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In the book “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect”, John Maxwell has five chapters devoted to principles of connecting, and five chapters devoted to practices of connecting.   I have spent five weeks on the first five chapters covering those principles, and today I start on the second part of the book, with the practices. The first practice of connecting is in the sixth chapter, and it is “Connectors Connect on Common Ground”.

In the last post, I listed four traits that end up being hindrances to building common ground with others, namely:

• Assumption (“I Already Know What Others Know, Feel, and Want”)
• Arrogance (“I Don’t Need to Know What Others Know, Feel, or Want”)
• Indifference (“I Don’t Care to Know What Others Know, Feel, or Want”)
• Control (“I Don’t Want Others to Know What I Know, Feel, or Want”)

After that material on what NOT to do, John Maxwell gives a list of positive ways to cultivate common ground.

1.  Availability–“I Will Choose to Spend Time With Others”

Availability requires time, of course, but it also requires intentionality.   You have to plan in time to be available to others.     If you have blocks of time to yourself, make sure that you let people know when your “office hours” are so that when they contact you during those hours, they can rest assured that you ARE available.    The rule is, you don’t have to give your team members 100% of your time, but when you give your time, you should be 100% there for them.

2.  Listening–“I Will Listern My Way to Common Ground”

Listening requires letting go of your own internal dialogue and your own preconceptions, so that the words people are telling you fall on fresh ears, not deaf ones.    If you are willing to listen to others and figure out how to fulfill their needs, you’re on your way to reaching common ground.

3.  Questions–“I Will Be Interested Enough in Others to Ask Questions”

The key to asking questions is having a sense of curiosity–about various topics, but also about people and what makes them tick, what motivates them.   Ron Puryear invented the acronym FORM, which stands for the standard questions you should ask team members to get to know them better:

• F:   Family
• O:   Occupation
• R:   Recreation
• M:  Message

4.  Thoughtfulness–“I Will Think of Others And Look for Ways to Thank Them”

If you have a team member who is not performing the task he or she has been assigned within the deadline provided, you should approach that person and not berate them, but befriend them.    Do they have everything they need in order to get the job done?    If they don’t have the time to get it done, is there something that is less urgent that can be delegated to someone else so that the team member can concentrate on the higher priority task.   If you are a person who helps them obtain solutions, rather than somebody whose chief preoccupation is assigning blame, then they will be more willing to come to you when they are having problems rather than you have to find out by going to them.

5.  Openness–“I Will Let People Into My Life”

Sometimes people shut themselves off from others, whether it is because they are introverts and sense that they need some alone time to recharge their batteries, or because they don’t want or they even fear people getting closer to them.   Usually this is because they are afraid of being rejected if people got to know the “real” person.

The problem with this is that the wall that people sometimes build to keep others out takes a certain amount of psychic energy to construct.    If you can find a way to tear down your inner walls, you will not only find yourself better able to connect with others, but you will be surprised how much you will WANT to do so, because the energy you used to use constructing and maintaining those walls can now be used more constructively in engaging other people.

6.  Likeability–“I Will Care About People”

People will like you if you genuinely like THEM, which doesn’t mean you have to BE like them.    I have friends who have different political beliefs or religious beliefs than I do, but because they do not take themselves too seriously, we can find a conversational “demilitarized zone” in which we can share the things we DO have in common, whether it be the kind of books we read, or the historical figures we admire.     So you don’t have to be all things to all people, you just have to genuine like all people for being themselves.

7.  Humility–“I Will Think of Myself Less So I Can Think of Others More”

Humility does not mean denying your strengths, and just admitting your weaknesses.    You can acknowledge your strengths, but as long as you recognize that these strengths are gifts, then you can use them on behalf of a higher purpose.

There’s an observation I invented regarding the Toastmasters organization:   there are three stages of being a Toastmaster.

• In the first stage, you’re afraid to get on stage.
• In the second stage, you’re afraid to get off stage.
• In the third stage, you know when it is time to get on, and when it is time to get off stage.

