37 of 39 people found the following review helpful
Anthony Robbins will motivate you!, September 30, 2005
By
warcon (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Live with Passion!: Stategies for Creating a Compelling Future (Audio CD)
I have never failed to be motivated by an AR cdI disagree with the reviewer that said you only need 1 motivational CD, they are all the same, you just have to take action.
Yes, they are all the same basic principles, but I find personally that I need to hear it regularly to stay motivated and in that certain mindset. The more often you hear this stuff in more different ways (various CD's/speakers) the more you will be ingrained with a self-motivating script.
Yes you do have to take action, but i find that action can be more easily sustained on a fairly regular diet of motivational material. The brain is novelty seeking by nature, and a narrow, though repeated, range of exposure to anything (a single CD) will be habituated and lose effectiveness.
There is a principle in human behavior and conditioning: we are always training everyone else how to think, how to feel by what we get rewarded for. IF every time you get sad and angry, somebody comes and gives attention to you and gives you love, then you are always going to get sad or angry or have a lot of problems. IF every time you step up people acknowledge you and you really feel that acknowledgementl, you're going to get rewarded. But we often reinforce people with the wrong behaviors, yet we wonder why people behave the way they do. Human beings are like dolphins. IF you want to train a dolphin by beating it, it will swim away. The only way you can train a dolphin is to wait for a dolphin that's maybe sick or lazy, it doesn't want to jump, what trainers will often do is create what's called a jackpot. And a jackpot is where they come in and they drop an entire bucket of fish on this dolphin who's been doing nothing, and "doesn't deserve it," but what happens is that they get so stimulated by all these fish around, that their is a new energy so that they can start to jump, and then the trainers reinforce them.
The quality of our life is the quality of our communication.
It's not the events of our lives that determine how we feel about things, or how they turn out, but rather how we communicate to ourselves about the events in our life. It's what we do with what happens inside our head that determines how we feel and how we react. If we really want to master our life, first of all, we really want to master communicating with ourselves before we master communication with other people.
In other words I can't communicate what my real needs are when I don't know what they are. If I'm just reacting to you, if I'm just responding to you out of anger, upset, or frustration, I've got to know what I really want if I'm going to go and help you achieve it. And vice versa, I've got to understand what you really want if I'm going to meet your needs. And even more importantly, you have to realize that more than meeting each other's needs, the way that we're feeling about anything in our life is based upon the meaning that we associate to that situation. In other words, nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning we give it. I'll give you an example.
The other day I was reading about a guy who was body surfing off the island of Kauai and he was attacked by a shark, the shark literally bit off one of his legs from the knee cap on down. Unbelievably gross, and unbelievably intense. What is it going to mean in his life? Its going to mean whatever he makes up about it. Whatever he decides it means is going to determine how he feels. Now what would be a logical meaning based on what most of us look at things. Most of us would say he lost a leg. He's going to be marred for life, he's going to be scarred for life. Not true for this man. There was an interview done with this man a few days later mostly because he requested it because he was concerned that the resulting attack on him and the loss of his leg to a shark that all of a sudden people are going to start seeking out sharks and start killing them off. And he tried to explain to people on radio and television interviews that it really wasn't that bad. That the reality is that he was responsible, he knew there were sharks in that water, he knew that he shouldn't have been body surving there, the sharks were just doing what they do naturally. And that the bottom line is that he learned an incredible lesson. Can you believe this? I don't think I would respond so healthfully, but I can tell you it was amazing. This man created a meaning and it was a powerful meaning for himself, he actually focused on sharks, and what was going to happen to the sharks instead of himself.
At our seminar one year, I brought in 3 people who were incredibly special, Kevin Saunders, Nick Davis, and Dax. I brought them all in because they had all been through incredible physical tragedies. One is a paraplegic, one is a quadraplegic, and one has his entire burned off, all his skin and was blinded by his experience. And I brought them in because they are some of the most happy, well adjusted, most successful people I know. They are better off than people who have all their limbs and all of their body intact. They seem to have more joy, more fun, more playfulness, and I brought them in so everyone else in the room would get one message clear: you have no real problems. If you look at these people and see how happy they are, you know you have no problems, you have no right to feel bad. And the reason that they feel good is because they mastered communication with one person, themselves. They've mastered the meaning they've associated with things. You talk to Kevin Saunders, a paraplegic, and its not how he labels himself. He was in a grain elevator accident and he lost the use of his legs. But he became a wheelchair athlete and won a bronze medal in the Olympics in the wheel chair competitions. He is one of the most inspirational people you'll ever meet. And he's going to help kids stay off of drugs and helping other people in wheelchairs to understand that, "Hey, just because I'm in a wheelchair doesn't mean I have limited opportunities. In fact you can get places faster in a wheelchair than other people can on their legs. He also has a dream to be a leading man in the movies. And he got a part alongside Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July. This man is a total inspiration, because the meaning of his accident is not that he was scarred for life, not that he was denied opportunities, but that he was offered a new set of challenges. Nick Davis got drunk while he was in high school, and one day being a top athlete in peak condition, he managed to screw up his entire body by taking a leap off a bridge into what he thought was a full area of water that turned out to be only 2 feet deep. He broke his neck, and he became a quadraplegic for life. What happened? He looked for a deeper meaning in his experience, he looked for a deeper meaning in his life. And to be around him makes you feel incredible. He's learned how to find adventure in a smile, how to appreciate even the smallest things in his life. He's now an artist. He's a poet. He writes with a pencil in his lips. And he does drawings. He has incredible character, and he's a demonstration of the power of the human spirit. Dax had all of his body burned off, and he became blinded. But he's become an attourney since then. He's learned how to give his experience a meaning that's empowering instead of disempowering. This is the first lesson of life that you and I have to master. We can't communicate to anybody else until we communicate to ourselves in an empowering way.
