Crucial Conversations Quotes

In a book, all would have gone according to plan... but life was so fucking untidy — what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?

People who are skilled at dialogue do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool--even ideas that at first glance appear controversial, wrong, or at odds with their own beliefs. Now, obviously they don't agree with every idea; they simply do their best to ensure that all ideas find their way into the open.

It’s the most talented, not the least talented, who are continually trying to improve their dialogue skills. As is often the case, the rich get richer.

As much as others may need to change, or we may want them to change, the only person we can continually inspire, prod, and shape—with any degree of success—is the person in the mirror.

The mistake most of us make in our crucial conversations is we believe that we have to choose between telling the truth and keeping a friend.

The Pool of Shared Meaning is the birthplace of synergy

Goals without deadlines aren’t goals; they’re merely directions.

The key to real change lies not in implementing a new process, but in getting people to hold one another accountable to the process.

Remember, to know and not to do is really not to know.

At the core of every successful conversation lies the free flow of relevant information.

One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears—by listening to them. —DEAN RUSK

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret. —AMBROSE BIERCE

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. Mastering

Respect is like air. As long as it's present, nobody thinks about it. But if you take it away, it's all that people can think about. The instant people perceive disrespect in a conversation, the interaction is no longer about the original purpose—it is now about defending dignity.

Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.

Don't aim for perfection. Aim for progress. Learn to slow the process down when your adrenaline gets pumping.

You know what? We need to talk about this. I’m glad you asked the question. Thank you for taking that risk. I appreciate the trust it shows in me.

What do I really want for myself? What do I really want for others? What do I really want for the relationship?

I have become more aware of (1) how true emotions can feel during crucial moments, and (2) how false they really are.

My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.

An apology is a statement that sincerely expresses your sorrow for your role in causing—or at least not preventing—pain or difficulty to others.

practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in baskets of silver.

When it comes to risky, controversial, and emotional conversations, skilled people find a way to get all relevant information (from themselves and others) out into the open.

Nothing in this world is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

When people purposefully withhold meaning from one another, individually smart people can do collectively stupid things.

Miss N. had taught her nurses to watch carefully in order to understand what the ill required and provide it. Not medicine—that was the doctors’ domain—but the things she argued were equally crucial to recovery: light, air, warmth, cleanliness, rest, comfort, nourishment, and conversation.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

There are four common ways of making decisions: command, consult, vote, and consensus. These four options represent increasing degrees of involvement.

Methods include cutting others off, overstating your facts, speaking in absolutes, changing subjects, or using directive questions to control the conversation.

Nothing fails like success. In other words, when a challenge in life is met by a response that is equal to it, you have success. But when the challenge moves to a higher level, the old, once successful response no longer works—it fails; thus, nothing fails like success.

Honesty, trust, and friendship in a relationship are crucial, and no relationship can survive without them.

Assignments without deadlines are far better at producing guilt than stimulating action.

Healers, lightworkers, and empaths get projected on badly. That's why it is so crucial that you're able to tell when a conversation is rooted in someone else's issues.

Communication is crucial to maintaining a relationship. Never marry a mime.

In judging our progress as individual we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education. These are, of course, important in measuring one's success in material matters and it is perfectly understandable if many people exert themselves mainly to achieve all these. But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others - qualites which are within reach of every soul - are the foundation of one's spiritual life.

Let’s say that your significant other has been paying less and less attention to you. You realize he or she has a busy job, but you still would like more time together. You drop a few hints about the issue, but your loved one doesn’t handle it well. You decide not to put on added pressure, so you clam up. Of course, since you’re not all that happy with the arrangement, your displeasure now comes out through an occasional sarcastic remark. “Another late night, huh? I’ve got Facebook friends I see more often.” Unfortunately (and here’s where the problem becomes self-defeating), the more you snip and snap, the less your loved one wants to be around you. So your significant other spends even less time with you, you become even more upset, and the spiral continues. Your behavior is now actually creating the very thing you didn’t want in the first place. You’re caught in an unhealthy, self-defeating loop.

5. Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I vow to cultivate good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practicing mindful eating, drinking, and consuming. I vow to ingest only items that preserve peace, well-being, and joy in my body, in my consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family and society. I am determined not to use alcohol or any other intoxicant or to ingest foods or other items that contain toxins, such as certain TV programs, magazines, books, films, and conversations. I am aware that to damage my body or my consciousness with these poisons is to betray my ancestors, my parents, my society, and future generations. I will work to transform violence, fear, anger, and confusion in myself and in society by practicing a diet for myself and for society. I understand that a proper diet is crucial for self-transformation and for the transformation of society.

