Mid-Course Corrections
Sometimes you think you know where you’re going with your work or your personal growth, then, suddenly, life spins you around in a different direction. But if you make a mid-course correction and carry on, things can turn out better than you ever imagined.
A big spin around for me began in about 1981 when I read Getting to Yes by Harvard professors Roger Fisher and William Ury. Till then, I thought negotiation meant something I now call number line tug of war:
• Sam the seller wants to sell his boat, and Beulah the buyer wants to buy a boat.
• Sam wants $35K, so he asks for $40K.
• Beulah assumes Sam asked more than he’s willing to take. So, though she’s really willing to pay $25K, she offers $20K.
• Then they stand on that number line and try to pull each other closer.
Number line tug of war is a competitive form of negotiation. Getting to Yes introduced me to a different kind of negotiation, a collaborative kind I’ll call “interest-driven negotiation.” Instead of starting with numbers, the parties talk about their interests. What are they really trying to achieve?
• Instead of countering Sam’s $40K asking price, Beulah says, “Nice boat. Why are you selling it?”
• Sam replies, “I’m tired of sailing. I want to buy an RV.”
• What if Beulah just happens to have an RV she no longer uses, and Sam likes it?
They swap the boat for the RV. No compromise. That’s what win-win really means. No compromise.
That’s an overly simple example just to show the concept. Fisher & Ury’s book, and my own books, Bridges to Consensus and Love on the Rocks with a Twist apply it to more difficult cases. I tried the interest-driven method, and it helped me. But it wasn’t till I took a Harvard continuing education course taught by Prof. Fisher that I realized learning negotiation from his book was like learning to drive from a book.
We spent eight-hour days for a whole week. We negotiated with partners up to 4 times a day. We practiced dealing with coworkers, neighbors, all kinds of things you don’t think of as negotiation. We learned many communication techniques, like open questions.
“Nice boat. Why are you selling it?” and paraphrasing,
“So, you’re not selling in order to get a bigger boat. What you want is
to switch from sailing to traveling overland. Right?”
By the end of that week, I didn’t just know the skills. I had assimilated them. And they changed my life. Because I have a talent for logical argument. But after that course, if I wanted to persuade someone who disagreed with me, instead of rational argument, I talked about interests. I tried to address their interests in ways that also met my interests, like Sam and Beulah swapping a boat for an RV.
And here’s one lesson about mid-course corrections; you give up something. I cut back on using a talent for logical argument that I had been very proud of. But I also gained something. When I used interest talk, I got my interests met better than if I had argued. And I met those interests while building bridges, rather than burning them. The interest-driven method got me better results even when the other person was trying tug-of-war. But it worked even better when both of us used interest talk.
So the interest-driven method wasn’t a bag of tricks I had to keep close to my chest. I wanted others to use interest talk when dealing with me. Would I prefer someone try to tug me down that number line? Of course not. I prefer they understand my interests
and try to address them.
I not only acquired the skills, I also learned how to teach them. Give the trainees plenty of hands-on practice. I’d always wanted to teach. But not to a captive audience of kids who didn’t want to be there. I wanted to teach adults something useful that they wanted to learn.
So I made a major mid-course correction, a career change. I developed all my own course materials and started going into organizations and training people. I also coached individuals. I gave up a conventional job for riskier self-employment. But I
gained the feeling of making the world a little better. For almost 25 years now, I’ve done this work, while always learning more. For example, I’ve studied how temperament and
culture affect interactions, and I incorporated that into my courses.
One thing I learned from studying how culture intersects consensus building is that collaboration, such as interest talk, comes more naturally to most women—not all, but a majority. Competition, such as tug-of-war, comes more naturally to most men, though not all men. Both types of interactions, collaborative and competitive, have their uses. Ideally, everyone would know both methods and when to use which.
But our society is excessively saturated with hierarchical social structures and customs. Hierarchy is inherently competitive. Political systems, business methods, legal systems, even many leisure activities, all lean way toward competition because, for millennia,
men designed and ran all those systems. Both women and men play number line tug-of-war because that’s the only kind of negotiation they know about, often with lose-lose
results.
Sam asks $40K. Beulah offers $20K. Suppose they compromise at $30K. If Sam really needs $35K to get the kind of RV he wants, he either has to buy a less desirable RV or come up with more money. He loses something. And if Beulah has to sell some bonds before they mature to get an extra $5K, she loses too.
If our imbalance toward competition arose because men have been in charge for so long, and if collaboration comes more naturally to most women, it make sense that equal numbers of women and men in leadership would facilitate a balance of collaboration and competition. There would be some growing pains, but eventually, everyone would have opportunities to observe and learn both collaborative and competitive methods. Then, they could choose the one that works best in a given situation.
In addition to what the sociologists and economists tell us, I found one more reason equality for women benefits an entire society—we’ll all do a better job of building consensus.
I designed a way to help people learn skills and promote equal status for women. First, I train people in collaborative interactions. Let them experience the improved results in all those hands-on exercises. Let them discover that, while they do better using interest talk even when their partner tries to use tug-of-war, they come out even better if the partner also uses interest talk. So they want other people to know the method Then, I teach them that equal status for women will facilitate greater use of the interest-driven method both female and male trainees have learned to value.
Now if a person who hasn’t experienced the interest-driven method hands on were to read how I relate this method to the societal value of equal status for women, he might blow off my writing, and my services, before I had a chance to train him. So my
writings—my books and my blog—steered clear of political issues, and focused on skills.
But on Nov. 8, 2016, life spun around and knocked the props out from under my professional plans.