In the first stage, you are nervous and unsure of yourself, and this is why many people don’t connect with the audience at first, because they’re so busy worrying about “hey, am I doing this right?”

Well, then you graduate to the next stage, and when people start giving you compliments on how well you speak, you let it go to your head, like the Little Jack Horner of nursery rhyme fame:

“Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said ‘What a good boy am I!’

Well, you can be impressed with what a good boy (or girl) you are, but this is also an eg0centric stage, because you are no longer afraid of speaking, you want to speak, but FOR THE WRONG REASON, to show everybody how clever you are.    What’s lost are two things:   your message and the audience.

You need to graduate to the third stage, so you can get on stage when it is your to deliver your message, but then you get off stage at the appropriate time and let others give you feedback, or on a different occasion, you listen to the speeches of others with rapt attention.

8.  Adaptability–“I Will Move From My World to Theirs”

If you are aware of a gap between you and the people with whom you are trying to connect, you must try to move to their world mentally, if not physically.    When I studied Japanese at the University of Illinois as part of graduate studies program in Asian Studies, I met a Japanese guy named Atsuki Tofukuji, and we became good friends because he was working at a manufacturing company, and I was fascinated by manufacturing because of my undergraduate engineering background.    We found we shared a lot of interests in common, including a love of science fiction.

When I graduated, unbeknownst to me, he had conferred with his home company in Japan and had asked if there was a position for someone like me who was studying technical translation to be of use to a Japanese manufacturer like the one I worked for.    It turned out there were looking for exactly that type of person, and with his introduction, I got an interview, which I aced and then it dawned on me that this job was going to be in Japan, a country I had been studying about for the previous three years.   It was literally a dream come true.

Many Americans who live in Japan like to live in neighborhoods with other Americans, lest they become too homesick.   I wanted to live in a traditional Japanese neighborhood where I was the only American.   This would force me to not only speak Japanese, but learn about Japanese customs, etc.     I learned a lot in the five years I worked there.    Not only did I, of course, become fluent in Japanese to the point that I could read and write it as well as speak it, I became valuable to the company after I moved back to the United States, because I understood perfectly both the American business world and the Japanese business world.    My role model was my boss Mr. Hase, who was perfectly at ease in both worlds as well, but after having gone the other direction and having moved to the United States and lived there for five years.

The amazing thing is that, when I went to Japan, I had quite a bit of “culture shock”, but I also had quite a bit of “reverse culture shock” when I came back to the U.S. after living in Japan for five years.    My father would relate how when I talked to my boss on the phone, I would bow my head instinctively at the end of a sentence, especially if I was agreeing to a request.    When he told me about it with a bemused look on his face, I told him I honestly didn’t realize that I was doing it.    When I sat in the apartment, I sat on the floor and not in the chair because that’s what I did when I was in Japan.   It took me a while to adjust, but here’s the benefit of having lived in both worlds:   you not only appreciate the world of the other more because you have lived there as much as an insider as you possible could, but you also appreciate the uniqueness and beauty of your own world even more for seeing it again as if for the first time.

In the next post, I will discuss four questions you should ask yourself in order to become a better connector.

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In the book “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect”, John Maxwell has five chapters devoted to principles of connecting, and five chapters devoted to practices of connecting.   I have spent five weeks on the first five chapters covering those principles, and today I start on the second part of the book, with the practices. The first practice of connecting is in the sixth chapter, and it is “Connectors Connect on Common Ground”.

In the last post, I discussed the fact that finding common ground is often the basis for international diplomacy, so the principle works on the largest stage there is.   It also works on the stage you are going to be standing on to give your speech, and this post discusses the barriers often encountered in trying to find common ground with your audience.

1.  Assumption–“I Already Know What Others Feel and Want”

It’s unwise to make assumptions about people based on their background, profession, race, gender, age, nationality, politics, faith, or other factors.    People’s idiosyncrasies often contradict one’s assumptions, because these are based on generalizations.    A person is neither an average nor any other kind of statistic!