Part of what would make us better at communicating with each other would be if we understood what we were communicating for. See if you understand why you're doing something, you're usually a lot better at it aren't you? Think about it...why do you communicate? Most people don't know the answer to this question. I was invited to speak at this fortune 500 company for the full day and needed to turn around this division. The executives talked about the division saying that it was terrible and that all these people who were in the division were egomaniacs and they all took advantage of each other. They were real haughty and they treated each other lousy. And this is the Vice President of the company telling me this. And I said, how do you feel about them? And he said that they were jerks. I said, well we got to start with your vision of who these people are; these people are not jerks, they are just behaving in a way that you don't appreciate and that very few people appreciate, in fact, they don't even appreciate each other! I said but we can turn this around. The VP said that we've had everyone come in and talk to these people and nothing has ever worked. And I said boy this is really inspiration, why am I coming to help? And I thought, well this will be a great challenge, and it really worked, and it really helped me to refine this technology.
The first thing I did when I sat down with these people is I started to find out: why do you guys communicate? Why do you guys talk to each other? What is the purpose of your communication? And then I taught them these technologies for turning it around and it worked like magic. It's really what sold me on using this technology in the future. Think about why you communicate, say it out loud. Some people say, "Well I communicate to make a difference, I communicate because that helps us learn things, or I communicate because it helps make us grow, or I communicate to survive, I communicate to get love, or I communicate to give love, or I communicate to give an impact, or I communicate to gain control, some communicate to understand things more, to release energy, because communication is what life's about, to create things, building things, to get even, there are all sorts of ways to communicate. What's the purpose of communication? Most people forget the answer to this question. Most people in life get caught up in a habit of doing something. And we just do it that way over and over again until pretty soon we forgot why we even started, why we were even doing it in the first place. We don't want to be unconscious. Unconscious communication creates pain. It hurts you and it hurts the people around you.
I think we communicate for 3 reasons:
- to create a positive feeling inside of ourselves/ amplify a positive feeling inside of ourselves that we are already having to make it feel better. For example, when you are really excited about something, how come you want to tell somebody else about it? Because telling somebody else about it makes you feel better doesn't it? It expands the feeling, it makes it feel even stronger usually. That's why you want to go out and share a feeling. The reason you want to share your feelings is because it makes you feel better.
- The second major reason to communicate is to get rid of negative feelings. To get out of a negative feeling or a negative state. Why do you go tell someone else how you are feeling? Because you are hoping that in telling them, they'll say something back to you that will make you change how you feel. Or if you're angry you think, "gosh if I let them know how I'm feeling, if I can get this out of my system then maybe I won't feel so bad anymore.
- The third reason we communicate is real simple. To create a new result. We don't like the way something is happening, we don't want this to happen, we want to change something. Well how do we get ourselves to change something? We communicate it. We communicate it to ourselves, we communicate it to other people.
The challenge is that most of us don't communicate in ways that make us feel good or anybody else. Kevin, Nick, and Dax all know ways to communicate with themselves to feel good. So they can take advantage of their life. You might say, "well yeah but they're not being very realistic, neither is the guy with the shark incident." Oh yeah! Well what's being realistic? Being stupid? What we have to do is learn to communicate in a way that empowers us, that makes us enjoy life, to take action, to make a difference. And most of don't communicate to ourselves in ways that make us feel good. We constantly beat ourselves up. Rarely does that make you change your life, and make you do something more effectively. So we've got to learn how to communicate to ourselves more effectively first, then we can communicate better to other people. But we've got to understand our goal is to make ourselves feel good. Secondly, we've got to know that if we are going to communicate well to other people, we can't do that by making them wrong, by attacking them, by telling them how screwed up they are. We've got to make sure we communicate in a way that creates change, but that does it in a way that feels good to the other person as well. Not just in the short term, but the long term. And we're going to talk about both of these elements.
But first lets understand something else. The first step in order to communicate more effectively is to really get clear on how to communicate with yourself. I'm going to give a reality check. It's going to be seven questions that I need you to ask yourself, so that you'll get clear on what things really mean, you'll get clear about what you really want. And then you'll be able to communicate better with other people instead of just reacting or responding out of stress. But also I'd like you to consider something else. And it works so well with companies like magic, and it's such a simple thing, and it's kind of hard to explain it verbally, you kind of have to do it to appreciate it, but I'll tell you it anyways. I teach people that the reason that they're not communicating well is because they're in a stressed state. Now the state of a stressed state you say I want to make my life perfect, but that's pretty hard to do, or you could interrupt your pattern. In other words, when you get stressed there are certain things you do. You smoke a cigarette, or you lash out at somebody, or you all of a sudden curse, or you close in and you get real quiet, or you retract your love from somebody; we all have weird patterns that we do when we get stressed, especially in communication.
