Welcome

Welcome to July's edition of People Matter, produced by CustomerClix.

On Thu 2nd Jun 2011, my funny, energetic, inimitable Dad died. He had Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). So, in tribute to my Dad, on Sun 31st Jul 2011, the amazing Justin Speake is doing the hugely impressive Ironman UK Triathlon (Swim: 2.4 miles; Bike: 112 miles; Run: 26.2 miles). Justin has never done a triathlon before and, with only a couple of weeks to go, has done no running, little swimming and only one bike ride. Oh and he needs to lose c20lbs. He has volunteered to do it though for a very worthy cause; my Dad's Fund: The Stanley Crosby Breath of Life Tribute Fund with the British Lung Foundation . Please give generously to (a) aid vital research into lung disease; and (b) encourage Justin to keep safe and finish. He needs all the encouragement that we can muster. Thank you.

With warmest wishes, as ever

Kim Crosby

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How to muzzle the yakker

We all hate to be interrupted. Or drowned out. Or conversationally dominated. We despise, secretly or otherwise, the verbal interloper. This scourge can appear in the guise of a loud talker, the close talker, the conversation hog, the story topper, the quick interjector, the extra long joke teller or the questioner who never waits for an answer. These people have one infuriating aim: They want you to shut up and yield the floor, and they want you to do it right now.

So some tips...

Learn to listen: If we take our cues in everyday conversation from much of modern political discourse, we may come to believe that bombast equals victory and good listening equals defect.  ‘I shout ‘em down and shut ‘em up, I win. I keep my mouth shut, I lose.’ But that’s not conversation, that’s verbal bullying. So why do so many people do it? The late American philosopher and educator, Mortimer Adler, wrote that schools do not teach listening as a skill at any academic level. This leaves many adults unprepared to engage in truly intelligent conversations. He asks: ‘Is anyone anywhere taught how to listen?’ and ‘How utterly amazing is the general assumption that the ability to listen well is a natural gift for which no training is required’. But listening is a skill that needs to be honed. While listening may seem like it should be easy to do, it can be very difficult, often requiring more mental effort than speaking.

Don’t be dominated by interrupters: Parlour conversations is one thing. But what if you’re in the bare knuckle netherworld of the business meeting, sitting around the table waiting for a serial interrupter – the person who loves to score points through the domination of others – to strike again? John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, points out that not all interruptions in meetings are bad. Interjections to ‘save time or to correct mistakes’ are fine as long as they’re quick and useful. He calls such breaks ‘running repairs to the discussion’. It’s the egregious interrupting windbag who’s the true culprit. ‘Letting the interrupter take over isn’t the answer’, says Cleese. The initial speaker can lose control of the situation and ‘completely swallow the interupter’s change of agenda’. Neither is simply telling the verbal interloper to ‘shut up’ an option. Assuming the meeting is chaired, the best defence, says Cleese, is to pack up and start to walk out. Severe? Yes, but ‘it’s very unlikely that it will ever come to that’, says Cleese, ‘and if it did, it would be very surprising if the chair didn’t call you back’. Timing, of course, is everything. One stratagem that may disarm the serial interrupter before s / he can pounce, says Cleese, is to outline your floor time by stating how many points you are going to make. This helps to close the yakker’s window of opportunity from the start.

Quieting the Questioner who... won’t... stop... talking...: Another awkward and frustrating situation can occur after giving a presentation, during the question and answer session: You’re confronted with a questioner who goes on and on and on. They hog the Q&A time, to the extreme irritation of other audience members. Answer? Say something like: ‘Perhaps we could chat about this during the break?’, then move onto another person who wants to ask a question.

Be decisive and confident: Interrupting can be a form of domination and, depending on the degree, sometimes needs to be dealt with instantly and decisively. Sometimes with a polite retort such as ‘Excuse me, Ray, but I didn’t get to finish. I’d like to say that...’. And then there’s that other person who’s rude and in a hurry: The Chronically Impatient. Buoyed by instant technology and addicted to speech, these people are having a tough time tolerating long-winded ramblers. The Chronically Impatient value time, clarity and action and they want you to get to the point, pronto. If you dilly dally, they’ll either nudge you with a brief interjectory question or they’ll overpower you and butt in as if your words don’t matter. The answer, in this case, is to speak clearly and concisely. Or if you’re being plagued with a serial interrupter, another approach is to push ahead with your own words and add more volume to them. That conveys that you’re sick of being rudely interrupted and you’re just not taking it any more.

Good luck!

Source: How to muzzel the yakker, p24-25, Toastmaster magazine, Jun 2011, Toastmasters International

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Why Do Children Pour Molasses on the Cat? Our Search for Good-Enough Freedom

Counsellors get many questions from parents about their children’s behaviors. Some are along the lines of Carl Sandburg’s plaintive cries in The People Yes. “Why do children put beans in their ears?” “Why do children pour molasses on the cat?”

