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The Antidote to Resentment

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A lot of time is wasted debating the relative merits of “hard” and “soft” skills. The right response is almost always “both,” and “it depends.”  I want to focus here on the “both” part.

There is a growing belief – particularly in tech and in consultative professions (and everything is becoming both tech and consultative) – that we should approach the ‘soft’ stuff in ‘hard’ terms, i.e. through metrics, short-term goals, competency models and the like.

Treating ‘soft’ skills this way completely disintegrates them. You can’t have both if you’ve turned one into the other.

Case in point: dealing with resentments in the business world.

You Might Be Copping a Resentment If…

You may not think you’re a resentful person. And maybe, graded on a curve, you’re not.

But how often do you find yourself muttering at the driver who cut you off; re-litigating arguments in your head, where you win this time; waking up in the middle of the night pre-occupied with your checking account; and gossiping with someone about how so-and-so really isn’t all that?

All those are versions of wishing you could change reality – when you can’t. And that’s pretty much resentment.

It’s the difference between hoping and wishing. Hoping things will change is fine, particularly if you’re doing something to help the change. But wishing that things were other than they are – that’s living in an alternative universe. That’s resentment. It’s fine to hope you win the lottery—as long as you bought a ticket. But wishing you’d won last week’s lottery – that’s resentment.

By living in an alternative universe, you’re playing at being God. (Unless, worse yet, you think it’s not play, and you actually believe that all your wishing makes a dime’s worth of difference to Reality). Well, hear this: there is a God – and you’re not it.

Resentment tends to eventually manifest as resentment against other people. But personal resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. All it does is eat you up from inside, while the Resented One is either blissfully unaware, or at least generally doesn’t give much of a damn.

Why Resentment Kills Sales and Influence

This is not afternoon TV psycho-babble. It makes a daily difference in business – a huge difference.

If you are prone to the Black Art of Resentment, then you are likely to believe in short cuts, quick fixes, fad diets, new interpersonal techniques, flashy methodologies, and come-on lines for dating bars – because all those gimmicks appeal to your desire to live in a world other than this one: one in which you can dominate, control, bend the other’s will to your desire. And when they let you down – and they do, and they will – you will once again feel your Old Friend Resentment (or its kissing cousin, self-pity).

People don’t buy from those who are trying to change them. People don’t pay attention to people who are trying to persuade them. People don’t take advice from those whose egos are tied up in having their advice taken. (Interestingly, people of both genders also don’t like to date people who are needy; they prefer people who appear independently self-contained).

We interpret all those things as attempts to manipulate, and we shun the manipulator. This is not a good thing.

It also has serious business consequences. It makes for salespeople who can’t sell; advisers whose advice isn’t taken; and relationship managers that people don’t relate to. The absence of soft skills has dramatically hard results.

 

The Best Way to Sell and Influence

The best way to sell and influence is to get rid of resentment; to get rid of living in alternative universes; to accept everything, starting with the customer in front of you.

Acceptance in this case means taking them at face value, getting to know them on their terms, giving up all attachment to your outcome (because that’s about you, not them) – and applying your focus, energy and attention to simply helping them. Let’s call that, for lack of a better term, empathetic client focus.

If you do that, and spend your time and energy seeking to understand them, you’ll do a far better job of connecting with them than all the other resentment-fueled alternate-universe salespeople and advisors.

One result of which is – you’ll end up selling more and having your advice taken more often.

Is that a paradox? Definitely. But it’s life. People buy from those who don’t try to sell them. People listen to those who listen to them, not those who talk. The best way to sell it to stop selling. The best way to influence is to shut up.

Training to Get Rid of Resentments

You do not get rid of resentments by examining best practices.  You don’t banish resentments by designing a training program based on four levels of resentment-coping skills, with behavioral metrics indicating competencies at successive levels.

Instead, you get rid of resentments by doing a Jedi mind trick; an emotional/spiritual jiu jitsu flip; a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus conversion. You have to come to believe that you are not God – and that all your resentments are nothing more than an attempt to claim otherwise, doomed to fail because your whole approach is selfishly based on You trying to dominate Them. It doesn’t work. They push back.