What crucial conversations need to be readdressed in your personal and professional relationships in order for you to gain peace, clarity, and resolution? Create the space in your life to readdress what needs to be given hope for healing.

Second, clarify what you really don't want. This is the key to framing the and question. Think of what you are afraid will happen to you if you back away from your current strategy of trying to win or stay safe. What bad thing will happen if you stop pushing so hard? Or if you don't try to escape? What horrible outcome makes game-playing an attractive and sensible option?

three stanzas says the same thing: May the Lord bless; may the Lord make His face shine; may the Lord lift up His countenance upon you. The Israelite understood blessedness concretely: to be blessed was to be able to behold the face of God. One could enjoy the blessing only in relative degrees: the closer one got to the ultimate face-to-face relationship, the more blessed he was. Conversely, the farther removed from that face-to-face

this is the first principle of dialogue—Start with Heart. That is, your own heart. If you can’t get yourself right, you’ll have a hard time getting dialogue right.

How can I be 100 percent honest with Chris, and at the same time be 100 percent respectful?

Storytelling typically happens blindly fast. When we believe we're at risk, we tell ourselves a story so quickly that we don't even know that we're doing it.

While active listening is crucial for optimal communication, we are faced with a dilemma which can perplex even the sincerest and engaged of individuals.

The pain is still within me, but it has been a source of regeneration for me. And this is a crucial point in my work: the problem is not that one has pain, but what you do with it.

A 2010 survey of 1,500 CEOs from sixty countries identified creativity as the “most crucial factor for future success.

You can measure the health of relationships, teams, and organizations by measuring the lag time between when problems are identified and when they are resolved.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

When you’re attacked in a negotiation, pause and avoid angry emotional reactions. Instead, ask your counterpart a calibrated question.

You can’t simply highlight an inspiring paragraph in a book and walk away changed.

The greatest fallacy with communication, is the belief that it has actually occurred.

The first time something happens, it’s an incident. The second time it might be coincidence. The third time, it’s a pattern.

A good entrepreneur converts his skills to cash.

And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art

Tolkien would play a crucial role in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, while Lewis would be the decisive voice in persuading Tolkien to complete The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

When people misunderstand and you start arguing over the misunderstanding, stop. Use Contrasting. Explain what you don’t mean until you’ve restored safety. Then return to the conversation. Safety first.

At this point, you could be tempted to water down your content—“You know it’s really not that big a deal.” Don’t give into the temptation. Don’t take back what you’ve said. Instead, put your remarks in context.

The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.” Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention. Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the victims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked. The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting? The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.

In perhaps the most revealing of all the health-related studies, a group of subjects who had contracted malignant melanoma received traditional treatment and then were divided into two groups. One group met weekly for only six weeks; the other did not. Facilitators taught the first group of recovering patients specific communication skills. (When it's your life that's at stake, could anything be more crucial?) After meeting only six times and then dispersing for five years, the subjects who learned how to express themselves effectively had a higher survival rate--only 9 percent succumbed as opposed to almost 30 percent in the untrained group.

SUMMARY—START WITH HEART Here’s how people who are skilled at dialogue stay focused on their goals—particularly when the going gets tough. Work on Me First, Us Second • Remember that the only person you can directly control is yourself. Focus on What You Really Want • When you find yourself moving toward silence or violence, stop and pay attention to your motives. • Ask yourself: “What does my behavior tell me about what my motives are?” • Then, clarify what you really want. Ask yourself: “What do I want for myself? For others? For the relationship?” • And finally, ask: “How would I behave if this were what I really wanted?” Refuse the Fool’s Choice • As you consider what you want, notice when you start talking yourself into a Fool’s Choice. • Watch to see if you’re telling yourself that you must choose between peace and honesty, between winning and losing, and so on. • Break free of these Fool’s Choices by searching for the and. • Clarify what you don’t want, add it to what you do want, and ask your brain to start searching for healthy options to bring you to dialogue.

When was the last time an American president found it worth his while to write a speech on the importance of art and literature? I cannot recall. And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them.

It's a familiar, if not exactly inspiring, message: in the face of slim pickings, lower your standards. It also makes clear the converse: with more fish in the sea, raise them. In both cases, crucially, the math tells you exactly by how much.