The way we numb those patterns is number 1, we identify what they are. So we usually do an exercise where we bring everyone together and here is step one. The first step is to write down (be dirt honest) how you communicate when you are stressed. In other words, what are some of your patterns. What do you do verbally and what do you do nonverbally? What do you say to people when you get angry or stressed? How do you respond to them? And how do you do it non verbally? What kind of facial expressions, what kind of gestures, what kind of movements, what are some of the things you do, because if you identify this, you'll be aware of it, and all of a sudden you'll catch yourself doing it and you'll stop it in the future. So step #1 is we have people write that down. After you've written down all the ways you communicate when you are stressed both verbally and nonverbally, you might get a little chuckle when you take a look at how you really are. Then step two is this: answer this question: how do you get leverage on people when you are not getting your way. I mean when you are not getting your way and you're stressed out, how do you try to get leverage? Do you try to get leverage by crying? Do you try to get leverage by demanding? Do you get leverage to do what you want by pulling rank? Do you get really intense, getting people fearful of you? Do you do it by acting like it doesn't matter and pretending like it nothing ever matters and you're like a martyr? What do you do to try to get leverage? Be honest with yourself. And I'd like you to take a moment to write down the answers to these two questions (0:20 Track D).
The way we numb those patterns is number 1, we identify what they are. So we usually do an exercise where we bring everyone together and here is step one. The first step is to write down (be dirt honest) how you communicate when you are stressed. In other words, what are some of your patterns. What do you do verbally and what do you do nonverbally? What do you say to people when you get angry or stressed? How do you respond to them? And how do you do it non verbally? What kind of facial expressions, what kind of gestures, what kind of movements, what are some of the things you do, because if you identify this, you'll be aware of it, and all of a sudden you'll catch yourself doing it and you'll stop it in the future. So step #1 is we have people write that down. After you've written down all the ways you communicate when you are stressed both verbally and nonverbally, you might get a little chuckle when you take a look at how you really are. Then step two is this: answer this question: how do you get leverage on people when you are not getting your way. I mean when you are not getting your way and you're stressed out, how do you try to get leverage? Do you try to get leverage by crying? Do you try to get leverage by demanding? Do you get leverage to do what you want by pulling rank? Do you get really intense, getting people fearful of you? Do you do it by acting like it doesn't matter and pretending like it nothing ever matters and you're like a martyr? What do you do to try to get leverage? Be honest with yourself. And I'd like you to take a moment to write down the answers to these two questions (0:20 Track D).
Have a group of people who are committed to doing this. Then say, "lets find out how we all communicate when we are stressed so that we can support each other and not being so stressed and taking care of each other, getting the results that we are here for and making the whole process fun." So you do everything that you've done so far. Write down all the verbal and nonverbal cues when they're stressed. Secondly, have them be honest and write down all the ways they try to get leverage on people when they're not getting what they want. Thirdly, ask: how have you communicated well when you were stressed. There have been times when you were stressed and you communicated well others haven't there? Even though you were stressed, you still cared about other people, you still interacted with them with rapport, you made things work. Model yourself, how did you communicate well during that time? How can you communicate even better in the future? You just try to get people thinking.
See, if you focus on the most simple question, ask and you shall receive, you'll get a good answer. Now here's where the exercise gets fun. After they've all done this on paper, we'll get everybody into groups of 5 and have them all stand up. Then we tell them that this must be a fun experience. The first person has a sheepish grin on their face and says: "well the way I used to communicate was..." and everyone laughs and teases them about it. Then the second question they answer is, "Well the way I used to try to get leverage on people was..." and again everyone teases and harasses them. Then they go to the third question. Here they'll say, "the way I think you guys see me when I'm stressed is..." Now we tell people in this exercise that it might be smart to tell people exactly how you think they see you with full honesty because they probably won't. Then the fourth question is, "How do you guys see me when I'm stressed?" Usually when most of these people get to the third step they say, "I think you guys see me as an absolute jerk." People start laughing hysterically and they say, "Well now that you mention it, it does come across that way." And what happens is that you have people angry at each other, but when you see this other person doing a characterture of themself, talking about how they're being a jerk or ridiculous or dumb, or whatever the case may be, laughter comes in. And does laughter ever change human communication. What also happens, is that the person finishes the exercises by saying, "In the future when I'm stressed, here's how I'm going to communicate to you guys, and I want your help. When you see me doing this, can you tell me 'hey can you communicate with me like the way we were in the seminar please.' And I'd like to have permission to come to ask you for help." What this creates is a bond. Again, this works with a family as powerfully as it does with a corporation.
And if you really do it all out, and it doesn't take much to do it because it's fun, and when things are fun people will do a lot more of it, what happens is two things occur: Number 1, you start identifying your own patterns, and when you start teasing yourself in those areas, you'll catch yourself in the future and you'll even laugh at yourself. That'll stop the stress pattern and cause you to communicate so much more effectively that things will really work between you and the people you're talking with. Number 2 you'll catch each other doing this. And this is good because we all get off track and we all need a little help no matter how great a communicator we are. So if we really want to master our life, one thing we've got to do is, master the patterns of communicating when we are stressed and create some better patterns, ones that empower us.
Now let's go a step further than this. Beyond stress, what else keeps us from having a communication that works between two people? If we want to make sure communication really works, that makes each person feel good and creates a new result in our lives, business, family, relationship, the only way we'll make sure the communication works is if we understand that communication fails to work when two people have a different reality about something. What this means is: when two people get together and they feel very strongly about what something means, and they have a different idea about what something means.
Some people have managed to lose a leg or an arm and they aren't upset about it. Why? Because the meaning to them is not loss. Most people's emotion starts with a sense of loss. They feel like they've lost respect or they've lost love, the person doesn't care as much about them anymore and they feel a sense of loss. They convert that loss into a feeling of hurt, and then they convert that hurt into a feeling of anger. Then sometimes they express it, and sometimes they keep it in, and eventually for many people it becomes depression because they don't deal with it. Well most of our losses are made up in our head. It's the meaning we link to it. The guy who lost his leg to the shark does not have a sense of loss, and he's not depressed, he's not angry, he's not even hurt! Just because he mastered the meaning in himself. The problem is somebody would say to him, "What's the matter with you? Have you lost track of reality? What's the matter with you, you've lost your leg!" And they'll try to sit there and try to get him to there idea of reality. See if you've ever had an upset with somebody else, if your communication is ever broken down, its either because you're stressed or it's because you and this other person have a different view of perception in this moment, you have a different meaning that you've attached in this same situation. One person thinks doing one thing is wrong, the other person thinks doing that thing is right. And that's where communication breaks down.