Stop the judging and start paying attention to what people say, how they think, and above all, what they do.   Then you may find common ground with someone who has a different … background, profession, race, gender, etc.

2.  Arrogance–“I Don’t Need to Know What Others Feel, or Want”

It’s one thing to assume that you know what others feel or want.   It’s even worse not to CARE what others feel or want.   This kind of person thinks of themselves as being not just different in degree, but in kind from others.   Losing empathy for others is the first step towards being a complete sociopath, for whom people are mere commodities or objects.     Slavery was a horrible institution because treating people like things takes you down that path.   The first step on that path is arrogance, so don’t take it.

3.  Indifference–“I Don’t Care to Know What Others Feel, or Want”

The people have no desire to know others are a puzzle to me.    I am filled with such xenophilia, love of that which is different from myself, that people who show no desire to learn or experience the outside world are a challenge for me to understand.    It is a form of selfishness because it says that the present horizon of my experience is all that I want to experience.   It implies that you have already grown enough and in a way are already perfect.    If you focus on yourself and your own comfort you will not be able to put yourself in the shoes of others to glean what they want and need.

The development psychologist Jean Piaget said that children typically move through various stages of development.   From two to seven years old, they are in Pre-Operations Stage where they are egocentric.    One test of this is to show a child a ball that is painted yellow on one side and blue on the other.    The tester shows both sides to the child, points the blue side towards the child, and asks “which side do you see?”, and the child answers “blue”.   Then the tester shows the yellow side towards the child, and asks “which side do I see”?   If the child has passed out of this stage, it will answer correctly, “blue.”   If it is still in the Pre-Operations Stage they will answer “yellow.”   Because they are egocentric, they are incapable of taking the perspective of another person than themselves.   The sad thing is that,  those adults who exhibit the indifference mentioned in the previous paragraph are, in a way, emotionally equivalent to those 2-7 year olds.

4.  Control–“I Don’t Want Others to Know What I Know, Feel, or Want”

In order to make a connection, you not only have to understand others, but you have to open enough for them to be able to understand you.    When I was working at Mitsubishi Motors, there used to be a saying prevalent among the American employees.    “The Japanese give information to the American employees on a  need-to-know basis:   meaning if you are an American, you don’t need to know.”    I didn’t agree with this saying, because I was fluent in Japanese and English and could understand what they were saying without any difficulty and my ability to understand Japanese meant that there was no barrier I perceived in getting information.

However, it bothered me that some people felt that:   that must mean that that perception exists, whether or not it is based on actual reality or not.    That got me started on contemplating how a global project should be run, when there are different languages spoken by the various participants, and the necessity for a global communications plan to reduce the risk of miscommunication.

If you are a leader, don’t isolate yourself, and don’t keep your employees in the dark.   Inform people, make them a part of what’s going on, and include them in the decision-making process whenever possible.

Now that you’ve learned what not to do in order to find common ground, the next post will discuss what you should do in order to cultivate a common ground mindset.

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In the book “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect”, John Maxwell has five chapters devoted to principles of connecting, and five chapters devoted to practices of connecting.   I have spent five weeks on the first five chapters covering those principles, and today I start on the second part of the book, with the practices. The first practice of connecting is in the sixth chapter, and it is “Connectors Connect on Common Ground”.

I will introduce the subject where finding common ground with one’s adversary was literally a matter of life and death.

1.   Introduction–The Cuban Missile Crisis

There were two weeks in October 1962 when the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union was in danger of becoming a very hot war indeed.    How hot?   Oh, a couple million degrees, because that’s the temperature in the center of a nuclear explosion.   You see, we almost had a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  At that time, John F. Kennedy was the president of the United States and Nikita Khrushchev was the Premier of the Soviet Union.

The United States had deployed nuclear missiles in Turkey that were capable of reaching Moscow, and so in a sort of global chess game, Khrushchev conceived of a plan to counter this by deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba that could be pointed towards the U.S.