In practical terms, the solution is not the usual ‘act your way into right thinking.’ Instead, this new perspective comes about through conversations with others; through reflection; through role-playing; and through discussion with others about shared experiences. This is a different approach to corporate training – but a necessary one for certain advanced ‘soft’ skills.

Goals are Great, but An Expectation is a Pre-meditated Resentment

Goals are great. So are objectives and milestones and targets. They give you a sense of what you’re aiming for, and help you envision the to-be state.

But don’t confuse goals with their purpose. The purpose of a goal is not to achieve the goal – the purpose of a goal is to help you achieve your True Purpose. You should never confuse a quarterly sales quota with a Purpose.

It’s when goals get transmuted into expectations that we confuse goals with purpose. When we start living in that alternative universe defined by the goals, when we start obsessing over the new car, winning the contest, getting the boss’s approval, ranking in the top 20% on the bonus plan – that’s when we begin to have expectations. And an expectation is a pre-meditated resentment.

Think. Do. Accept. Rinse and repeat.

Plan, set goals, and strive. Then celebrate what you get; because to bemoan what you haven’t got is to live in resentment. A life spent wishing you were other than you are is a failed attempt at playing God, and a recipe for unhappiness – and for poor sales and unheeded advice.

 

Acceptance Is an Active Act

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Usually “acceptance” means giving in to some over-powering force–grudgingly.  Active acceptance is not part of the basic toolkit of trust, but it belongs in the advanced course. If you can learn to actively accept, you will gain unheard-of levels of trust.  Not to mention, you’ll be a lot happier.

Accepting a Smoker

My wife-at-the-time helped me quit smoking by accepting me as a smoker. She told me that while she wanted me to be healthy and live a long life, she more wanted me to live my life on my terms, and she’d do everything to help me with that.

“If you want to smoke in the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, whatever,” she said, “It’s OK.”  She once rerouted a joint long plane trip into two so I could get off and have less time without a cigarette.  (Hey I was hooked).

About two weeks after she made that offer, I quit on my own.

Acceptance is Not Defeat

Don’t confuse acceptance with surrender under protest.  It’s not giving in.  It’s not something you do as a last resort.  And if you’re “accepting” with fingers crossed, eyes rolled, and resentments intact—that’s something else entirely.

Acceptance is a positive. It’s an affirmation of the other party.  It’s a commitment to support them, despite some fairly significant differences in world-view. Acceptance goes beyond “tolerance”—it’s a statement of the other’s legitimacy in the world.

If it’s a client or a buyer that you’re accepting, it means acknowledging them as equals, and not as parties whom you succeed or fail in selling to or persuading to do your will.

Acceptance is Paradoxical

Much like trust, when you accept another, odd things happen. Accepting someone’s foibles–as my wife did mine–often results in a reciprocating counter-offer from the other party. Unless, that is, you were secretly trying to get that result, in which case you jinxed the deal.

The best way to change someone is, sometimes, to give up trying to change them, and to change yourself instead.  Specifically, to change your attachment to achieving your change.

Don’t ask yourself, “Who needs changing?” or “Who needs to get better at accepting?”

Instead, ask yourself, “Whom do I need to accept?”

Warren Buffet on Envy and the Seven Deadly Sins

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Berkshire Hathaway held their annual bash in Omaha a few weeks ago, as delightfully reported by Laura Rittenhouse. 

As happens at that time of year, Buffet and his even-more-quotable-if-that’s-possible partner in investing, Charlie Munger, make themselves available to be interviewed. Which is where I first heard their rundown of the seven deadly sins.

Buffet: As an investor, you get something out of all the deadly sins—except for envy. Being envious of someone else is pretty stupid. Wishing them badly, or wishing you did as well as they did—all it does is ruin your day. Doesn’t hurt them at all, and there’s zero upside to it.

If you’re going to pick a sin, go with something like lust or gluttony. That way at least you’ll have something to remember the weekend for.

This isn’t just good homespun Buffet humor. It’s deeply meaningful on at least three levels.

Why Envy Is Bad For Your Investments

First of all, you can make a case that envy actually destroys your investment portfolio. Turns out Buffet and Munger have used this standup routine before, and it was brilliantly detailed five years ago in a blogpost by Sanjay Bakshi.