Consequently, the first condition of safety is Mutual Purpose. Mutual Purpose means that others perceive that you’re working toward a common outcome in the conversation, that you care about their goals, interests, and values. And vice versa. You believe they care about yours.

It’s crucial to understand that ordinarily the FBI applies for a wiretap separately from the National Security Agency. The NSA had tapped my phones for years, going back to the 1993 World Trade Center attack. But those wire taps would not automatically get shared with the FBI, unless the Intelligence Community referred my activities for a criminal investigation. The FBI took no such action. Instead—by coincidence I’m sure, the FBI started its phone taps exactly when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee planned a series of hearings on Iraq in late July, 2002.212 That timing suggests the FBI wanted to monitor what Congress would learn about the realities of Pre-War Intelligence, which contradicted everything the White House was preaching on FOX News and CNN. In which case, the Justice Department discovered that I told Congress a lot—and Congress rewarded the White House by pretending that I had not said a word. But phone taps don’t lie. Numerous phone conversations with Congressional offices show that I identified myself as one of the few Assets covering Iraq.213 Some of my calls described the peace framework, assuring Congressional staffers that diplomacy could achieve the full scope of results sought by U.S policymakers.

Talking successfully about feelings requires you to be scrupulous about taking the judgments, attributions, and statements of blame out of what you are saying, and putting the statement of feeling in. It is crucial to look at the actual words you are using to see whether those words really convey what you want them to. For

If you use these skills exactly the way we tell you to and the other person doesn't want to dialogue, you won't get to dialogue. However, if you persist over time, refusing to take offence, making your motive genuine, showing respect, and constantly searching for Mutual Purpose, then the other person will almost always join you in dialogue.

...in Aristotle...leisure is a far more noble, spiritual goal than work...leisure is pursued solely for its own sake...: the pleasures of music and poetry, ... conversation with friends, and ...gratuitous, playful speculation. In Latin, the ultimate good is otium — the opposite is negotium, or gainful work. We have sought too much counsel in the proto-Calvinist work ethic preached by St Paul...during the cessation of work we nurture family, educate, nourish friendships....in loafing, most of our innovations come...the routine of daily work has too often served as...sleep...a refuge from two crucial states — awakedness to the needs of others, and to the transcendent, which only comes...loitering, dallying, tarrying, goofing off.

Journaling Taking time every day to center yourself in the Lord and really get in touch with your heart and His voice is crucial for your journey as an artist in the Kingdom. Every day, your assignment is to begin writing random thoughts, prayers, conversations, ideas—just write. As you begin to ‘uncork’ your heart, you’ll be amazed at what the Lord begins to show you.

Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.

But if you want to make a place safe for people to take on culprits, and admit their own bad behaviors too, it’s crucial to treat alleged jerks with dignity and respect. That means starting with calm and backstage conversations with them and giving them chances to change. It also means realizing that some people aren’t usually jerks, but there is something about the characters they work with, their customers,

The apocalyptic scope of 2 Corinthians 5 was obscured by older translations that rendered the crucial phrase in verse 17 as “he is a new creation” (RSV) or—worse yet—“he is a new creature” (KJV). Such translations seriously distort Paul’s meaning by making it appear that he is describing only the personal transformation of the individual through conversion experience. The sentence in Greek, however, lacks both subject and verb; a very literal translation might treat the words “new creation” as an exclamatory interjection: “If anyone is in Christ—new creation!” The NRSV has rectified matters by rendering the passage, “If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation.” Paul is not merely talking about an individual’s subjective experience of renewal through conversion; rather, for Paul, ktisis (“creation”) refers to the whole created order (cf. Rom. 8:18–25). He is proclaiming the apocalyptic message that through the cross God has nullified the kosmos of sin and death and brought a new kosmos into being. That is why Paul can describe himself and his readers as those “on whom the ends of the ages have met” (1 Cor. 10:11).14 The old age is passing away (cf. 1 Cor. 7:31b), the new age has appeared in Christ, and the church stands at the juncture between them.

In their quest to be inclusive and tolerant and up-to-date, the accommodationists imitated his scandalously comprehensive love, while ignoring his scandalously comprehensive judgments. They used his friendship with prostitutes as an excuse to ignore his explicit condemnations of fornication and divorce. They turned his disdain for the religious authorities of his day and his fondness for tax collectors and Roman soldiers into a thin excuse for privileging the secular realm over the sacred. While recognizing his willingness to dine with outcasts and converse with nonbelievers, they deemphasized the crucial fact that he had done so in order to heal them and convert them—ridding the leper of his sickness, telling the Samaritans that soon they would worship in spirit and truth, urging the woman taken in adultery to go, and from now on sin no more.