So how do we turn it around? The answer is, you build a bridge. A reality bridge. And a reality bridge is a way for us to realize that, hey! The reason we are communicating, the reason we are doing this is, even though we both have different views on this is because we want to make our lives better for each other, we want to make our business better for each other. We want to stay connected, we want to build a bridge that causes us to continue to feel good about each other while we look for a solution that bridges our realities. How do I take all of this verbalization and make it simple? Let's start with this, they are a couple core beliefs that you need to have about other people if you want to communicate well. What happens if you have these beliefs is that you'll interpret other people's behaviors in a way where you don't judge people, where you don't hold a reality that is so different from them that you can't have rapport. See I can tell you how you can destroy communication for the rest of your life with anybody. It's very simple, all you have to do is judge people, make people wrong.
Here's the cardinal rule that you must never violate if you want a relationship to last, if you want communication to be strong between you and another person: never, ever, ever, ever question another person's intent. NEVER QUESTION ANOTHER PERSON'S INTENT.
You can question all day long whether my behaviors are the best behaviors or the right behaviors in a given situation. But if you question whether or not I was doing it for the right reasons, like whether "I was doing it to hurt you" or because "I don't care about you" what do you think that does about the way I feel towards you? Well one thing that that does is that it makes me feel a sense of loss and it makes me feel hurt. Like, "How could you think that way about me, obviously I care about you." And if you keep fighting and you keep attacking pretty soon you will destroy that communication with that person, maybe even destroy the relationship if you aren't careful. So how can we get around that? Again, it must be by interpreting human beings and human behavior in a whole new way by adopting some new beliefs. And here's the first belief that you need to operate from if you want to build quality communication from now on. And it's simply this: people are not their behaviors. See if someone does something, it isn't necessarily who they are or what they are about. Haven't you ever done something where you said to yourself after you did it, "ah I can't believe I just said that or did it!"? Of course you have. And have you ever done something and been embarrassed? Have you ever said, "ah I wish I hadn't said that or treated that person this way, that's not what I'm about."? I bet you have. The reality is, you weren't being yourself in that moment, you are not your behaviors, certainly you are more than your behaviors. You are more than your mind or anything else. So if you're that way, aren't other people the same? See can't you look at other people and say, "I don't like that behavior," but see if you attack a person individually you have a problem. Because we all respond to personal attacks by responding with an attack of our own. We defend or we deny, or we push back even harder than the person pushed at us. See if somebody appears to you to be vicious, the first thing you want to do is use a softer word. Maybe they weren't vicious, maybe they were unkind. And secondly that doesn't mean that they are an unkind person. That doesn't mean that you should make excuses for them or let them continue to do it, but you don't want to judge somebody.
Judging someone breaks down the lines of communication. No one wants to be judged, least of all, you. So make sure you give to other people what you want. Give people the benefit of the doubt, and know that if they did something that appears to be selfish, it doesn't mean that they're selfish. Don't generalize about people, or your communication will be destroyed.
Remember the core belief that: people are always dong the best they can with the resources they have. Meaning: this person in front of you is not doing there job and they keep screwing up and you're getting upset with them, you need to stop and say, "ah this person has done the best they can with the resources they have." They're not an unresourceful person, they're just in an unresourceful state. What you need to remember is that you need to change their state, not judge the person.
Thirdly, remember the belief that no matter how thin you slice it, there are always two sides. When you are starting to feel really righteous, and when you are really judging somebody, like "they are really screwing up and I'm doing the right things," remember the phrase, "no matter how I slice it, there are always two sides." There's another side to this no matter how strongly you feel.
And now there is the belief that can transform how you interact with anyone for the rest of your life, especially in stressful situations. By the way, it is a belief that comes from a book, A Course In Miracles, which I read years ago. In any human communication, the response you get from someone is either a loving response, or a cry for help. Now I know that this sounds a little crazy, especially when somebody comes to you and says, "You're really upsetting me!" and they scream at you. It's hard for us to stop and say, "well that's a cry for help." But the truth is, if we just remember and operate by this belief, it will empower us. When people are angry, remember what we learned from emotions is that they are not really angry, what they really are is that they have a sense of hurt. And they feel hurt because they have a sense of loss. Understand that when somebody yells or is upset, or they're frustrated, what they are actually doing is that they are crying out for help, they're saying "I'm frustrated, I'm upset, I need help!" And if we hear that, if we really see that someone is crying for help, that they're not angry with us, that they are really upset inside, we can really communicate back to them in a way that is really empowering. We won't take it personally. If we don't take things personally you are less liable to attack back. But you know what the problem is? We respond to a cry for help with a cry for help (disc 4 Track F 3:00).