On October 14^th, 1962, their plans were found out.   A US spy plane on a reconnaissance mission over Cuba took pictures of seemed to be a missile base construction site.

The CIA analyzed the photographs identified the objects as being medium-range ballistic missiles.   These were the rockets that would carry nuclear warheads to their targets in the U.S., but they did not see any warheads themselves.    So they assumed that the warheads had not yet been delivered, and that the Soviet Union would soon be sending ships to deliver them to Cuba.

The President was informed of the existence of the missiles in Cuba and he held a meeting with members of the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military.    There were three options discussed, diplomacy, a limited blockade to prevent the warheads from reaching Cuba, and a full-scale invasion.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that the only option to remove the threat was a full-scale attack and invasion.   They figured that since the nuclear warheads were not yet in Cuba, the Soviets would not be able to stop the U.S.

The National Security Council preferred the blockade option, which Kennedy accepted,  but the military was directed to prepared for the full invasion just in case.

Meanwhile, on a beach in Miami, Florida there was a little boy who was playing with his grandfather.    He and his mother had flown from Chicago to spend a vacation there.    That night they saw President Kennedy on the television who announced that Cuba had missiles aimed at the U.S. and that the U.S. would launch a blockade around Cuba.

The Soviet Union now gave its response, saying that it would view a blockade as an act of aggression and that their ships would defy the blockade.   The situation was now at a stalemate; the U.S. raised its defense level to condition red.   There is only condition beyond this, condition white, which just happens to be the color of the center of a nuclear explosion.

That night, the boy who staying with his grandfather heard the voice of his father on the telephone calling to tell him that he loved him very much.    You see, the father was a reporter who knew the seriousness of the situation, and knew that his son was in a place that would very likely be a target of a nuclear attack in the case that war broke out.   He wanted to memorize the sound of his son’s voice in case he never heard it again.

At 6:00 PM on the night of October 26^th, the State Department received by teletype a very long and emotional letter written by Khrushchev .

“Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of a rope in which you have tied the knot of war.   Let us take measures to untie that knot.  We are ready for this.”

Tommy Thompson from the State Department,  a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, was sitting at the elbow of the President reading what he referred to as the soft, diplomatic message which he said had come directly from Khrushchev.    Just then, another message that came in that was more threatening and it was the message that had written by the hardliners in the Kremlin.

The crucial question now was:   which message should the U.S. respond to, the soft message or the hard message?

Tommy Thompson had knowledge of the Russian language, but even more importantly, because of his time as ambassador to the Soviet Union, he knew the Premier personally.   He could empathize with him, and knew exactly what the Premier was thinking.   He said that the Premier was being pushed by his hardliners into a military confrontation and he wanted desperately to find a diplomatic solution that would allow him to save not only the Cuban people from invasion, but to help him save face politically.   President Kennedy finally understood exactly how the Premier felt.

President Kennedy listened to Tommy Thompson, and made a deal with the Soviet Union.   You pull out the missiles from Cuba, and we will remove ours from Turkey.    Khrushchev agreed, and the crisis was now over.

In 1992, it was discovered that the CIA had made a mistake.    Remember how they had assumed there were no warheads in Cuba?   There were over 160 nuclear warheads already in Cuba.   So the blockade accomplished nothing.    But more importantly, if Kennedy had listened to the military, who based their strategic plans on what the CIA had told them, the invasion would have failed and nuclear war would have resulted.

And I would not be standing here today.    Why?   Because that boy I mentioned in the story–was me.

In the documentary The Fog of War, the former Secretary of State Robert McNamara listed several lessons to be learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis, among them 1) be prepared to re-examine your reasoning, which you can see by the fact that the CIA made a mistake regarding the warheads, and 2) empathize with your enemy, which was the key to Tommy Thompson’s diplomatic breakthrough.