In fact, with experience and maturity we learn to worry less about others’ intent and more about the effect others’ actions are having on us. No longer are we in the game of rooting out unhealthy motives. And here’s the good news. When we reflect on alternative motives, not only do we soften our emotions, but equally important, we relax our absolute certainty long enough to allow for dialogue— the only reliable way of discovering others’ genuine motives.

When it comes to risky, controversial, and emotional conversations, skilled people find a way to get all relevant information (from themselves and others) out into the open. That’s it. At the core of every successful conversation lies the free flow of relevant information. People openly and honestly express their opinions, share their feelings, and articulate their theories. They willingly and capably share their views, even when their ideas are controversial or unpopular.

In the Gospel of Luke, just at the crucial moment, Jesus too is in the courtyard, and the two—Jesus and Peter—exchange a look that pierces the disciple's heart. The question that Peter reads in this look, “Why do you persecute me?” Paul will hear as well from Jesus’ own mouth: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” In response to Paul's question “Who are you, Lord?” Jesus answers, “I am Jesus whom you persecute.” Christian conversion is always this question that Christ himself asks. Because of the simple fact that we live in a world whose structure is based on mimetic processes and victim mechanisms, from which we all profit without knowing it, we are all accessories to the Crucifixion, persecutors of Christ. The Resurrection empowers Peter and Paul, as well as all believers after them, to understand that all imprisonment in sacred violence is violence done to Christ. Humankind is never the victim of God; God is always the victim of humankind.

Gretchen Rubin The sense of thankfulness, appreciating the grandeur of everyday life, just the ordinary day, and really taking the time to take it in is absolutely crucial. And then when you have that thankfulness, so many other negative emotions get washed away—resentment, anger, grievances, and grudges—because you’re just so thankful for what you have. Also, it’s better with a sense of humor. It helps me keep my sense of humor, because it helps me keep my sense of perspective.

This book is an apt response to the wisdom of the great historian Arnold Toynbee, who said that you can pretty well summarize all of history—not only of society, but of institutions and of people—in four words: Nothing fails like success. In other words, when a challenge in life is met by a response that is equal to it, you have success. But when the challenge moves to a higher level, the old, once successful response no longer works—it fails; thus, nothing fails like success. The

To make sense of plastic on the mind and to develop a resistance to the perverse patterns that will otherwise run our world for us, I believe an activity of this sort - by way of a blog, an especially redemptive conversation with a coworker, a water coloring or a playlist - is absolutely crucial. It can be done. And when we do it, we begin to see things we didn't know. We have to try to make sense. We have to make time for artful analysis, which is the way we clear a space for the possibility of sanity. It is an outlet for honesty.

Actually, some of us learn to look for minor errors from an early age. For instance, you might conclude in kindergarten that while having the right answer is good, having it first is even better. And of course, having it first after others are wrong endows you with an even greater glory! Over time you find that finding even the tiniest of errors in others’ facts, thinking, or logic reinforces your supreme place in the spotlight of teacher and peer admiration. So you point out their errors. Being right at the expense of others becomes skillful sport.

With the intercom they could wander far apart from each other and still converse, and no one could know they were talking, while each voice hung in the other's ear. So they talked and talked. Everyone has had conversations that have been crucial in their lives: clarity of expression, quickness of feeling, attentiveness to the other's words, a belief in the reality of the other's world - of these and other elements are such conversations made, and at the same time the words themselves can be concerned with the simplest, most ordinary things: "Look at that rock.

Do we want to raise disciples? Then pay equal attention to what isn’t working as much as what is. Treat their questions and concerns with respect, because in my opinion, they have a decent pulse on cultural Christianity. Rather than starting with, “You are young and clueless,” maybe we say, “Tell me what you see and what concerns you. What draws you to church? What pushes you away? What do your friends say?” Humility attracts the next generation as easily as arrogance alienates them. This is so crucial. If we dismiss this conversation, we dismiss them from the church.