I had an experience with my mom that was rather interesting. The background story I should tell you is that at my household I had about a couple hundred calls each days at the office and 50 to 125 at home each day. It's a bit of a challenge with my assistants and I to respond. As it happens, my mom had called a few times, but I hadn't gotten the message. By the 3rd and 4th time she had gotten to a unique state. She left me a message one night: "my son is not the President of the United States! I want to speak to him directly instead of these machines and secretaries. If he cares at all he should call me!" This is probably paraphrased, but the bottom line is that I was so angry. I called her up livid! Why was I so angry? Because I said the meaning of this was that she doesn't respect me, how could she question my intent? How could she question whether I care or not? Think about all the things I try to do for her, to try to communicate to her, all the things that we do! When I got on the phone, boy I let her have it! Did that make things better? Haha, no! What did I do? I responded to her cry for help, "Hey I want to connect with you, I'm frustrated, I'm upset, and I love you, and I want to hear from you" with anger, with my own cry for help saying, "how dare you do this...after all these things I do...!" Which is basically me saying, "Hey you hurt my feelings, please tell me something that makes me feel like I really care, and what you're saying isn't true." But neither one of us figured it out for a few minutes. We just responded anger with anger.
Fortunately, we love each other and we have a strong enough bridge, this emotional connection that we always have and we remembered why we communicate with each other. We communicate to feel good. We want both ourselves and the other person to feel good. Why was she calling originally? She wanted to share some things with me because she wanted to hear from me, because she loves me. And I wanted to communicate with her for the same reasons! When we got out of our stress and reactions, and stop screaming for help and realized that, "hey, the bottom line is is that there is just some miscommunication here and we need to go back to what's real which is our relationship." And things turned around. All of us have been guilty of this. We've got to stay out of the stress, we've got to stop assuming what things mean, because that always gets us into trouble.
And when somebody comes at us with intensity in communication, we've got to step aside, not let it hit us and say to ourselves, "this person is crying for help. They are angry, they are upset, they need me to come by and meet their needs, they need someone to come by and say 'I'll help you' or 'I hear you,' 'I'm listening to you,' 'I want your needs to be met,' 'I'm sorry this happened, that's not really my intent, here's what is really true.'" People are just asking for clarification. So what we want to make sure is, no matter what somebody does, when they go crying for help, respond back in a loving way. Because if you respond back in a warm and loving way even when they treat you harshly, they'll remember that. They'll remember that even though they were harsh with you, you were warm with them. And in the future it will make them treat you better and create an even deeper bond in your relationship. Aren't there people in your life, in spite of your stress, in spite of all the stupid meanings you can make up in your head about things, that through it all they will always be your friend and the upsets will never last long term.
My mom and I have that relationship. Don't you have certain family members, friends, associates, that come hell or high water, it doesn't matter what happens, you will always come back to that relationship with that person. You'll always make the communication work long term. Who's somebody like that in your life who there's no question in your mind that your relationship, that your communication you will always be good with. Who would it be? Now as you think of that answer, think about why will communication always work with that person? I'll tell you the answer, you made a decision a long time ago about who that person really is. You decided, this is a good person, this a person who really loves me, this a person I really love, they would never do anything purposely to take advantage of me, to rip me off, to cheat me in some way. They would never do it consciously. If they did something and they did it in some way, it wasn't there intent. In other words, you built a bridge of reality with someone. You decided in your heart who this person was, how they felt about you, and you decided never ever again to question their intent. That's the critical key to long term communication working. And if you want communication to work for a lifetime, decide that the people around you, who they really are, care about you, are really committed to you and you are really committed to them, and don't ever question their intent. You can question their behavior, "this didn't feel good to me," but you can't question their intent, "did you do this to me to rip me off, or to take advantage of me?" that's how you start wounding people in a way that they'll never forget or may never forget. The truth is we can forget anything. If we can forget where our keys are, we can certainly forget anything. But the bottom line is that most people don't try to forget, they just try to hang on to things and feel bad about them for a long time. You don't want to give people ammunition to do that in a way that hurts you and hurts your relationship.
You must realize that the way people create a relationship and maintain a relationship long term, one where there is great communication, great emotion, great feelings, one that's truly successful is that you have to create a bond. They build a bridge. Because we meet people who have different realities all the time, you're going to have different views on things. Something happens that gets you upset and you have one perception, while the other person has another. The way that you have a relationship that's long term is you build a permanent bridge between you that says, "even if we have two different realities, there is always this connection between us, this connection that we always go back to. This emotional bond, this bridge, and we're always going to come back to this place if we start to get upset with each other, we'll get out of our stressed states and remember the connection that's always there, and remember who we really are and what we really mean to each other. See that's where the bond comes in. That's the bridge, and we got to race back to that bridge when there are problems. Not get caught up in the problem, but get back to our feeling of connection with that person and say, "look I need your help, I have a different view than you do on this one, how can we work this out?" See whenever you try to clarify rather than try making things wrong, you start to build the bridge even stronger. You have to build a bridge so strong that nothing can ever shake it. It must be so sturdy, and sturdiness comes from deciding that you'll never questioning this person's intent ever again. You may not like their behavior, you may not like their view, but you always know that the intent is one to empower you and themselves, that they really care no matter what. That's what makes a relationship last long term, and we've got to do that in business as much as we have to in a one-one relationship, as much as with our children. I got the company with the division that hated each other to go through a process that made them all feel totally connected, where they were all working for the same desires, for the same designs. And there was a dramatic change once there was a decision to build that bond. The first thing to do is to decide to feel connected to that person no matter what the evidence on the outside appears to be. Decide that you are not going to question their intent.