In the case of Tommy Thompson, he allowed President Kennedy to see that, although Premier Khrushchev was politically on the other side, in reality they both were in the same position vis-a-vis their military.     The military on each side was overly optimistic about the chances of success in a military confrontation.   In the case of the American military, it was born out of a false premise.   In the case of the Russian military, it was underestimating the willingness of Castro to actually engage in a nuclear war on his own soil, knowing full well the ruination it would wreak on the island of Cuba and its people.

But by seeing the two leaders as follow politicians who not only wanted to resolve the crisis but do it in a way that would be acceptable to their own people, Tommy Thompson paved the way for a solution to the crisis.

That is why, to the lessons proposed by Robert McNamara I would like to add a lesson of my own.  We can learn from Tommy Thompson and use the power of language to engage the language of power.   It is the power of language, and its ability to be an window of understanding, and through that window, to be an instrument of peace, that has motivated me throughout my life.   Why?   Because it allows you to explore the common ground you have with others with whom you speaking, or negotiating.    Peace is found on level ground.

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Yesterday I attended what must be the sixth in a series of workshops held at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Park Forest on the subject of Sacred Communication.    Although the title sounds like it is talking about the way one addresses the divine, the actual subject matter is how you address yourself.

When I moved here to the Chicago area last year, it was with some trepidation because I had lived in the area for decades.    Feeling a little bit like Rip Van Winkle, I wondered if it was possible to generate an entirely new network of friends and colleagues.    I was looking for work in my new career of being a project manager, and while doing that, I was also trying to recast myself not just as an employee of a company, but as a leader, in such a way that would gain me success that had so far eluded me where I used to live in Orange County, CA.

But you know that saying, “lead, follow, or get out of the way?”   Sometimes the biggest factor that prevents us from being successful is within ourselves.    The Sacred Communication, which is like spiritual gardening, promised to help me not get in my own way, so to speak.   When I say “spiritual gardening”, I mean it is analogous to planting a garden.

First you till the soil, then you plant seeds, but you also remove weeds, prevent bugs from eating the fruits of your labors, and there is a lot of constant work that needs to be done so that the new plants get enough sunlight, water, and nourishment from the soil.    In a similar way, you have to till the soil (do introspection), plant seeds (visualize your goals and make concrete plans to achieve them), and then monitor the growth.   Weeds (thoughts whose origin is fear) can choke off the growth of the seeds, so you have to remove them, not just once, but CONSTANTLY.

In this latest workshop, the leader of the workshop, Henrietta Byrd, asked two important questions.

1.   What do you wonder about?

People responded with something that was of paramount concern to them–for example, I was wondering about what my next success was going to be after I completed the project I am currently working on.    However, after we named our individual areas of concern, she said, “now, when I said ‘wonder’, did you interpret that to mean what you ‘worry’ about or whether you ‘wonder’ in the more neutral sense of ‘speculate with your imagination’?”

Because if we were WORRYING about the outcome of a particular situation, then this is essentially taking the form of “IF something negative happens, THEN how will I deal with it?”    Now, this does not mean that you shouldn’t plan for the future so that you have a plan B to fall back on if plan A doesn’t materialize.    However, planning for a possible negative outcome is not the same as DWELLING on it.   If you dwell on the negative, your mind will create ways for that negative outcome to happen.

So if you dwell on the positive, your mind will likewise starting thinking of creative ways of how you can get from here to there.   Once you have fixed a positive goal in your mind, and you are doing all you can to achieve it, then LET GO and trust in life that the goal will materialize.

So I am concentrating on doing what I am doing and achieving the goals I have set out for myself, but with an attitude of wonder and not of worrying about what my next project will be.

2.  What have you had enough of?

What are you so sick of in your life that, if you had a chance to, you would get rid of it and have no more of it from here on out?    I don’t mind sharing that, in my case, it was “excuses”, which translate for me as the belief that the reason for my not achieving my goals is something or someone outside of myself.

Once Henrietta asked this, she then said, “okay, so you want to get rid of that.   What concrete steps are you going to take to do so?”

