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[Note: see my latest article on this site, Friends, Motives and Profits—Avoid Fear-based Selling]

There is being trusted, and there is trusting. To trust requires acceptance.

When my children were young, they would say, “How come Marshall got the big piece?” or, “why does Ashley always get to be first?” Followed by the conclusive, “It’s not fair.”

My feeble answers were part rationalization (“because she’s older…”), part problem-solving (“next time you’ll get…”), part fatalism (“hey, life’s not about fairness”). They prospered despite my advice.

Still, we all know that feeling. Some fine people waste their lives, one finite and irreplaceable day at a time, by an inability to get over it. “It” might be a relationship that ended years ago. A parent who didn’t give us what we wanted. A friend who slighted us. A boss who didn’t appreciate us. An inability to come to grips with our own levels of mediocrity.

How could this have happened to me?

I can’t point fingers—they point back to me times four. I can resent for hours a driver who cut me off. And I know better.

I know that resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Other people don’t annoy me, I am annoyed. I and I alone own my feelings; and I can’t own anyone else’s. And still I ask, "why me?"

But my problems are trivial. Does the advice work on real pain?

NYTimes, April 10:

Minneapolis – For 14 years, Isaac Owusu’s faraway boys have tugged at his heart. They sent report cards from his hometown in Ghana and painstaking letters in fledgling English while he scrimped and saved to bring them here one day.
So when he became an American citizen and officials suggested taking a DNA test to prove his relationship to his four sons, he embraced the notion…

But the DNA showed that only one of the four boys — the oldest — was his biological child. For Isaac, a widower, the revelation has forced him to rethink nearly everything he had taken for granted about his life and his family.

It has left him struggling to accept that…his deceased wife had long been unfaithful…the children he loves are not his own…his long efforts to reunite his family in this country may have been in vain. The State Department let his oldest son, now 23, come but said the others — a 19-year-old and 17-year-old twins — could not come because they are not biologically related to him.

“I say to myself, ‘Why this one happen to me?’ ” he asked, his eyes wet with tears. “Oh, mighty God, why this one happen to me?”

Kinda puts my puny problems in their place.

Believing events to be divinely driven, Owusu suffers for his lack of understanding. Religion has two answers for him:

a. The soft version—faith: there are no coincidences, all is God’s purpose —your misery is in direct proportion to your lack of faith;

b. The hard version: God’s will is what it is, and the fact that you don’t know what it is means diddly. (Roughly what God told Job, on what I suspect was a particularly honest day).

“How could that happen to me?” is a profoundly useless question. It has no answer, beyond a trite rehearsal of the steps that got you here. It is a form of resentment; resentment of the universe, which doesn’t care. To resent is to be disaffected from reality, from what just is. And resentment’s handmaiden, self-pity, is a turnoff to others.

The generic answer is, get over it. Accept. Embrace what is. That doesn’t mean passivity in the face of injustice, nor does it mean others aren’t wrong—it just means get on the right side of reality.

That’s not hard to say to a kid. Not even to a friend. Harder, of course, to ourselves. Hugely harder for Mr. Owusu. But I think it’s true for all.

Even for another hard case, a Rutgers woman basketball player who feels, right now, irretrievably harmed by another’s despicable remarks. Ms. Rutgers too will ultimately find relief only within. Ditto the 9/11 survivors, and the spouses of those lost in Iraq.

But this isn’t all hard-ass. Do yourself a favor. Read an excerpt from Bone to Pick: Of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, by Ellis Cose. There are lessons for all of us in these stories of lives transformed by acceptance and forgiveness in the face of unspeakable pain.

To trust requires a small measure of this acceptance. If I trust you, you might betray me. But if I try to totally control you, I cut myself off from the reality of you. I come to live in resentment. And I usually fail in controlling others anyway.

Acceptance doesn’t guarantee trust: but it’s a helluva start.

You’ve heard street buskers, musicians in the subway. Some are pretty good, some not.

Do you stop and listen? Do you give money?

What would you do—honestly—if you encountered a ringer? Say, a truly world-class musician, playing world-class music, using a world-class instrument?

What would you do? How much money would you throw in the violin case? How long would you listen?

Worse yet—would you recognize the quality at all?

Of course you would—after all, you read this blog. But how about the rest of the great unwashed? How would they behave?

That was the experiment, conducted in Washington, DC’s L’Enfant Plaza subway station on January 12 of this year, and brilliantly reported on in the Washington Post. Treat yourself to some great writing at the Post from April 10.

The musician was virtuouso Joshua Bell, playing on his 1713 Stradivarius some of the great classical repertoire of Bach, Schubert, and others. In 43 minutes, 1097 people passed, videotaped, most on their way to mid-level bureaucratic jobs in the Federal Government.