Capable, clever and with a natural gift for land and estate management, Anne had been the natural choice to take on the huge task of running Shibden. Not only had she impressed Uncle James with her abilities to deal with the renewal of leases and misbehaving tenants, he also knew that she would never marry and therefore the estate would not be broken up. In their conversations together, Anne had left him under no illusion that her emotional and sexual feelings for other women precluded the possibility of her ever entering into a marriage with a man, in which she stood to lose all that was hers. It was another four decades, on the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870 (thirty years after Anne’s death), before women would be able to keep hold of and inherit property following marriage. So, remarkable as it may seem to us now, it was Anne Lister’s lesbian sexuality (then with no name or legal recognition), which played a crucial role in helping her to keep control of her wealth at a time when it was thought that it was impossible for a woman to do so. That Uncle James, in 1826, seemed to understand and recognise this is even more extraordinary.

First, clarify what you really want. You’ve got a head start if you’ve already Started with Heart. If you know what you want for yourself, for others, and for the relationship, then you’re in position to break out of the Fool’s Choice. “What I want is for my husband to be more reliable. I’m tired of being let down by him when he makes commitments that I depend on.” Second, clarify what you really don’t want. This is the key to framing the and question. Think of what you are afraid will happen to you if you back away from your current strategy of trying to win or stay safe. What bad thing will happen

The reassurance of the Word was what all of us wanted in church. Defibrillate us. Shock our hearts. Tell us that pain is okay. That life is fucked but still worth it. Tell us that pain is a crucial part of everyone’s story—every birth and rebirth. Tell us we don’t need to answer every question. The divine mystery sparked my conversion. If it worked on me, it could lift anyone. Perhaps Father Reese was exhausted. We all were. But come on. So often I wished it could be me or any of my Sisters up at that pulpit, sharing that passion that we felt every day. Even thorny Sister Honor could stir us into feeling the Lord, or at least scare us. Feeling something was better than being numb.

As a displaced community, Tibetans often speak of learning to look to the future without forsaking tradition. And as Tibetans continue their flight from Tibet to India or Nepal and then scatter farther and farther away from the physical land of Tibet, the conversations on identity and culture become more crucial and complex. As the distance increases so does the desperation in keeping Tibet as the eventual home, our aspired home. Yet it is the loss of Tibet and its very distance that also awakens us to view patriotism and identity in new ways that are not guided solely by Buddhist philosophy. Self-assertion- an approach avoided in the past because of the Buddhist aspiration to prevent focus on the self- enters our identity as Tibetans.

Similarly, it’s necessary to acknowledge that most people don’t respond well to conflict as it unfolds. If they feel attacked, what they say in the heat of the moment could be less than kind. They also may respond by attacking back. (This again is why “I” statements are so valuable.) Or they respond by crying. Neither are productive responses—the person who’s bringing up the issue shouldn’t also play the consoler. You’re bringing up something that hurt you; you should be the one getting consoled. So it’s crucial to have some time away after a conflict to recollect and think things over. It’s often the second or third time you discuss an issue when things start getting resolved. Expect and even encourage having conversations about an issue multiple times.

As you practice presenting this question to yourself at emotional times, you’ll discover that at first you resist it. When our brain isn’t functioning well, we resist complexity. We adore the ease of simply choosing between attacking or hiding—and the fact that we think it makes us look good. “I’m sorry, but I just had to destroy the guy’s self-image if I was going to keep my integrity. It wasn’t pretty, but it was the right thing to do.” Fortunately, when you refuse the Fool’s Choice—when you require your brain to solve the more complex problem—more often than not, it does just that. You’ll find there is a way to share your concerns, listen sincerely to those of others, and build the relationship—all at the same time. And the results can be life changing.

Most churches are strong on teaching about conversion but weak on teaching about how to live after you are saved. Think of an analogy: In one sense, our physical birth is the most important event in our lives, because is it the beginning of everything else. Yet, in another sense, our birth is the least important event, because it is merely the starting point. If someone were to mention every day how great it was to be born, we would find that rather strange. Once we have come into the world, the important task is to grow and mature. By the same token, being born again is the necessary first step in our spiritual lives, yet we should not focus our message constantly on how to be saves. It is crucial for churches to lead people forward into spiritual maturity, equipping the saints to carry out the mission God has given us in the Cultural Mandate.

