by James Brooke
It works like this: as humans we make sense of the world by formulating things into rules. We also create rules about ourselves. These help to create the sense of a consistent self. So far this is all quite reasonable. The problem arises because these rules can easily become hard baked into something too rigid. We make rules for ourselves such as: I must always be liked; I should always be nice; I should always be the joker; and – a common one – I must always be respected.
You spot the theme. These are the must-always and should-always that we apply to ourselves. Think about an incident where the outcome was something undesirable for you when you felt it really should not have been and it is likely that it came down to a must-always or a should-always rule that was conducting things for you under the surface.
Case Study 2.4
Mike had a short-haul London to Paris business flight. It was the middle of the day, which should have been a quiet, hassle-free time to fly. He had just enough time to polish off a couple of spreadsheets before his meeting in Paris. But Mike ended up sitting next to Mr Grumpiflier. Mr Grumpiflier saw it as a matter of pride to sit with his elbow permanently positioned, not only over the armrest, but over Mike’s seat. Mike gently shuffled his arm roughly in the area of the armrest, hoping Mr Grumpiflier would move his arm, but to no avail. Mr Grumpiflier wasn’t budging. Mike even asked Mr Grumpiflier if he could spare him a little room. Mr Grumpiflier harrumphed and looked affronted, shuffled his arm a little and put it back pretty much where it was.
Rigid-rule Mike reckons this guy has no right to behave like this. Mike has a right to sit in his seat and nobody has the right to steal his all-important share of the space on the seat boundary. Rigid-rule Mike spends a stressful flight in an increasingly tense game of elbow shuffle. He arrives irritable and tired, and he never got those spreadsheets done.
Bulletproof Mike also values respect, but he is capable of being flexible if it means a better outcome. Recognising the stalemate, he looks for another empty seat. He moves to it, relaxes and pops open his laptop.
Bulletproof Mike does not feel his sense of self-worth has crumbled because he left Grumpiflier to it. Who knows why it was such a big deal to Grumpiflier? Either way, it was Grumpiflier’s problem, not Mike’s.
Rigid-rule Mike holds the belief: ‘I must always be respected.’ Flexible Mike retains the essence of this, but reframes it in a way that is more flexible and therefore works better for him: ‘I prefer people to show respect, but if they are really not going to, it doesn’t hurt me. I’m okay.’
Case Study 2.5
Hannah is a corporate conference organiser. She worked on one conference where – for reasons that she couldn’t figure out – the atmosphere seemed fairly poisonous and Hannah felt that she was subjected to some really frosty attitudes. The harder Hannah tried, the worse the situation became. Hannah felt really low after the event and complained that she felt her confidence and sparkle had been extinguished. It turned out that Hannah was getting much of her self-worth from the idea that: I can always make people like me. This had become hard-baked into Hannah as a rigid rule: I must always be popular. When this wasn’t working for Hannah, she felt helpless, as if she had no option but to continually try harder. Then Hannah changed her rigid rule to a flexible preference: I prefer to be popular, but if sometimes that doesn’t seem to be the case, I am okay. She found that, as a result, she was far better able to cope in a range of situations, and was more confident going into a new situation, regardless of what lay in wait.
People often question our recommendation to be flexible about one’s need to be respected. For many of us, respect is an important value by which we live our lives. But it’s the need to be respected that can lead people to behave in a way that is, at best, counterproductive. That’s why the emphasis is on being flexible. And, of course, we are not suggesting you abandon ‘self-respect’, but self-respect is quite different from must-have-respect-from-others. The former is entirely within your control. The latter is not.
We can find ourselves applying rigid rules to ourselves (‘I must always’) or to other people (‘people should always’). The issue is the same: rigid is fragile, flexible is stronger. Again, it’s the equivalent of the silk shirt under your outfit.
You have probably spotted the formula by now. Become aware of rigid thinking (‘I must always’) and modify it to flexible thinking (‘I prefer to … but I’m okay if …’).
Below are some common rigid rules. Try modifying them to become flexible preferences:
• I must always be popular …
• I must always make people laugh …
• I must always be respected …
• I must always have the answers …
• I must always control a situation …
Case Study 2.6
Rhina was head of accounts at a large advertising agency. Once a week she would attend the meeting of its business development team. The team tended to consider Rhina’s input as trivial bureaucracy. They tended to be curt, abrasive and dismissive, but Rhina was relentlessly courteous. Her assistant Viktor pointed this out and asked Rhina why she continued to bother being polite, when the rest of the guys were so rude. Rhina pointed out that courtesy may not be one of their values, but it was one of hers, so why would she let discourteous people choose her behaviour for her.
Replace your old rigid rule with your new flexible preference. Test drive your new flexible preference for a couple of weeks (remember, you have nothing to lose; you can always go back to your old rigid rule at any time). Become aware of how your flexible preference is working. When you would normally react in a way that is driven by your rigid rule, take a pause, take a breath, and act in line with your flexible preference.