Ask these 7 questions to yourself every time before you communicate with the person you think you are upset with
See, if you focus on the most simple question, ask and you shall receive, you'll get a good answer. Now here's where the exercise gets fun. After they've all done this on paper, we'll get everybody into groups of 5 and have them all stand up. Then we tell them that this must be a fun experience. The first person has a sheepish grin on their face and says: "well the way I used to communicate was..." and everyone laughs and teases them about it. Then the second question they answer is, "Well the way I used to try to get leverage on people was..." and again everyone teases and harasses them. Then they go to the third question. Here they'll say, "the way I think you guys see me when I'm stressed is..." Now we tell people in this exercise that it might be smart to tell people exactly how you think they see you with full honesty because they probably won't. Then the fourth question is, "How do you guys see me when I'm stressed?" Usually when most of these people get to the third step they say, "I think you guys see me as an absolute jerk." People start laughing hysterically and they say, "Well now that you mention it, it does come across that way." And what happens is that you have people angry at each other, but when you see this other person doing a characterture of themself, talking about how they're being a jerk or ridiculous or dumb, or whatever the case may be, laughter comes in. And does laughter ever change human communication. What also happens, is that the person finishes the exercises by saying, "In the future when I'm stressed, here's how I'm going to communicate to you guys, and I want your help. When you see me doing this, can you tell me 'hey can you communicate with me like the way we were in the seminar please.' And I'd like to have permission to come to ask you for help." What this creates is a bond. Again, this works with a family as powerfully as it does with a corporation.
And if you really do it all out, and it doesn't take much to do it because it's fun, and when things are fun people will do a lot more of it, what happens is two things occur: Number 1, you start identifying your own patterns, and when you start teasing yourself in those areas, you'll catch yourself in the future and you'll even laugh at yourself. That'll stop the stress pattern and cause you to communicate so much more effectively that things will really work between you and the people you're talking with. Number 2 you'll catch each other doing this. And this is good because we all get off track and we all need a little help no matter how great a communicator we are. So if we really want to master our life, one thing we've got to do is, master the patterns of communicating when we are stressed and create some better patterns, ones that empower us.
Now let's go a step further than this. Beyond stress, what else keeps us from having a communication that works between two people? If we want to make sure communication really works, that makes each person feel good and creates a new result in our lives, business, family, relationship, the only way we'll make sure the communication works is if we understand that communication fails to work when two people have a different reality about something. What this means is: when two people get together and they feel very strongly about what something means, and they have a different idea about what something means.
Some people have managed to lose a leg or an arm and they aren't upset about it. Why? Because the meaning to them is not loss. Most people's emotion starts with a sense of loss. They feel like they've lost respect or they've lost love, the person doesn't care as much about them anymore and they feel a sense of loss. They convert that loss into a feeling of hurt, and then they convert that hurt into a feeling of anger. Then sometimes they express it, and sometimes they keep it in, and eventually for many people it becomes depression because they don't deal with it. Well most of our losses are made up in our head. It's the meaning we link to it. The guy who lost his leg to the shark does not have a sense of loss, and he's not depressed, he's not angry, he's not even hurt! Just because he mastered the meaning in himself. The problem is somebody would say to him, "What's the matter with you? Have you lost track of reality? What's the matter with you, you've lost your leg!" And they'll try to sit there and try to get him to there idea of reality. See if you've ever had an upset with somebody else, if your communication is ever broken down, its either because you're stressed or it's because you and this other person have a different view of perception in this moment, you have a different meaning that you've attached in this same situation. One person thinks doing one thing is wrong, the other person thinks doing that thing is right. And that's where communication breaks down.
So how do we turn it around? The answer is, you build a bridge. A reality bridge. And a reality bridge is a way for us to realize that, hey! The reason we are communicating, the reason we are doing this is, even though we both have different views on this is because we want to make our lives better for each other, we want to make our business better for each other. We want to stay connected, we want to build a bridge that causes us to continue to feel good about each other while we look for a solution that bridges our realities. How do I take all of this verbalization and make it simple? Let's start with this, they are a couple core beliefs that you need to have about other people if you want to communicate well. What happens if you have these beliefs is that you'll interpret other people's behaviors in a way where you don't judge people, where you don't hold a reality that is so different from them that you can't have rapport. See I can tell you how you can destroy communication for the rest of your life with anybody. It's very simple, all you have to do is judge people, make people wrong.
Here's the cardinal rule that you must never violate if you want a relationship to last, if you want communication to be strong between you and another person: never, ever, ever, ever question another person's intent. NEVER QUESTION ANOTHER PERSON'S INTENT.
You can question all day long whether my behaviors are the best behaviors or the right behaviors in a given situation. But if you question whether or not I was doing it for the right reasons, like whether "I was doing it to hurt you" or because "I don't care about you" what do you think that does about the way I feel towards you? Well one thing that that does is that it makes me feel a sense of loss and it makes me feel hurt. Like, "How could you think that way about me, obviously I care about you." And if you keep fighting and you keep attacking pretty soon you will destroy that communication with that person, maybe even destroy the relationship if you aren't careful. So how can we get around that? Again, it must be by interpreting human beings and human behavior in a whole new way by adopting some new beliefs. And here's the first belief that you need to operate from if you want to build quality communication from now on. And it's simply this: people are not their behaviors. See if someone does something, it isn't necessarily who they are or what they are about. Haven't you ever done something where you said to yourself after you did it, "ah I can't believe I just said that or did it!"? Of course you have. And have you ever done something and been embarrassed? Have you ever said, "ah I wish I hadn't said that or treated that person this way, that's not what I'm about."? I bet you have. The reality is, you weren't being yourself in that moment, you are not your behaviors, certainly you are more than your behaviors. You are more than your mind or anything else. So if you're that way, aren't other people the same? See can't you look at other people and say, "I don't like that behavior," but see if you attack a person individually you have a problem. Because we all respond to personal attacks by responding with an attack of our own. We defend or we deny, or we push back even harder than the person pushed at us. See if somebody appears to you to be vicious, the first thing you want to do is use a softer word. Maybe they weren't vicious, maybe they were unkind. And secondly that doesn't mean that they are an unkind person. That doesn't mean that you should make excuses for them or let them continue to do it, but you don't want to judge somebody.
