This requires all three core components: a vivid memory, a heightened sense of indignation, and a storehouse of energy. When any of these factors are absent, no lasting grudge forms because the Victim automatically disallows the grudge from entering into his identity.

Our Metaphors For Grudges

We perceive grudges as burdens. This is indicated by our terms “to carry” and “to hold” a grudge, implying this type of emotional material has mass or weight. This is also indicated by our term “to let go” of grudges. The meaning behind the “weight” of grudges is, the heavier it feels, the harder it is to hold onto.

The act of holding a grudge has a distinct quality of burdening, so that carrying a grudge, maintaining it over long periods does not occur automatically. Victims must intentionally maintained their grudges by refueling their fully-functioning and optimized identity-indignation connection. Otherwise, the grudge loses its strength and the grudge-carrier must “let go” of the grudge, which amounts essentially to giving to the Perpetrator full forgiveness for his crime and “letting him get away with it.” At this point, the Victim “gets over it,” meaning the crime and its ensuing grudge transform into an obstacle he has surmounted and he drops the emotional baggage.

Dropping A Grudge

Why Drop A Grudge?

The main reason to drop a grudge is simply to unburden oneself. Grudges can be feel emotionally very dense, and relieving oneself of a grudge can be a cathartic and spiritually uplifting act. We have many words to describe this state of relief, such as buoyant, upbeat, uplifted, better, lightened.

How To Drop A Grudge

In order to successfully drop the grudge, the Victim must…

• Develop the ability to detach from his vivid memories and stop fixating on the crime
• Decouple his sense of indignation from his identity
• Starve the grudge by limiting the energy he expends on it
• Expel the grudge from his identity and allow it to wither away

These steps force the Victim to re-define himself so the grudge is not built-into his identity; this kills the grudge and unburdens the Victim.

The Use Of A Grudge, The Use Of A Pearl

A grudge is often a burden from which we should relieve ourselves, and unburdening yourself of all your grudges is a very good habit. But before you unburden yourself, understand that a grudge can be very useful. It can provide a powerful incentive to work and accomplish goals. Sometimes the process of coping gracefully with a grudge bears incredible fruit.

How Oysters Transform Their Irritants Into Pearls

When talking about profiting from a grudge, we must discuss the oyster for a moment. Oysters evolved an ability to transform their irritants into pearls, known as pearlization. An oyster reacts to an irritant, generally a parasite it cannot purge, by encasing the intruder in a protective material called mother-of-pearl, which incarcerates the parasite and renders it inert, and thereby forms a pearl. A pearl is an imprisoned parasite, and the process of pearlization is the oyster’s coping tool. This is how the oyster copes with irritants. An oyster cannot produce a pearl unless it suffers an irritant, an affliction.

What the irritant is to the oyster, grudges are to human beings. Grudges can initiate the beginning of something beautiful. I mentioned above how to expel a grudge, but the question is: How does a human being pearlize a grudge?

How to Pearlize a Grudge

Grudges are powerful instructors. They are opportunities for a Victim to learn about himself, and it’s important a Victim extracts the lesson contained in a grudge before he purges it from his identity and gets over it. A Victim ought not to waste a painfully juicy grudge by ignoring it, suppressing it, or purging it too early. He needs to relish the grudge for a while, in order to pearlize it. Through this process, a grudge can transform into a difficulty not to be denigrated but celebrated.

So how does a Victim alter his reaction toward his grudge in a healthy direction so that he, like the Oyster, imprisons his irritant and transforms it into a pearl? In order to successfully pearlize a grudge, the Victim must match the oyster. He must…

• Imprison the memory of the crime by emotionally detaching from it, retaining it, and not fixating on it.
• Reverse his sense of indignation by becoming grateful to the Perpetrator for providing the crime and by learning the lesson it brings. This is extremely hard to do because this so deeply threatens the Victim’s identity.
• Reflect on the grudge and be vigilant about applying the lessons it carries. The quicker he applies these lessons, the quicker he pearlizes his grudge into a pearl.
• Wear his pearl proudly as a badge of strength and grace.

IN CONCLUSION, think of difficulties in life as opportunities for meaning and growth. I hope this system gives you a useful set of tools to examine your grudges, enables you to think in a versatile way about the many difficulties that afflict you, and helps you in how you deal with troublesome people.

Posted by Rob at 12:50 AM | Comments (1)

January 13, 2007

Confusing

If you're not confused, you're not alive.

Posted by Rob at 08:46 AM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2007

Enjoying Difficult People

Do you feel it is possible to enjoy difficult people?

I wondered about it when my wife told me about a lecture/workshop named exactly this — “Enjoying Difficult People” — to be taught by Dian Killian PhD from Center for Nonviolent Communcation at the 92nd St Y. Naturally, the topic for this class seemed very interesting to me.

Well, I checked it out and found that it was interesting. The length of the class was only two hours, and consequently Dr. Killian could only touch upon the innermost core ideas of her topic, which in general were about non-violent communication, but she had several specific techniques for every-day communication that she wanted to impart upon us.