Summary
The rules we define about ourselves help us to create the sense of a consistent self, but we lose effectiveness when our personal rules become too rigid
Bulletproof people don’t maintain must-always and should-always rigid rules
Bulletproof people develop flexible preferences: ‘If that doesn’t happen, I’m okay’
Bulletproof people are like flexible trees, swaying in the harshest wind but never losing their firm rooting
Don’t let your cave dweller pick your fights
‘I must always be respected’ can be one of the most destructive of rigid rules. In the US, among the most common motives for homicide is the one termed ‘altercation arising from relatively trivial causes’. How often are we left bewildered on hearing of a road rage incident that has escalated out of all proportion? How often are we surprised by the power of our own anger when someone drives discourteously? We may justify it to ourselves in terms of concern for safety but we would suggest that these primal responses have another source. It is our inner cave dweller demanding respect. It is no surprise that the ‘culture of respect’ tends to take root more insidiously in environments of greatest social deprivation. Where you have little else, a perceived diminution of your sense of respect can cause your universe to crumble.8
Let’s look at an example. In August 2010, Ranjit Nankani was sentenced to a minimum of 18 years in prison at the Old Bailey for the murder of Gary Johnson. Johnson had been thrown into the air and partially decapitated when Nankani drove his 4x4 at him, hitting him full on, before crashing into a line of parked cars. As Nankani lay trapped in his ruined vehicle, the body of his victim just feet away, he was shot and injured by a friend of Johnson’s called Dwayne McPherson. After the trial Mr Johnson’s mother, Joyce, said: ‘Eighteen years is not enough. I will never see Gary. Skye (the victim’s daughter) will never know her dad.’
The reason for this particularly brutal murder? Nankani allegedly stepped on Johnson’s toe in a nightclub, which started a row between the pair.9
The fact that humans frequently go to extraordinary lengths to settle scores, at great personal cost, with no rational benefit, is well documented by psychologists.
In the workplace, thankfully, murder is infrequen
t, but most of us at some time pursue a trivial slight or perceived injustice to the point of conflict. We may tell ourselves that it is a matter of principle. In reality, it is our inner cave dweller at work. The compulsion to get even, to settle a score, with no identifiable rational gain, has an adaptive explanation. It is one of those instincts that appears to be encoded in us, but which tends to be counterproductive in our modern environment.
In our ancestors’ more dangerous and hostile environment, it was a wise survival strategy to give the unambiguous signal that you were somebody not to be messed with, under any circumstances. To give this signal to your potential foes, it made sense to respond consistently – even if that meant disproportionately – to the most trivial slight. To let something go would have singled you out as easy prey to a potential enemy.
Evolutionary psychologists hypothesise that this instinct is particularly prevalent among people whose ancestors are predominantly from lands most dependent on herding, and who hail from areas that were traditionally remote from the forces of law and order. It is impossible, or at least very difficult, to steal arable land, but if you are reliant on herding to feed your family, you know that your livelihood can readily be taken from you at any time, simply by virtue of the fact that your adversary is more powerful or more ruthless. In this environment, reputation is all and therefore scores must be settled. This gives rise to what is known as a ‘culture of honour’: an individual’s honour must be maintained, which means that scores invariably need to be settled. To put it more accurately, the more we are affected by this psychological or cultural inheritance (it’s still a source of contention which of these it is), the more difficult we find it not to react to a perceived slight.
It is believed by many that a strong culture of honour exists in the Southern United States, as herders from Ireland, Northern England and the Highlands of Scotland largely settled these states. In a remarkable experiment at the University of Michigan, a fake psychology experiment was advertised and students were asked to volunteer. To reach the place to which they were instructed to report, they needed to squeeze past a stooge who appeared to be filing papers in the corridor. As they brushed past, the stooge was instructed to say something insulting under his breath. Students who hailed from northern states were more likely to brush off the insult or laugh at the temerity. Students who hailed from southern states were far more likely to become visibly angry and confront the stooge. Their levels of testosterone were measurably higher as their bodies prepared for a fight.10
Ask yourself who you most want to be like: the students who laughed off the insult or the students who could not let it go? Allowing our inner cave dweller to choose our battles is grossly inefficient and mitigates against being bulletproof. Pausing for a moment to remind our inner cave dweller that we do not need to react is a crucial part of being bulletproof.
Try taking a breath and switching your rigid rule to a flexible preference: ‘I’d prefer that guy to apologise to me for unnecessarily interrupting my presentation and making me momentarily lose my flow of thought in front of all my colleagues … but if he is really not going to, it’s not going to spoil my day.’
You can choose to live by a standard of courtesy, and that’s a good thing, but you cannot control the standards by which other people live.