Judging someone breaks down the lines of communication. No one wants to be judged, least of all, you. So make sure you give to other people what you want. Give people the benefit of the doubt, and know that if they did something that appears to be selfish, it doesn't mean that they're selfish. Don't generalize about people, or your communication will be destroyed.
Remember the core belief that: people are always dong the best they can with the resources they have. Meaning: this person in front of you is not doing there job and they keep screwing up and you're getting upset with them, you need to stop and say, "ah this person has done the best they can with the resources they have." They're not an unresourceful person, they're just in an unresourceful state. What you need to remember is that you need to change their state, not judge the person.
Thirdly, remember the belief that no matter how thin you slice it, there are always two sides. When you are starting to feel really righteous, and when you are really judging somebody, like "they are really screwing up and I'm doing the right things," remember the phrase, "no matter how I slice it, there are always two sides." There's another side to this no matter how strongly you feel.
And now there is the belief that can transform how you interact with anyone for the rest of your life, especially in stressful situations. By the way, it is a belief that comes from a book, A Course In Miracles, which I read years ago. In any human communication, the response you get from someone is either a loving response, or a cry for help. Now I know that this sounds a little crazy, especially when somebody comes to you and says, "You're really upsetting me!" and they scream at you. It's hard for us to stop and say, "well that's a cry for help." But the truth is, if we just remember and operate by this belief, it will empower us. When people are angry, remember what we learned from emotions is that they are not really angry, what they really are is that they have a sense of hurt. And they feel hurt because they have a sense of loss. Understand that when somebody yells or is upset, or they're frustrated, what they are actually doing is that they are crying out for help, they're saying "I'm frustrated, I'm upset, I need help!" And if we hear that, if we really see that someone is crying for help, that they're not angry with us, that they are really upset inside, we can really communicate back to them in a way that is really empowering. We won't take it personally. If we don't take things personally you are less liable to attack back. But you know what the problem is? We respond to a cry for help with a cry for help (disc 4 Track F 3:00).
I had an experience with my mom that was rather interesting. The background story I should tell you is that at my household I had about a couple hundred calls each days at the office and 50 to 125 at home each day. It's a bit of a challenge with my assistants and I to respond. As it happens, my mom had called a few times, but I hadn't gotten the message. By the 3rd and 4th time she had gotten to a unique state. She left me a message one night: "my son is not the President of the United States! I want to speak to him directly instead of these machines and secretaries. If he cares at all he should call me!" This is probably paraphrased, but the bottom line is that I was so angry. I called her up livid! Why was I so angry? Because I said the meaning of this was that she doesn't respect me, how could she question my intent? How could she question whether I care or not? Think about all the things I try to do for her, to try to communicate to her, all the things that we do! When I got on the phone, boy I let her have it! Did that make things better? Haha, no! What did I do? I responded to her cry for help, "Hey I want to connect with you, I'm frustrated, I'm upset, and I love you, and I want to hear from you" with anger, with my own cry for help saying, "how dare you do this...after all these things I do...!" Which is basically me saying, "Hey you hurt my feelings, please tell me something that makes me feel like I really care, and what you're saying isn't true." But neither one of us figured it out for a few minutes. We just responded anger with anger.
Fortunately, we love each other and we have a strong enough bridge, this emotional connection that we always have and we remembered why we communicate with each other. We communicate to feel good. We want both ourselves and the other person to feel good. Why was she calling originally? She wanted to share some things with me because she wanted to hear from me, because she loves me. And I wanted to communicate with her for the same reasons! When we got out of our stress and reactions, and stop screaming for help and realized that, "hey, the bottom line is is that there is just some miscommunication here and we need to go back to what's real which is our relationship." And things turned around. All of us have been guilty of this. We've got to stay out of the stress, we've got to stop assuming what things mean, because that always gets us into trouble.
And when somebody comes at us with intensity in communication, we've got to step aside, not let it hit us and say to ourselves, "this person is crying for help. They are angry, they are upset, they need me to come by and meet their needs, they need someone to come by and say 'I'll help you' or 'I hear you,' 'I'm listening to you,' 'I want your needs to be met,' 'I'm sorry this happened, that's not really my intent, here's what is really true.'" People are just asking for clarification. So what we want to make sure is, no matter what somebody does, when they go crying for help, respond back in a loving way. Because if you respond back in a warm and loving way even when they treat you harshly, they'll remember that. They'll remember that even though they were harsh with you, you were warm with them. And in the future it will make them treat you better and create an even deeper bond in your relationship. Aren't there people in your life, in spite of your stress, in spite of all the stupid meanings you can make up in your head about things, that through it all they will always be your friend and the upsets will never last long term.
My mom and I have that relationship. Don't you have certain family members, friends, associates, that come hell or high water, it doesn't matter what happens, you will always come back to that relationship with that person. You'll always make the communication work long term. Who's somebody like that in your life who there's no question in your mind that your relationship, that your communication you will always be good with. Who would it be? Now as you think of that answer, think about why will communication always work with that person? I'll tell you the answer, you made a decision a long time ago about who that person really is. You decided, this is a good person, this a person who really loves me, this a person I really love, they would never do anything purposely to take advantage of me, to rip me off, to cheat me in some way. They would never do it consciously. If they did something and they did it in some way, it wasn't there intent. In other words, you built a bridge of reality with someone. You decided in your heart who this person was, how they felt about you, and you decided never ever again to question their intent. That's the critical key to long term communication working. And if you want communication to work for a lifetime, decide that the people around you, who they really are, care about you, are really committed to you and you are really committed to them, and don't ever question their intent. You can question their behavior, "this didn't feel good to me," but you can't question their intent, "did you do this to me to rip me off, or to take advantage of me?" that's how you start wounding people in a way that they'll never forget or may never forget. The truth is we can forget anything. If we can forget where our keys are, we can certainly forget anything. But the bottom line is that most people don't try to forget, they just try to hang on to things and feel bad about them for a long time. You don't want to give people ammunition to do that in a way that hurts you and hurts your relationship.