Basically, if you’re really knowledgeable about a business in which you can get a 19% return, but have heard about some other business in which you can get a 21% return, you’d be stupid to forsake the 19%. Which is why good investors say things like “stick with what you know.” (Buffet himself goes into more detail in his Chairman’s letter of 1993, in the section on equity investments, even quoting Mae West).

Envy, in other words, can hurt you financially.

Why Envy is Bad for Your Relationships

Buffet aside, envy and its kissing cousin resentment are equally culpable in the softer realm. Like customer relationships. Here’s why.

If you’re envious of a customer—of anyone, really–it poisons your relationships with that person. What are you envious of? Their money? Their status? Their social ease? Their romantic partner? 

Regardless of the object of your envy, your level of envy is likely to be most acute when you’re with the envied person—and particularly if the money, status, social ease or romantic partner are in play or close at hand.

In those cases, our envy oozes out of us in the most dishonest ways. We sneak furtive glances, make snide comments, look for favor, disparage the things we covet, and subtlely beg. All the while, of course, maintaining plausible deniability about what we are doing. Or so we think.

In fact, we kid only ourselves. The customer may not follow every twisted inward thought we have (why would they want to?) but they know the result. We are absent; we are not genuinely focused on them; we are obsessed by our own needs, and cannot focus on theirs.

Envy can hurt your commercial relationships.

Why Envy is Bad for Your Own Self

As if it weren’t enough that envy hurts us financially and commercially, it rots us as people too. Envy, festering, becomes resentment. The Latinate derivation of resentment is re-feeling. Feeling after the fact, revisiting the past, dwelling negatively on history—the one thing over which we have precisely no control.

Resentment is akin to playing God, groveling in the fiction that we can alter the reality of time past. It’s no accident that the 12-step program literature refers to resentment as “a grave matter,” and “the number one offender.” 

Living in resentment means you are living outside reality. Living in a fictional world between your ears just removes you from humanity, and from the moment. Alone and out of time is no good way for a human being to live.

It all starts with envy. Buffet was right. Go get you some good sins, if you must, at least there’s some pleasure in them. As to envy—as Buffet put it, there’s no upside to it.

Empathy is the Antidote to Resentment

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If you’re groaning at the prospect of another ‘soft skills’ blogpost, hang on. The soft stuff is what enables ‘hard’ stuff like profits, speed and success. Here’s what I mean.

You Might Be Copping a Resentment If…

You may not think you’re a resentful person. And maybe, graded on a curve, you’re not.

But how often do you find yourself muttering at the driver who cut you off; re-arguing arguments in your head, where you win this time; waking up in the middle of the night pre-occupied with your checking account; and gossiping with someone about how so-and-so really isn’t all that?

All those are versions of wishing you could change reality—when you can’t. And that’s a pretty good definition of resentment.

It’s the difference between hoping and wishing. Hoping things will change is fine, particularly if you’re doing something to help the change. But wishing that things were other than they are—that is living in an alternative universe. And that’s resentment. It’s fine to hope you win the lottery—as long as you bought a ticket. But wishing you’d won last week’s lottery—that’s resentment territory.

By living in an alternative universe, you’re playing at being God. Unless, worse yet, you think it’s not play, and you actually believe that all your wishing makes a dime’s worth of difference to Reality. There is a God–and you’re not it.

Resentment generally, eventually, manifests as resentment against other people. But personal resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. All it does is eat you up from inside, while the Resented One is either blissfully unaware, or at least generally doesn’t give much of a damn. 

Why Resentment Kills Sales and Influence

This is not afternoon TV psycho-babble. It makes a daily difference in business—a huge difference. Let’s just take business development and advice-giving.

If you are prone to the Black Art of Resentment, then you are likely to believe in short cuts, quick fixes, fad diets, new interpersonal techniques, flashy methodologies, and come-on lines for dating bars. Because all those gimmicks appeal to your desire to live in a world other than this one: one in which you can dominate, control, bend the other’s will to your desire. And when they let you down—and they do, and they will—you will once again feel Old Friend Resentment (or its kissing cousin, self-pity).

