Tag: self-improvement

Near-enemies

Fabrizio1 Comment

I love the concept of near-enemies.

In Buddhism, near-enemies are manifestations that are quite close to a desired state, yet are actually a whole lot different. So different, they are actually dangerous.

A desired state of Buddhists, for example, is equanimity. That is to say, a way of being calm and focused no matter what happens around you. It is “stability in the face of the fluctuations of worldly fortune“.

Equanimity has a clear enemy, a “far-enemy”. That is restlesness, anxiety, the desire to have things the way we want them to be. The near-enemy, though, is indifference.

From the outside, equanimity and indifference look perhaps the same. Yet they are substantially different: equanimity is not desiring things to be one way or the other; indifference is not caring whether things are one way or the other. With equanimity, we feel everything: the good, the bad, the ugly, the despair, the difficulties, the joy, the sorrow. We are simply not stuck there. With indifference, we feel nothing.

This makes me think of how much we are nowadays focused on near-enemies.

Activity, for example, that is an active force, a state in which things happen and are being done, is often mistaken for its near-enemy busyness, that rarely leads to any progress.

In the same way, our popularity (definitely not a Buddhist concept), that is the condition in which we are liked, admired, supported by others, is often mistaken for its modern near-enemies likes, fans, followers, visits, clicks or any other vanity metric of your choice.

If we expand the concept a little, we can also see how easily we are distracted by near-enemies in our pursue of something we deem important. We do not want our community to be racist or bigot or closed, we want to pursue an ideal of openness. And to do that, we aim at a target, we attack, we label and brand, we separate. Ending up in a community that is even more close than it was before.

Near-enemies are an incredibly powerful concept. If we manage to go behind their seduction, if we do not fall for their attractiveness and easiness of reach, if we force ourselves to open to the real objective of our journey. That is when the highest states that we want to achieve – for us, our families, companies, communities – become not only attainable, but also natural.

What type of listener?

Fabrizio7 Comments

One of the things we most seek is a good listener. Somebody who can just shut up and intensely, passionately, attentively listen to what we have to say.

But are we any good at that?

During a coaching course I took, professor Bob Thomson taught me the five different types of listening.

The first one is not listening. It happens when you are in presence of somebody else speaking, yet you are not really paying any attention to what is being said. A great example is when somebody is in a meeting and continuously checks the phone. They are not really listening, they are just physically present.

The second type is listening, waiting to speak. This is when we pay just enough attention to the what is being said to be able to say something as soon as there’s a pause. It happens quite a lot early in a relationship, as we want to make a good impression, and we can’t wait to follow up with something smart. Most of what is said is missed.

The third type is listening to disagree. It happens very muhc in arguments and heated discussions, it’s essentially taking some of the things the other person is saying to make a point. Words are often misunderstood in this scenario, as the real meaning is not at all important. What matters is finding ways to support and strengthen our own view.

The fourth type is listening to understand. While the first three types are very common, this is incredibly difficult to practice and meet. This is sitting in a conversation saying “I want to see the World from your point of view”. We put ourselves aside for a moment, and try to the best of our possibilities to listen and empathize with the other person.

The fifth one is listening to help the other understand. I know the fourth type seemed magical, and as it is so rare, we might be satisfied with it. Yet, it still demands some kind of negotiation: for me to understand your perspective, I need to take my worldview, your worldview, and somehow make sense of them both. And this often means I “distort” your worldview to try to make it fit mine.

The fifth type of listening, on the other hand, says “It does not matter if I understand you or not, what matters is that you understand yourself”. It is pure service. I am here, I am present, I am listening, and I want to help you understand what you are feeling, living, experiencing.

Listening to help the other understand means “I” am out of the equation. Not momentarily, but completely. What you are saying does not have an impact on my assumption, I am not defending anything or trying to understand anything, as I am strong in my own awareness. I want to make yourself strong as well, hence I listen.

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key — a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they’ve been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.

Alain de Botton

Before you demand a certain type of listening, be aware of what you can offer. Most likely, the two will go hand in hand.

Us and them

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We care a whole lot more about what is done to us than what we do to others. It’s not that we are mean and inconsiderate, it’s just the way we are. We feel our pain, our loss, our despair, our loneliness. We see others’ success, joy, delight, harmony.

When others come to us with their pain, the best we often manage to do is saying “I know how that feels”. When they come with our triumphs, we say “it’s not how it looks”.

The shift is: we all feel pain, loss, despair, loneliness, as we all achieve success, joy, delight and harmony. We don’t mean bad to others, others do not mean bad to us. We can be open.

Honest and open stories

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We are surrounded by stories.

We tell stories all the times. About ourselves, our family, our work, the situation we are in, what happened yesterday, the last weekend, the last time we went on vacation, our childhood, our adulthood. Others do as well, and so all we hear all day long, every day of the week, are stories.

Companies tell stories as well. The story of a company is sometimes more complicated, as it is a mixture of its values, products, customers, stakeholders, shareholders, and so on. There are, in general, more interests involved in the story of a company, yet that does not mean it is not a story.

As your exposure increases, and this is valid both for individuals and for companies, you progressively lose the grip on your story. Sometimes you might hear that somebody does not believe it, that they have a different version, that they have seen you do something that is not line with what you are narrating.

Facebook has for long time been the platform bringing people together. Its story was one of communality, of moments and likes, on sharing interests (and stories) with your friends and family. Nowadays, Facebook is the platform that has rigged elections in many countries, where hatred and fraud spread, and people with mean intentions can organise to easily find an audience.

Amazon has for long time been the best shop in the world. Its story was one of outstanding customer service, attention to details, low price and convenience. Nowadays, even though it is not remotely in as bad waters as Facebook (and other social media), we hear more and more about how it basically pays no taxes, how it devours every competitor in every market it chooses to enter, and how its CEO is the richest person in the world while its employees are sometimes overworked and strictly surveilled.

The more a story is told, the more its audience grows, the more the power of the person or the people telling it, the more it is difficult to believe it. It’s just how it is, and the only thing that you can do to attempt to mitigate this risk is being honest and open.

Honest, because the closer the story you are telling is to how things actually are, the easier it is to stay on its track. How do you behave when nobody’s watching? If your interest is in getting people together, why is your main source of revenue advertising?

Open, because in telling the story you need to be sensible of the people you are affecting. Is my story beneficial to my community? Am I willing to lose profit to address something that unexpectedly happened while I was living my story? Am I ready to quit, should the damage be too much?

Telling stories is complicated, and we don’t spend quite as much time as we should trying to define them.

The role of praise

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If you are leading people, it is your duty to identify and praise the good work of the people you lead.

On the other hand, if you are the one who is supposed to receive the praise, you have a couple of choices.

You can wait for the praise, build up the expectation, imagine and wonder how it would feel, rehearse what you are going to say, make of the praise the motivator for your next endeavour, and inevitably feel down should the praise not come.

Or you can increase the awareness around the fact that it is not the praise that makes your work good, be proud of what you know you have achieved, and move on to the next task.

[…] a lot of our wrong conceptions, or many of them, have to do with wrong conceptions about what is happiness and what is the cause of happiness. So we think, sense objects, external things, external people, that those things are the source of our happiness and so “I want this. This can make me happy and this is gonna make me happy, and they’re all mine. I’m not going to give them up.”

Venerable Thubten Chodron