Many years ago a mother and her reluctantly-present-14-year-old boy changed my way of thinking about questions like these. Worried and frustrated, the boy’s mother ended her angry and tearful tour de force of her son’s deviant behaviors with, “And why does he wear that awful purple nail polish?” In one of those leaps to clarity that sometimes occurs when we don’t know something is true until we hear ourselves say it, I replied, “He paints his nails purple because he can.”

As I spoke, her son met my eyes for a moment for the first time in the session. I think I was as startled as he was. In that second of contact, we both saw the same thing and saw each other see it. He was struggling for good-enough freedom to sustain the feeling of being a person instead of a robot, but had no inkling of it until that moment. Nor had I. It was an opening, a new beginning, for both my new young client and for my self.

I was certainly familiar with parent-child struggles over rules and expectations and familiar with the box that many children feel they are in. The box is formed by their parents and teachers promise of freedom if and when they can be counted on to do what their parents and teachers want them to do. 

This interpretation of freedom is a sickly and harmful distortion of a fundamental truth for humans and all social species who care for their young. The young require some degree of behavior control until they have enough maturity and experience to rely on their own judgment. But this implies more freedom should result from increased knowledge and ability, not from more compliance to others’ wishes.

Children are born helpless and ignorant. We take it for granted that children’s behaviors must be restricted until they have the ability to keep themselves safe. This is the source of our universal concern for the well-being of young and helpless individuals.

What dawned on both this young boy and myself is that his struggle for freedom, to get out from under controlling adults, isn’t really a search to be totally free. It’s a search to be free enough. Or as I later added, it is a search for good-enough control to feel like a person instead of a robot.

Neither children nor adults are totally free to control everyone and everything. But we must feel in good-enough control of our own ship so that, even if we are not its captain, we are at least an officer. We must feel we are to some extent a contributing agent to our behavior.

The feeling of “being some-thing” as opposed to feeling like “no-thing,” as the French existentialists might put it, is more important than avoiding physical pain. Many children and adults will simply “take” any physical punishment handed out and continue to do the dangerous things they are warned to avoid doing, sometimes with tragic consequences. Surprisingly many teenagers and adults of all ages inflict cuts or burns upon themselves in an effort to validate their being.

Why do they do this? Why do children put beans in their ears when that is the very thing they are told not to do? Because being someone who is disobedient or in pain is preferable to being no one at all.

My young client and his mother, in the months that followed our initial visit, were able to recognize, with relief, their options for cooperation in both her attempts to keep him safe and his attempts to make his actions his own. Both discovered they could learn from the other, even help one another. Both discovered that it wasn’t necessary to feel helpless and defeated in a struggle for control. Rules could be enforced without anger. They could be broken without defiance. They could be obeyed with a sense of cooperation, a cooperative obedience that cost their individualities nothing.

Fortunately, freedom and control good enough for validating our individualities are available, or can be made available, for both children and adults. It occurs when robotic obedience that serves a subservient agenda is replaced with cooperation through exchanges of voluntary obedience in a common cause, therefore also enhancing the cause of human individuality.

We can dance together in the common cause if and when we aim at cooperative steps that produce a good dance. In doing so, we sometime obey the another person’s direction and visa versa, both without ever becoming another’s robotic tool.

Good-enough control of each other results in good-enough freedom for both. Those who will not dance with us, we must avoid.
 

Written by Carl Semmelroth, PhD, Clinical Psychologist and author of The Anger Habit series of books including the highly recommended The Anger Habit: Proven Principles to Calm the Stormy Mind.

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Poet’s Corner: A Nation's Strength

Those of you that have attended our public speaking training sessions know the importance of working with words to craft compelling speeches. So, each month, we feature a topical poem or passage that illustrates this point, using lyrical English. As 4th July commemorates Independence Day in the US, this month we feature a topical poem by US poet Ralph Waldo Emerson:

What makes a nation’s pillars high
And its foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor’s sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation’s pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.

A Nation's Strength by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), US essayist, lecturer, and poet

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Quotations

A summer's sun is worth the having, French Proverb

A life without love is like a year without summer, Swedish Proverb

You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen, it said 'Parking Fine', Tommy Cooper (1921-1984), British comedian

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception, Groucho Marx (1890-1977), US comedian with the Marx Brothers
 

And if your birthday is in July...

Birthstone: Ruby

The glowing ruby should adorn
Those who in warm July are born
Then will they be exempt and free
From love's doubt and anxiety

Anonymous

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Forthcoming events

Here are some forthcoming events that we hope are of interest to people who have attended our training courses - and friends too - that have an interest in the personal development of themselves or others.  Do come along, mingle, chat and have fun. All are very welcome!

Thu 7th Jul 2011 - 19:00-20:30 - Lecture - Aping mankind: neuromania, darwinitis and the misrepresentation of mankind by Professor Raymond Tallis at the Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BS, United Kingdom - Fee: £10 per person

And remember to tell us if you do plan to attend, so that we can rendezvous with you.

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