Wicked showcases the idea of understanding the other and not jumping to conclusions about each other's backgrounds, stories or histories. By remaining curious and asking, we can do this. Wicked also suggests how lack of understanding and making false assumptions can lead to hurt feelings and unforeseen consequences. If Elphaba had really listened to her sister instead of trying only to protect the people around her from her follies, might her sister not have been so embittered?

Sitting in that theater among teenage girls dressed as if for prom, couples on dates, folks with silver hair or no hair, people in a myriad of shapes, sizes and colors, I decided that the green-faced Elphaba should be my reminder to always consider the other person's story. She can remind me to consider what I think that I know, and how, and from what source. Elphaba will maintain my curiosity, cause me to ask questions... and seek empathy, not when I agree but especially when I don't. I'm not perfect, but that good witch Glenda, she had her flaws, too. I am no so certain that she deserves that title Good Witch anymore.

But she could just be Glenda.  

Comment: Hi Nettie, this is inspiring and a good reminder. I am not so familiar with the Oz Land. So your story makes me think of which reminder item I can implement in my mind so I stay curious. -- Suzanne

October
Buddhism and Feedback
by Jay M. Seiff-Haron, Psy.D.
Specializing in couples therapy, parenting and the needs of small children in the aftermath of trauma or divorce, Dr. Seiff-Haron is the Executive Director of Cross-Cultural Communuications, Inc. and teaches Group Psychotherapy and Family and Couples Therapy to doctoral students at Argosy University. Dr. Seiff-Haron holds a Psy.D. from the California School of Professional Psychology, an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and a B.A. in Economics from Yale University.

Sometimes, I meditate. Not often and probably not well, but I do. Recently, my friend Brian Cochran (an ordained Episcopal Minister) got my attention by describing possible parallels between Buddhism and Effective Influence. While one's "stuff" comes up in both venues (and is welcome in either), the suggested response is radically different: to engage in a dialogue as in Effective Influence, or to sit quietly and observe as in Vipassana meditation. I thought that Brian's insights were worth preserving here.

At Effective Influence, we use dialogue and getting real with one another as mechanisms for interpersonal exploration, and the engagement of others into joint problem-solving and the calibration of greater and greater interpersonal effectiveness. Brian observed that the benefits of this process derived from the same source, i.e. being less wedded to one's own subjective point of view, being more open to other possible explanations.

For example, I recently overhead a friend joking with another friend in a manner that I did not think was funny... though I suspected that he was probably only kidding. Still, I was uncomfortable and had I spoken, I might have said something like, "Stop being mean!", which contains many assumptions and prescriptions. If I had been able to think of a way to say that more politely and with less judgment, I'd have been more likely to engage in a dialogue and perhaps, shift my point of view. But, I couldn't, and did not.

Brian tells me that in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, suffering is seen as the result of clinging too tightly to Skandhas (aggregates), which are the five characterizations of all individual experience. The five Skandhas are Form, Feelings, Notions, Impulses, and Consciousness. Form is basically sensory data: what we see, what hear, how our bodies feel, etc. The other Skandhas are Feelings (perceptions of pain and pleasure that result from encounters with Forms), Notions (how I recognize what I sense), Impulses (habits of thought and behavior that are triggered by my past encounters with forms) and Consciousness (the base of experiencing.)

Brian noticed that these line up almost exactly with Effective Influence's feedback model, achieving a similar broadening of available information through interpersonal dialogue instead of non-response. Armed with either Effective Influence or the Skandhas, perhaps I'd have had sufficient clarity of mind to say, "When I heard that joke (Form), I felt a little twinge (Feeling). I thought that I'd better be on guard around you (Notion), because I wouldn't want to be the butt of a joke like that. And yet, while I don't like jokes like that, but I also don't like feeling guarded around you (Impulse), because you are my friend. So as I observe myself (Consciousness) having that reaction, I thought that I would check it out with you, see if perhaps there's something that I didn't get." For fear of sounding critical, I didn't say anything.

For one thing, it would take a lot of time. It is hard to get that clear on the first pass, and I'd fear making a mountain out of a molehill by using all of those words. That said, giving myself the latitude to try (and, perhaps, fail) gives me practice at figuring out which parts are important to share in different situations. Maybe a simple question like, "I didn't think that was funny, come again?" would have served to engage in a conversation, or (depending upon our relationship), a response as simple as, "Ouch!" But, at this stage of my life, I'd not have had the awareness to say that either, without thinking through the Form, Feeling, Notion, Impulse and Conscioussness in its entirety... though, as I continue practicing, I get better at it. That was one value of Effective Influence, a place to practice so that, by the time I went home, I didn't sound odd or say "better not" to myself after all, because the practice had been, err, practiced.

I can imagine that (and, in fact, I have to, since I did not actually ask) if I had said something like the above, my friend could have responded, "Oh, sorry! I would never say something like that to you. He and I, we've been sharing this little in-joke with one another for years. Sorry if it bothered you!" With that additional information, my guard would go down, the judgment would decrease... my distancing reaction would pass.

I attended Effective Influence for professional reasons, because I was looking for techniques to use in day-long, group-based trainings that I conduct professionally. Later, I suggested to my partner that she attend because she had been, for some time, experiencing herself as a buffer between the business owner and the rest of their team that she helped to manage and heaping a lot of the resulting stress upon her own shoulders. She was looking for a way to do her job without the stress. We both reaped a lot of professional benefit from attending. But that is not this story.

So Jane and I were arguing about how to accommodate my son's upcoming, protracted visit. There was a lot of time pressure, and many things for us to do. We argued about this and argued about that, and all of a sudden she looked at me and said, "We are already Storming and the rest of the group isn't even here yet!"

Storming is the group developmental stage about conflict, pushback and challenge to authority. According to Effective Influence, that Storming stage is inevitable. It can be delayed but not skipped, and (counter-intuitively) its goal is not to resolve conflicts. Instead, Storming involves things like welcoming (instead of fighting) different points of view, getting curious about the different perspectives without yet bridging them. Achieving resolution at that juncture is unlikely, but just noticing that Rome wasn't built in a day (and that there is time) defuses the tension, opens up more space to collaborate and makes productive resolution far more likely. It just does not, however, always feel very good. Collaboration takes time, and tempers get in the way.

Now, I had heard about these group stages before: what I had not had before was an understanding of the purposes of these stages, what they mean in terms of useful and not useful actions that I could take. When Jane noticed that we were Storming, we knew what to do in Storming because we'd learned it at Effective Influence: to stop explaining, to listen, to understand what was causing the other to get heated. We temporarily put aside the floors, boxes, deer and garden to focus, for just a few minutes, on one another. Very quickly, the mood changed. Suddenly it was not so hard. We processed what we needed to do, and did it together.

Our team was not an exception. Storming contributes extra latitude and information. Teams are generally in a much better position to resolve conflicts productively when people feel heard, and more information is out in the open. Conversely, managers who see conflict as a sign of something wrong, or who take conflicts offline, unfortunately demonstrate to the team that different points of view are not welcome, that the group might not be able to survive them, and that the major in-group resource to be employed had best be avoidance! Better by far to lay everyone's cards on the table.