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Making Waves
April 14, 2004
Welcome to Change Your
World!
Hello. My name is
Courtney Huntington, and I am the founder of Change Your World.
In order to change our
world, we must be willing to make waves—sometimes very big waves. Not
everyone is going to like what you have to say or the way you say it.
Not everyone will agree with the course of change you think is best. We
all encounter disagreements every day. It's a natural part of life in
the real world.
If you think you don't
like what we do at Change Your World, I ask one thing: Be patient.
There's much more to come, and maybe you'll find you agree more than
you thought you would.
What do you do when you
encounter someone you disagree with? The first step is to follow the
prayer commonly attributed to St. Francis of Assissi:
Lord,
make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow
love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union;
where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there
is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not
so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to
understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we
receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying
that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
It can be a difficult
prayer to pray. It is even more difficult to do.
One line of the prayer
inspired one of Stephen Covey's seven habits of highly effective
people: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. That's what we
have to do when someone expresses distate for our ideas or actions.
Maybe they have a point. Maybe they see the issues more clearly than we
do. It is often hard to know ourselves the way others know us. It's
hard to be honest with ourselves the way others will be. When someone
disagrees with you, thank them for expressing themselves and ask if
they mind discussing the issue in more depth. Generally, your
detractors will love to pour out more of their mind to you. Let them.
Maintain your composure, no matter what they say. What's important is
not who's right or wrong. What's important is what is right. Many times the truth
will be somewhere in between the two starting positions.
Listen to some of what
Stephen Covey says about how to listen properly:
We're
filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography. We want to be
understood. Our conversations become collective monologues, and we
never really understand what's going on inside another human being.
When another person speaks, we're usually
"listening" at one of four levels. . . . Very few of us ever practice
the fifth level, the highest form of listening, empathic listening. . . .
Empathic (from empathy)
listening gets inside another person's frame of reference. You look out
through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you
understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel. . . .
The essence of empathic listening is not that you
agree with someone; it's that you fully, deeply, understand that
person, emotionally as well as intellectually. . . .
Empathic listening is so powerful because it gives
you accurate data to work with. Instead of projecting your own
autobiography and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives and
interpretation, you're dealing with the reality inside another person's
head and heart. You're listening to understand. You're focused on
receiving the deep communication of another human soul. (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,
pp. 240-1)
In order to listen
properly, we must open ourselves to the possibility of being wrong. We
must open ourselves to what the other person really means, not just what we
think he or she means. We must be willing to really examine the issues,
to go deep, into unexplored caverns of meaning. Covey calls this
empathic listening. Notice that the purpose of empathic listening is
not necessarily to agree with the other person; nor is it necessarily
to prove a point or discover who's wrong. The purpose of empathic
listening is to get to the truth of the matter. Listening to the other
person gives you another perspective from which to view the issue. The
more angles you're able to view the issue from, the clearer your
understanding of the issue will be.
C. S. Lewis gives similar
advice for approaching the written word. In his book, An Experiment in Criticism, he says,
A
work of (whatever) art can be either "received" or "used." When we
"receive" it we exert our senses and imagination and various other
powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we "use" it
we treat it as assistance for our own activities. . . . "Using" is
inferior to "reception" because art, if used rather than received,
merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does
not add to it. (p. 88)
Whom do you want to meet
in your confrontation with your objectors? Only yourself? If you only
want to meet yourself and your own opinions, stay home and keep to
yourself. It's a good way to avoid learning anything new or doing
anything productive. If you want to learn and work, you must be willing
to see things through the eyes of other people.Though his comments are
directed toward works of art, they apply equally to conversation. When
you speak to someone, whether it's an easy or hard matter, approach the
conversation as a work of art, and approach the other speaker or
speakers as artists. Receive the art and the artist. Seek to understand
it. Don't begin by judging. "Don't jump to conclusions" is the common
proverb, and it fits Lewis's point exactly. When we do jump, as it
were, we do not engage the art or the artist enough to fully understand
either. This is exactly the problem Covey mentioned. Elsewhere, Lewis
gives us this: "We are so busy doing things with the work that we give
it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only
ourselves" (p. 85). Covey's phrase for this is "projecting your own
autobiography."
How can we apply this to
world change? Thomas Evans, the CEO of Training Logic, Inc., says
that in order to help anyone else change, you must help them take
ownership of their problems. The only way to bring about change in your
own life is to take ownership of your problems. And the only way to
bring about change in other people's lives is to help them take
ownership of their problems. Ultimately, they must bring about change
in their own lives, so they must take ownership of their own problems.
Empathic listening allows us to get at the truth more fully, which
allows us to know who needs to change and how. If we don't know who and
we don't know how, then we can't change actively for the better.
If you'd like to learn
more about how Change Your World can help you listen effectively and
help you take ownership of your problems, email us at change@howtochangeyourworld.com.
With many blessings and
wishes for successful positive change,
Courtney Huntington
Founder
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