I won’t get into the pros and cons of Hillary Clinton. She’s not a candidate anymore anyway. But whether one agreed with her or not, whether one voted for her or not, it’s a plain fact that she had a huge amount of support. When she didn’t win, I felt that, if a woman with all that support couldn’t get elected in this country, what chance was there
for my hopes of making a difference teaching collaboration and relating it to women’s equality? No chance!
I wanted to advocate for more women leaders. But now, the implicit bias against women leaders, not to mention overt misogyny, felt overwhelming. I had given up a sound career for risky self employment. At age 67, I had spent about half my adult life building my expertise, my reputation and my following. Now, it all felt like a waste.
I’ve had my share of grief. But when I’ve lost loves ones in painful ways, I never despaired. I never felt like I couldn’t go on or didn’t want to. But on Nov. 8, 2016 I did despair of my professional hopes and dreams. I turned off the TV, went to my room and curled up on top of the bed in a fetal position. I felt like I wanted to sink into that bed, all the way through the bottom, and never get up.
But in time, I did get up and gradually started reaching out to others. Here are some things I learned within the next day or two:
• A community college instructor, and friend, reported Hispanic and gay students phoning him to say they were too scared to come to class on Nov. 9.
• One of our Unitarian Universalist ministers wrote that someone had driven a truck straight at her 20-year-old child, who dodged it, but was in mortal fear. The mother holds liberal beliefs and is bisexual.
• I read reports of schoolboys grabbing girls by the crotch, and girls too scared to report it.
• I read about hate messages on walls, on cars, in backpacks, and more.
So I decided to make another mid-course correction. As usual, I gave up some things. I gave up the policy of avoiding political issues in my writing. So, no doubt, I will lose readers, which means I’m giving up potential clients. I recalled William Burke’s idea that evil can triumph if good people do nothing, or in my case, write nothing.
Both the girls who were afraid to go to school and the boys who scared them were laboring under the misimpression that crotch grabbing is now okay. Both the truck driver who drove at the minister’s child and that terrified young person were laboring under the impression that bigotry and violence were now okay.
So, as soon as I was sufficiently recovered, I posted a blog article that mentioned the truck driving, the crotch grabbing and other incidents. I said that victims and perpetrators alike felt that bigotry was now OK. And I wrote, “I am going on record to say that bigotry is not OK with me. Here are some other things that aren’t OK with me: oligarchy, theocracy, white supremacy, misogyny.”
And I gained something, a huge sense of inner peace from publicly owning my beliefs on these political issues in writing. Now I know most of you have heard my Silver Rule of
Persuasion, “Avoid making people wrong.” Criticizing, blaming, arguing, etc. triggers resistance to your message. So, when I wrote what’s not OK with me, was I breaking my own rule?
Well, not so much. Because that rule applies to someone with whom you’re trying to build consensus or whom you’re trying to persuade. There had been a time when the idealist in me hoped I could eventually influence even people like that truck driver.
But that would be a very long-term project, with very low chances of success, to try and reach the tiny percentage of the population who do things like driving trucks at people. In this mid-course correction, I wasn’t focused on reaching extremists on the fringes of the political spectrum.
I wrote that blog, firstly, to offer moral support to those who felt marginalized and scared. Secondly, I wrote to inspire the huge number of people between those political extremes, who don’t approve of harassment and violence, to speak up or take whatever kind of action they could get comfortable with. So, yes, I made the truck driver wrong, but I still minimized the wrong-making. If, instead of “bigotry is not OK with me,” I had written, “the actions of that bigoted truck driver are not OK with me,” not only would the extremists get even angrier, but my message would be less persuasive to people in the moderate middle, whom I did want to reach.
In some future blog articles, and possibly new books, I plan to write for those who, like me, wish to connect with the non-extremists. I’ll write about how to express ourselves in ways that are least likely to trigger resistance, and most likely to build bridges. I’ll be teaching and modeling how to use the Silver Rule and other best practices to make your words more persuasive. I’d love for people like you all to consider a mid-course
correction that includes reaching out to the moderate middle. And I’d love for my writings to help you do that. Because I’m already reading on social media about people who want to reach out and listen and understand why others voted differently than themselves. People want to build bridges. And I truly believe that, distressing as the current political climate may be, it also offers an opportunity to heal some of the
polarization, and for our country to come out better and stronger in the long term, if we make the right mid-course corrections.
If you join me, you’ll give up some things. You’ll give up time. Because this isn’t going to happen by clicking “share” on some handy dandy Facebook meme. It’s going to take real conversations. And that’s where I can help. That’s my job. That’s why I’ve spent half my life on this stuff. If I write something helpful, I want it to reach as many people
as possible.
So if you’ve never seen my blog or my books, I’d be honored and grateful if you have a look. When you read something helpful, please share it with others in any way that’s comfortable for you—personal conversation, email, social media. And I’ll give you one tip right now. Don’t immerse yourself in negative news or negative conversations about things everyone’s already heard six times. You don’t need to know about every hate crime to know what you want to do to support the marginalized. And you do need breaks. Long breaks where you concentrate on something positive and totally absorbing. You need to laugh, every single day. It’s better for you, and ultimately, better for your cause.
We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few months or years, but there will be changes. Some of those changes will spin us around just when we thought we’d found the right direction. And when they do, we may feel the need to go curl up on the bed for a while. But then, let’s get up, make a mid-course correction and carry on, knowing that, though we’re giving up something, we’ll also gain something.
Amen. Blessed be. www.persuasioncoach.com
P. S. I’m now working on a third book, Bridges to Understanding. It
will explain in more detail how you can make the world a little better
with enlightened communication skills. Meanwhile, my previous
books, Bridges to Consensus and Love on the Rocks with a Twist, are
available on Amazon in both print and Kindle editions.