There are some problems which because they are difficult to solve, I find myself avoiding because of the emotional charge I attach to them (“I can’t solve it because I am not good enough/smart enough, etc.”).    Once I realized that I was using this as an excuse not to solve these problems, I realized I needed what I call an “ego-bypass operation”, meaning that I need to make it less about me as a person, and focus instead on principles that will help me deal with the problems.

So I came up with a little slogan to help me out:  “I’m eager to go to the problems that scare me, and treat them instead as puzzles that dare me.”   This slogan has two parts to it:   going to the problems that scare me, which means that I will no longer tolerate avoidance behavior.    And then when I go to the place that scares me, I will use the calming techniques that Pema Chodron recommends in her book “Go to the Places that Scare You”, because this allows you to face reality and detach yourself from fear.   And if you detach yourself from fear, one thing you can do to propel yourself in the right direction is to attach yourself to the same problem, but with a different emotion, that of curiosity and delight.    How can you delight in problems?

Well, for one thing, I LOVE puzzles:   logic puzzles and cryptic crosswords being some of my favorites.   If I approach a puzzle I can’t solve, I don’t go away in anger or in self-recrimination.   “Oh, gosh, I’m so stupid!”   No, if I were stupid, I wouldn’t even TRY to solve such complicated puzzles.    If I solve the puzzle, yes, I do feel a little bit of an ego boost.  But if I can’t solve it, I don’t just give up.   I put it aside TEMPORARILY, after I have made a decent attempt.   And then I come back to it–and it is amazing how what the solution to what was though to be an unsolvable problem now taps you on the shoulder and says, “here I am!”    That’s because your subconscious often times continues working on the problem after your conscious mind has temporarily thrown in the towel.

Well, why not deal with the various problems of my life like puzzles?   Rather than eagerly avoiding them, I would start eagerly tackling them.   Not just because I want to solve the problems, but because the process is FUN and makes my mind sharper for having done so.    So this is an example where I am trying to get out of my own way, and work towards solutions that will propel me forward.

And if I do that, I have trust in life that I will be rewarded.   This is not just blind faith, either:   I started these Sacred Communication Workshops about one year ago when I had NO accomplishments here in Chicago under my belt.   Now, in the one year since then:

• I volunteered as a project manager for the Chicagoland Chapter of the Project Management Institute’s Professional Development Day Project for 2013, which was a very successful event for the chapter.
• I got a part-time project management position in November 2013 which ended in April 2014.
• I then got a full-time project management position as a Chief Project Manager for the Professional Development Day Project for 2014 (based on my work last year).
• As a Vice President Education for my Toastmasters Club (Homewood-Flossmoor Toastmasters Club #1451), I helped our club achieve the highest level of achievement at the club level, the President’s Distinguished Club award, for having achieved all 10 goals in the Distinguished Club Program.
• As an Assistant Area Governor for Area S56, I worked together with Felton Armand, and helped our Area achieve the highest level of achievement at the Area level, the President’s Distinguished Area award, for having more than 50% of the clubs in our Area achieve the level of Distinguished Club or higher AND having sponsored the growth of a new club in our Area (Richton Park)
• I have been selected as Area Governor for my area for the upcoming Toastmasters year (July 2014-June 2015).
• I have been elected as President of my home club Homewood-Flossmoor Toastmasters Club, and have been elected as the Vice President Education for my second club, the PMI Chicagoland Toastmasters Club.

I have been asked to be in a leadership position both professionally and at my church; I am applying for those positions, but will not mention what they are specifically until I actually achieve them.   But these opportunities are coming unexpectedly, and so I am truly in a position of not worrying about success, but simply wondering, what direction is it coming to come from?

And I achieved this by, as the title suggests, getting out of my own way and not preventing my own success.    I hope you can ask yourself the questions Henrietta asked us, and take some quiet time out for reflection.   As Maya Angelou said in her last public statement on Twitter before she passed away, “listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.”

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