People don’t buy from those who are trying to change them. People don’t pay attention to people who are trying to persuade them to their own viewpoint. People don’t take advice from those whose egos are tied up in having their advice taken. They interpret all those things as attempts to manipulate, and they shun the manipulator. This is not a good thing.

The Best Way to Sell and Influence

The best way to sell and influence is to get rid of resentment; get rid of living in alternative universes; accept everything, starting with the customer in front of you.

Acceptance in this case means taking them at face value, getting to know them on their terms, giving up all attachment to outcome (because that’s about you, not them), and applying your focus, energy and attention to them. Let’s call that empathy.

If you do that, and spend your time and energy seeking to understand them, you’ll do a far better job of understanding them and their needs than all the other resentment-fueled alternate-universe salespeople and advisors. One result of which is, you’ll end up selling more and having your advice taken more often.

Goals are Great, but An Expectation is a Pre-meditated Resentment

Goals are great. So are objectives and milestones and targets. They give you a sense of what you’re aiming for, and help you envision the to-be state. 

But don’t confuse goals with their purpose. The purpose of a goal is not to achieve the goal—the purpose of a goal is to help you achieve your True Purpose. You should never confuse a quarterly sales quota with a Purpose.

It’s when goals get transmuted into expectations that we confuse goals with purpose. When we start living in that alternative universe defined by the goals, when we start obsessing over the new car, winning the contest, getting the boss’s approval, ranking in the top 20% on the bonus plan—that’s when we begin to have expectations. And an expectation is a pre-meditated resentment. When we expect, we are setting ourselves up for resentment.

Plan, set goals, and strive. Then celebrate what you get; because to bemoan what you haven’t got is to live in resentment. A life spent wishing you were other than you are is a failed attempt at playing god, and a recipe for unhappiness—not to mention poor sales.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Envy, Resentment and Trust

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Resentment is like taking poison—and waiting for the other person to die. 

Sounds absurd, but anyone who’s honest will recognize not only the absurdity of that stance, but the fact that we nonetheless indulge in it all too often.

Then there’s resentment’s close cousin envy.  “Envy is the ulcer of the soul,” said Socrates.  The parallel metaphors of ulcers and poison are not accidental.  They are internally corrosive issues masquerading as external.

I want to highlight two other writers whom I find do a wonderful job of exploring the darker regions of the soul. One is Phil McGee; the other is Peter Vajda.  Both have commented on this blog from time to time.

Here are a few choice comments from each on the subject.  Peter’s comments come from  “I Want What You Have.”  Phil’s come from his post "Three Men."   
I recommend reading both in the original. 

Here is a taste, in alternating call-and-response format:

In the throes of envy, we become mired in a sense of lack and deficiency. And, like an ulcer, envy eats away at you, consciously and subconsciously. It seems to be the energy that is running your life – a life of frustration – feeling like you’re being decimated from the inside out.  Peter Vajda

He was the oldest of the group and the ring leader and most of the people in the room seemed to respect and care about him. He was, therefore, the target of my jealousy and dislike. Phil McGee

The honest reality with envy is that it’s never – repeat never – about the other person. Envy can be a blind spot. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Few folks realize they are their own worst enemy when it comes to envy.

He had, I came to realize, a sharp wit and great sense of humor and he enjoyed life, a feeling rare in me until I began to question why I disliked so many people instead of wondering what was wrong with me. Somewhere inside I knew I was cheating myself and that I was afraid of getting close enough to feel the rejection that was sure to come.

While focusing outward on what others have, the envious one is also dwelling on “what’s wrong with me.” In this place of self-loathing and self-pity, when we feel “less than”, we tend to focus on what we don’t have. Lack attracts lack. Caught in a downward spiral of envy, you move backwards, sowing seeds of doubt and limiting your potential.

Les…helped me to see that I was wrong about people. They really don’t exist for the sole purpose of making my life miserable. Actually when I seek their friendship and counsel and am open to them it seems they will do anything to help me see the light of love rather than the blind darkness of fear and resentment.

You can decide to not be envious or jealous. It is a choice.

Indeed it is. And choosing to be free of envy and resentment makes you able to trust, as well as trustworthy.

Thanks,Phil and Peter.