Write down your prediction now: how many will stop? How much money will be left?

Leonard Slatkin, musical director of the National Symphony, braved a prediction: maybe 75 to 100 will stop to listen, and in all contribute about $150.

What do you think the results were?

One person recognized Bell. About half a dozen—including a prescient three-year old—stopped to listen. Total take—$32.16, including a $20 gift by one person.

What if you play the best music there is, and nobody listens? What does it mean?

On reflection, it can mean an awful lot of things.
 

• It could be about the audience. Maybe bureaucrats are hopelessly mundane. Maybe they’d dig it in Paris; maybe even New York. Yeah, maybe.
• It could be that classical music is just dead these days—Fifty Cent or Mick Jagger could’ve stopped more than a dozen, don’t you think?
• It could be that the experts on quality are just full of it—that there clearly is no such thing as innate “quality” in art, that art is only subjectively experienced.
• It could be we’ve been conditioned by context: several people passed by talking louder in their cellphones, one didn’t even recall hearing the music he’d heart 4-feet away a few minutes later—he had been listening to his iPod. May’be we simply do not notice world-class quality as such if we experience it in a subway.
• It could be our taste in art has been diminished by the relentless least-common-denominator materialistic blah of our materialistic culture.
• Or—it could be that our entire sensibility about all kinds of art has been bludgeoned into submission by, fill in your favorite cultural demon.

I really don’t know. But I suspect the answer is kind of important.

So—what do you think?

Quantum physics feels paradoxical to us.

Is it a wave or a particle? Yes.

We’re accustomed to thinking paradoxes are uncommon. But they are not.

• The way out of a rip current is to go with the flow.
• The best way to sell someone is to stop trying to sell them.
• When your ski edges slip, lean downhill, not up.
• What you fear, you empower.

My brother in law Dick, a learned clinical psychologist, provides some paradoxical (or, at least, surprising) findings from the field of psychotherapy. I had asked him for insights about how people are influenced—here’s his (abridged) response:

Meta-analyses of hundreds of psychotherapy outcome studies provide strong evidence that, overall, it works – it’s better than no treatment or placebo. That was big (and encouraging) news when it was first published in my field in the mid-70’s after years of doubt …

The next question is—do some therapies work better than others?

The various therapeutic "schools" (Psychoanalytic, Gestalt, Jungian, Rogerian, Adlerian, Cognitive-Behavioral, Existential, Family Systems, and their myriad offspring) want to prove their "brand" works best. That interest was fueled by the insurance and managed care companies’ desire to apply the medical model to the delivery of psychological services—matching the right "treatment" to specific diagnoses.

Various types of psychotherapy have been compared to each other — and to controls—in an attempt to replicate the medical "clinical trials" method. The complication is consistency of treatment.  In drug tests, a pill is a pill.  But therapists’ “treatments,” however, are humanly applied and therefore vary infinitely.

Nonetheless, the research has resulted in one robust finding—the type of treatment doesn’t significantly create differences in outcome.  Instead, ANY treatment seems better than none.

Can you say, “Hawthorne effect?”

Moreover, the strongest predictor of positive outcomes is—[CHG—hang on, wait for it]—the strength of the therapist-client "alliance"- i.e. the strength of the relationship… it is the therapist’s personality and their ability to make rapid strong connection with clients which is most predictive of success.

So—Cognitive Therapy, or Landmark?  Yes.

There is some evidence that "allegiance" to one or another point of view correlates to positive outcome — i.e. strong belief in a school or model. That makes sense since that may play a part in projecting confidence and charisma. (That, by the way, has always been a challenge for me as a therapist since I am too philosophically inclined and broadly informed to be a true believer in any particular "brand" of therapy.)

(Dick and I both suffer from a predilection to subordinate belief to knowledge).

But back to Trust Matters.

One of this blog’s themes is that “business” is too often framed in terms like logical, deductive, behavioral, rational, self-serving, and trainable. Whereas people are often perverse, inductive, emotional, irrational (not the same as crazy), altruistic, and independent.

Result: loads of paradoxes.

What’s the best model for:

• Motivation—carrots or sticks?  Caring.
• Alignment—systems or credos?  Attention.
• Change management—people, or rewards?  Relationships.
• Leadership—reflection or inspiration?  Connection.
• Sales—SPIN or consultative?  Trust.

Whether on the therapist’s couch or in the conference room, a lot of apparent choices are just that—apparent.

The real key to personal change—in business as in life—is a matter of personal connection.  When we stand alone, we stay put.  When we touch others, and allow them to touch us, all things become possible.

I like it when commonsense and science coincide.