You must realize that the way people create a relationship and maintain a relationship long term, one where there is great communication, great emotion, great feelings, one that's truly successful is that you have to create a bond. They build a bridge. Because we meet people who have different realities all the time, you're going to have different views on things. Something happens that gets you upset and you have one perception, while the other person has another. The way that you have a relationship that's long term is you build a permanent bridge between you that says, "even if we have two different realities, there is always this connection between us, this connection that we always go back to. This emotional bond, this bridge, and we're always going to come back to this place if we start to get upset with each other, we'll get out of our stressed states and remember the connection that's always there, and remember who we really are and what we really mean to each other. See that's where the bond comes in. That's the bridge, and we got to race back to that bridge when there are problems. Not get caught up in the problem, but get back to our feeling of connection with that person and say, "look I need your help, I have a different view than you do on this one, how can we work this out?" See whenever you try to clarify rather than try making things wrong, you start to build the bridge even stronger. You have to build a bridge so strong that nothing can ever shake it. It must be so sturdy, and sturdiness comes from deciding that you'll never questioning this person's intent ever again. You may not like their behavior, you may not like their view, but you always know that the intent is one to empower you and themselves, that they really care no matter what. That's what makes a relationship last long term, and we've got to do that in business as much as we have to in a one-one relationship, as much as with our children. I got the company with the division that hated each other to go through a process that made them all feel totally connected, where they were all working for the same desires, for the same designs. And there was a dramatic change once there was a decision to build that bond. The first thing to do is to decide to feel connected to that person no matter what the evidence on the outside appears to be. Decide that you are not going to question their intent.
Ask these 7 questions to yourself every time before you communicate with the person you think you are upset with
- Am I willing to learn something valuable from this, and am I willing doing something right now to make this better? You say, "I'm so upset with this person!" The first thing you want to do is to do a reality check. Before you communicate you're upset with them, or before you suppress it, ask yourself the above question: Am I willing to learn something valuable from this, and am I willing doing something right now to make this better? A subquestion you might want to ask if you are still upset is, will making this person wrong help me to make things better? I doubt it.
- What is really upsetting me in this situation? Ask the question, what is the specific meaning that I've linked to this? A way to get this out of your head is to say the phrase, the meaning that I want to link to this situation is _______.
- Could this be a misperception or a misinterpretation on my part? Probably not, but anything is possible. Do I have all the information possible to know absolutely, exactly what this really means? Obviously I've designed the question so you answer, "no." All of a sudden you may not be totally certain about your upset, you may say, "it's possible that I may have misperceived things." You can say that you're upset when it's possible that you're misperceiving this.
- What else could this mean? Remember upsets come out of the meaning we create. So we say, "ok" if it's possible that this meaning was a misperception, if I don't have all the information possible, what else could this mean? It's real important that you come up with some new meanings that are more empowering. Maybe some things that you haven't thought of before. And these things will change your state, they will change how you feel, and therefore you will communicate better with somebody, you won't go out making them wrong. Because we've all had times when we've said, "you did this, and that means this," and found out we were wrong, and then we felt pretty sheepish and pretty silly. So what else could this mean? And I taught this to a group of people, and someone told me, "why don't we come up with one more positive meaning than we have negative meanings from question 2." Maybe I've overloaded her, maybe the tape didn't work, maybe she hired someone else to do it and they didn't get it done, and she didn't find it out in time. Now you become uncertain, and when you are uncertain you not really upset. Now when you communicate you can try to get some clarification from that person rather than making them wrong.
- Very important question: what do I need in order to feel good right now? Find out what it's going to take to feel good now? 8 possibilities: 1, do I need to change my perception on this? 2, do I need to find out more information. 3, do I need to understand this person's viewpoint, why they did this? Yeah I need to know why, if I understood why, then I probably wouldn't be so upset. 4, do I need to know that this person really cares for me or just remember that they do. Well I know that they do. 5, do I need to get a commitment from them? yes, in the future I need them to commit to get what I say to get done. 6 do I need to change the way we're doing something? yes, in order to feel good now, I need a way to change the way we get things done in this process. 7, do I need to apologize to this person? I thought that is an interesting question I never thought of, maybe I need to apologize for being upset when never really knowing what was going on. Maybe I need to apologize for assuming. 8, Do I need to just remember who this person really is, what incredible relationship we have and how much I really love them? Yes.
- How can I communicate my needs in a way that truly empowers the relationship? If we want to feel good, we've got to make sure other people feel good as well. The best way to meet our needs is to find out what they are and find a way to truly communicate them in a way that truly empowers the relationship. You've got to be sincere and you've got to be honest. I would do anything for somebody if they said, "I need your help." Saying, "we need to talk," or "I'm really upset with you" that doesn't set people up to hear you very well. If I tell her how I felt, she may still interpret that as making her wrong, so I need to make it clear that when this situation happened I need to give her the benefit of the doubt since I don't really know what's going on. I just need to clarify something. This feels a lot lighter than straightening something out.
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