Matthieu Ricard, the former scientist-turned-Buddhist, points out that in order to relieve ourselves of some of the suffering we experience when someone offends or annoys us, we need us to reconsider our self-image and our ego. By way of illustration, he asks you to imagine that you’re lying in a boat, floating on a lake. Suddenly another boat hits you, jolting you rudely. You leap up. Who the hell has been so stupid and careless to bang into you like this? But when you catch sight of the offending boat you see that … it’s empty. Your anger dissipates. You lie down again. What’s changed your mood? ‘In the first case you’d thought yourself to be the target of someone’s malice, while in the second you realised that you were not a target,’ suggests Ricard.
When we are working with groups of young graduates, we impress on them the importance of staying focused on a goal. As a metaphor for this, we ask them to spread evenly around the perimeter of a large room. Each person is asked to focus on a spot on the other side of the room representing his or her goal. The brief is to ‘move towards that goal with absolute determination, letting nothing or no one get in your way’. People tend to mistake focus and determination for strength and toughness. They brace themselves for the inevitable collisions with others. The result is generally a morass in the middle of the room where focus and energy are lost. After a debrief they are encouraged to sustain their focus but increase their sense of flexibility. In other words, they may have to swerve slightly, speed up slightly or slow down slightly. With the new mode of working, with exactly the same number of players – and therefore the same complexity – each player reaches his or her goal with relative ease. They have learnt that staying focused on a goal is about learning when to stay flexible.
The point is not that bulletproof people are submissive or acquiescent. They are not. The point is that they pick their battle carefully. They choose their fights carefully: when the outcome is in their interest. That way they stay in control. If your inner cave dweller is choosing your fights, you have ceded control.
Richard Branson, billionaire businessman and Virgin Atlantic chief, famously said that he was not the sort of person to waste time having arguments with people. At the same time he picked the biggest fight that his industry had ever seen when he took on British Airways for its ‘dirty tricks’ campaign against its rivals. He knows which potential conflicts to let go and which battles to fight.
Summary
Bulletproof people pick their battles wisely
They recognise that while their inner cave dweller has the urge to settle a score or avenge a slight, they are capable of choosing a wiser and more beneficial course of action
Bulletproof people calm and guide their inner cave dweller in order to make the wisest choices
Let the small stuff go; fight only the important battles and fight them with guile, and with a calm focus
CHAPTER 3
USING JUJITSU COMMUNICATION
DEALING WITH COMMENTS from colleagues during meetings and handling conversations that are confrontational – or even appear to the listener to be confrontational – is one of the most difficult aspects of office life. But here, too, concepts such positive thinking and reframing can help bulletproof people handle them.
We call this Jujitsu Communication because although this ancient martial art is often associated with aggression and confrontation it’s nothing of the sort. ‘Jistu’ means technique and ‘Ju’ actually means ‘flexible’ in Japanese. Jujitsu is about flexible technique and the idea of it is to channel your opponent’s energy rather than try to meet it head on.
Case Study 3.1
As a sales executive for a small electronics firm, Charlie, 28, had always enjoyed the business of identifying new clients and then developing them. He said, ‘I’m told that I’m good with people and so whenever I visit a new client or go to see an existing one I always find that we have a good chat about football or holidays or whatever. I never give them a hard sell; I’m just friendly and chatty – but I always get the business.’
However, when Charlie’s firm came under pressure from a successful competitor and a new aggressive sales director took the helm, everyone felt the pressure.
‘Suddenly these Monday morning meetings got a lot more competitive,’ he said. ‘Everyone started trying harder than ever to please the sales director. The competition in the meetings and the pressure to outdo the other people in the room was awful. People would start scoring points off each other and everyone would try to shoot down everyone else’s ideas … There had always been quite a bit of rivalry, but this was just becoming nasty – and desperate.
‘Every time I told myself that I was not going to play that game, and every time the same
pattern occurred, I was always the one who felt isolated. Everyone sided with the boss and I was out on a limb.
‘No one ever really liked our Monday morning sales meetings, I don’t think. I used to get that knot in my stomach on the way to work – even Sunday nights were always blighted by the thought of the Monday morning meeting.’
Turn criticisms around
Being bulletproof is very much about the ability to have the presence of mind to take the heat out of the situation at the height of a verbal assault, as well as the ability to recover from setbacks or verbal assaults from colleagues, customers or bosses.
You will need to deal with comments and questions in the workplace that are either aggressive or hostile or turning up the discomfort in other ways. It is unreasonable, illogical and unfair, but it is also a simple fact of corporate life that an employee who defends him or herself when being criticised not only confirms their culpability, but adds the crime of ‘defensiveness’ to their charge sheet.
There are smart ways to deflect a verbal assault and live to fight another day, but mounting a defence is not one of them. To be more precise, mounting a defence that sounds like a defence is not one of them. And, of course, the temptation to return fire is out of the question.
Eyebrows raise when we advise people to ‘never defend an attack’. However, people soon see the logic. People who are seen as high-status don’t tend to invest their energies in defending jibes and brickbats from other people. They understand the importance of being seen to set the agenda. When we defend an attack, we prolong a discussion which links ourselves to something undesirable, a mistake, shortcoming or failure. We have allowed the opponent to set the agenda.