These were the five most trafficed posts during March – a couple of which are actually older posts which bounced back to the top during March.  If you didn’t have a chance to read them when they were originally posted, now’s a good time to do so, and to join the conversation.

1. You Empower What You Fear
2. Trust and Social Networking
3. American Secret
4. Trust, Betrayal and the 9/11 Jumpers
5. Working and Feeling Good

Carey Bertolet blogs on “Personal Isn’t Private: Advice for New Lawyers in the New Milennium” about increasing opportunities for personal behavior to become public—in the workplace.

Bertolet lists funny-as-long-as-it-isn’t me private emails gone public, ranging from dating behavior to employment disagreements. His message: “Everyone is entitled to a personal life, but it’s important to be aware that your personal life isn’t necessarily private…Big Brother isn’t necessarily watching—but he very possibly uses the same dry cleaner.”

Bertolet is certainly right—but it goes further. The personal is becoming less private—and professionalism must become more personal.

20 years ago I had a rolodex. It had maybe 400 names on it, many outdated. Half didn’t hear from me even once a year. I met maybe 200 new people per year as a consultant. I had published one article. I went to a couple association-type meetings per year.

My clients were stable organizations. Their issues were either strategic—competitive battles with other stable organizations—or managerial—the techniques of influencing others within their organization.

Fast-forward. I have 3000 names in my Outlook database, which I cull frequently. I can recall nearly every one. I communicate much more frequently. I send more holiday cards than I used to, and of course massively more emails. I blog. I publish articles on my site, and on others’ sites. I meet thousands of people per year. I now take cell-phone photos of clients to match up with names. At Iguazu Falls, Brazil a few weeks ago, my blackberry’s data reception was as good as in Manhattan.

I am vastly more connected to vastly more people. As, no doubt, are you.

My clients are not stable organizations—they are in flux. People come and go more frequently—and more easily. “Disloyal employee” is becoming an oxymoron. One of my clients sells 95% of its product through partners who are also competitors. Every one of my clients is an outsourcer; several are insourcers of others. Corporations of one (like me) are increasing.

As business processes become more and more discrete, they become more and more plug-compatible (think object-oriented programming for an analogy). Transactions that used to happen internally now happen externally. The internal world of a fixed organization is becoming the outer world of inter-organizational commerce.

The world is becoming less about competitive production, and more about commercial collaboration. Less vertical, more horizontal. Les internal, more external. The atomic unit of business is no longer the corporation: it’s the individual. We move around. Our benefits and pensions are less tied to our employer. Ditto our personal lives.

The idea of “private” behaviors is becoming obsolete.

You can conclude, as Bertolet does, that you’d better watch your private behavior; assume whatever you say will end up on the cover of The Times, that every email will be circulated to everyone. True that, and good advice.

But there are two more conclusions.

I used to smoke. Then it became a private behavior in an increasingly public world. It was too hard to maintain, impossible to keep private. Being cautious is exhausting. It’s difficult to hide the real you in an increasingly public world!
I finally just quit smoking? Analogously, why not live your life in such a way that you’re not concerned about it being public?

What if you always behaved well toward others? Didn’t tell lies. Got over resentments. Lived a grateful and giving life. And so forth. Then you wouldn’t have to worry much about things being revealed.

The second conclusion has to do with professionalism. If private lives conflict with professionalism, then we need to focus on the real core of professionalism, not on outward manifestations.

I used to wear a tie. I stopped after most of my clients did. A tie is the height of symbolism-without-function. Yes, in a way it signifies respect. But a world that demands to be connected needs less symbolism, and more real connection.

Professional codes of conduct need revisiting to ensure they fit with an increasingly connected world. Stock brokers, software manufacturers, real estate agents, financial planners, lawyers, movie makers, book publishers—all these industries, and more, need to re-examine their concepts of professionalism to give greater weight to client and employee relationships. “Caveat emptor” sucks as a standard of professionalism. So does “sustainable competitive advantage.”

The debates about private property and copyrights are going to get resolved—in favor of the commons. In an increasingly interconnected world, we can’t afford to let an insistence on 18th century property rights dominate the collective good the way we did even just 20 years ago.

20 years ago I met a man in Vero Beach selling carved totem poles. He was from Arizona, had a wide-bed 6-wheel pickup, wore a cowboy hat. We talked a bit. I asked him about life in the desert. He swore vehemently no one was going to take away his god-given right to drill as much water as he wanted under whatever sandy piece of the earth’s surface was legally owned by him.

His world is shrinking. The world is increasingly public. We can protest it, or be wary about it—but we’re way better off dealing with it.

The sandbox hasn’t grown. But many more of us are playing in it, all day long, 24-7.

Getting along is the new getting ahead.