I would summarize these techniques as this: When you find yourself with a difficult person, it is possible for you to enjoy your experience, however you must be curious about several things — about yourself, this person, and how you react to the difficult situation.

She said you must do three things:

1. Identify the sensation that indicates you are, in fact, in the presence of a difficult person. What is actually happening? What, for example, would be the facts and actions that a hand-held video camcorder would record in this situation? I noted that possessing the ability to think in terms of these sensations would require a great deal presence and clarity from you; furthermore, I would uncategorically characterize such a mental attribute as being not at all common to possess.
2. Identify your feelings about this sensation. In other words: How do you respond to these sensations while interacting with a difficult person?
3. Identify your needs, or, identify what you seek within this situation. The instructor stressed that you must: (a) Connect with this difficult person, even if you don’t want to, by acknowledging their experience of their predicament and (b) Request that they articulate precisely what they wish to achieve, in the form of a “concret, positive and doable request.”

These three acts of identification will force you to reframe your experience of difficult people, to the point where it is possible for you to actually enjoy them while you learn about yourself.

Two final points then come to the fore. First is: Every difficult person is actually a disguised opportunity to learn about yourself. The second corresponding issue then springs forth from the first: You must be willing to learn about yourself and enjoy difficult people for the lessons they bring you. Are you? I think, for most people, this is the greater difficulty. It is the clincher.

I would add that Dr. Killian’s interesting system pre-requires that you not be solely goal-oriented in your interaction with difficult people. Her system implies that you also must be journey-oriented. Goal-orientation is a mindset whose central motive springs out of the preoccupation to “get things done,” which is generally a good mindset to occupy but which makes difficult people impossible to actually enjoy. When you alter your mindset into include journey-oriented tendencies, you alleviate your instinct to ruthlessly plow through people and leap over potentially meaningful obstacles, and you gain the possibility to actually enjoy difficult people and the lessons they offer you.

Posted by Rob at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2007

My Weight Throughout 2006

First thing in the morning, a few times each week, I weigh myself on a scale. Every time I do this, I write it down on a small calendar I keep in the bathroom. It’s a good habit, I think, and have done this for several years, and this morning I weighted 175 pounds, which isn't bad for a thirty-five-year-old in this country.

The more I thought about my weight for the past twelve months, the more I was curious about how much it had actually fluctuated. So I created a graph of it, which I include below.

When you look at this graph, you can also see how much my weight fluctuated throughout the year. Note that my weight had a 7.5 pound differential, ranging from a high of 176.5 pounds to a low of 169 pounds, with an average of 172.3 pounds and an approximately 3 pound fluctuation around this average throughout the year, which seems strange to me because I actually remember feeling wild weight fluctuations.

One obvious anomaly through the course of the year was my weight loss beginning in August, which was when I made a distinct effort to lose a few pounds for a special occasion in the middle of October. It took me about one month to drop six pounds from 175 down to 169 pounds. But after that, I ran into difficulties.

I had a big reason to lose those six pounds: I was getting married. Originally I planned on losing a lot more than 6 pounds during that time, but in September, I got a highly contagious, yucky case of viral pink-eye that kept me out of sight for nearly three weeks and completely out of the gym. And if you look at my weight after October 15th, our big day, the chart reveals how, after our wedding, I began three months of relaxation in which I steadily put back on those six pounds (and then some!) right up to my top weight for the year. Notice the huge spike during December. Yikes! Cause and effect people!

I present this to you as evidence that my basic psychological system for losing weight has worked for me. An important point that I make to people is that the work of losing weight is not really about doing more. It's about doing less. Losing weight or maintaining weight loss is more about the epic battle to resist temptation than it is an expression of ruthless exercise. I consider getting exercise to be only a small portion of the effort I put into my weight loss, as I wrote, only about 20%.

I also want to illuminate that for a human being's weight to fluctuate six pounds is a lot, even if you are a big person. Have you ever had to heft around six bricks of butter? It's hefty!

One pound of butter feels heavier than it looks. Now imagine that butter layered onto you and then hidden. I put on six of these since October. Eesh.

There have been periods of my life in which I have gotten tremendous amounts of exercise, as if I was possessed. I once went from 187 pounds, down to 157 pounds, over the course of four months. Note that this was after 9/11, and I was unemployed, so I had plenty of time. I would get an hour and a half of exercise and then follow that up later on in the day with another thirty or forty minutes. During this time, I lost incredible amounts of weight. But, more importantly, it took me a Herculean effort to maintain the exceedingly strict low calorie and low carbohydrate diet required. I never felt better.

But as the chart makes clear, my days of weighing 157 pounds are gone. I have a stressful full-time job, which makes getting exercise at the gym that much more difficult. What is worse is the myriad of carbo-riffic temptations flying past me at work. That's the hard part. Resisting temptation.

This year, however, I plan on losing more weight. I have a new pair of running shoes that do not cause me knee pain and which I hope will make it easier for me to run longer distances. And perhaps, who knows? I may even run the New York City Marathon. But in order to do this, I will need to get my weight down to an average near 160 to have a good time. As of this morning, that's 15 bricks of butter away!

Posted by Rob at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)