Having a TV—which gives you the ability to receive information—fails to establish any capacity for sending information in the opposite direction. And the odd one-way nature of the primary connection Americans now have to our national conversation has a profound impact on their basic attitude toward democracy itself. If you can receive but not send, what does that do to your basic feelings about the nature of your connection to American self-government? “Attachment theory” is an interesting new branch of developmental psychology that sheds light on the importance of consistent, appropriate, and responsive two-way communication—and why it is essential for an individual’s feeling empowered. First developed by John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, in 1958, attachment theory was further developed by his protégée Mary Ainsworth and other experts studying the psychological development of infants. Although it applies to individuals, attachment theory is, in my view, a metaphor that illuminates the significance of authentic free-flowing communication in any relationship that requires trust. By using this new approach, psychologists were able to discover that every infant learns a crucial and existential lesson during the first year of life about his or her fundamental relationship to the rest of the world. An infant develops an attachment pathway based on different patterns of care and, according to this theory, learns to adopt one of three basic postures toward the universe: In the best case, the infant learns that he or she has the inherent ability to exert a powerful influence on the world and evoke consistent, appropriate responses by communicating signals of hunger or discomfort, happiness or distress. If the caregiver—more often than not the mother—responds to most signals from the infant consistently and appropriately, the infant begins to assume that he or she has inherent power to affect the world. If the primary caregiver responds inappropriately and/or inconsistently, the infant learns to assume that he or she is powerless to affect the larger world and that his or her signals have no intrinsic significance where the universe is concerned. A child who receives really erratic and inconsistent responses from a primary caregiver, even if those responses are occasionally warm and sensitive, develops “anxious resistant attachment.” This pathway creates children who feature anxiety, dependence, and easy victimization. They are easily manipulated and exploited later in life. In the worst case, infants who receive no emotional response from the person or persons responsible for them are at high risk of learning a deep existential rage that makes them prone to violence and antisocial behavior as they grow up. Chronic unresponsiveness leads to what is called “anxious avoidance attachment,” a life pattern that features unquenchable anger, frustration, and aggressive, violent behavior.

The Fifth Mindfulness Training Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I am committed to cultivating good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society, by practicing mindful eating, drinking, and consuming. I am committed to ingest only items that preserve peace, well-being, and joy in my body, in my consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family and society. I am determined not to use alcohol or any other intoxicant or to ingest foods or other items that contain toxins, such as certain TV programs, magazines, books, films, and conversations. I am aware that to damage my body or my consciousness with these poisons is to betray my ancestors, my parents, my society, and future generations. I shall work to transform violence, fear, anger, and confusion in myself and in society by practicing a diet for myself and for society. I understand that a proper diet is crucial for self-transformation and for the transformation of society.

Outside of governments, the Church is the largest provider of education and medical services in the world, and this gives it great presence and impact in the lives of the poor. That is helpful in so many ways, but not when the Church discourages women from getting the contraceptives they need to move their families out of poverty. Those are some of the conversations that have been heard in the world over the previous hundred years or more. Each conversation helped drown out the voices and the needs of women, girls, and mothers. And that gave us a crucial purpose for holding the first summit in 2012: to create a new conversation led by the women who’d been left out—women who wanted to make their own decisions about having children without the interference of policymakers, planners, or theologians whose views would force women to have more, or fewer, children than they wanted. I gave the opening address that day in London and asked the delegates: “Are we making it easier for women to get access to the contraceptives they need when they need them?

Everything is always changing in nature, writes La Mettrie; everything is subject to the vicissitudes of fate. Suddenly, the clouds can obscure the warmth of the sun, but also, conversely, in the darkest night a star can appear at the horizon to bring joy to us mortals: 'It is hope, whose soft rays sometimes pierce adversity itself, and come to raise up within the downcast soul a dismayed and withered courage' [DB, 209, (third edition); DB, 227 (second edition)]. If everything is subject to change, then so too is adversity. Things can always get worse, but also, things can always get better, and it is in this knowledge that we may find our hope. That which makes life tragic is also what makes it comic; that which takes away our hope is also what gives it back to us. This kind of hope may seem but a feeble one, it is true, but from La Mettrie's point of view at least it is a solid hope, a true hope (like many pessimists, he is averse to 'false' hope), which it can only be for him because it is also, crucially, a secular hope. And it is this notion of hope as well as consolation, that makes La Mettrie not only a pessimistic optimist, but also a hopeful pessimist.

In this world, a subordinate owes fealty principally to his immediate boss. This means that a subordinate must not overcommit his boss, lest his boss “get on the hook” for promises that cannot be kept. He must keep his boss from making mistakes, particularly public ones; he must keep his boss informed, lest his boss get “blindsided.” If one has a mistake-prone boss, there is, of course, always the temptation to let him make a fool of himself, but the wise subordinate knows that this carries two dangers—he himself may get done in by his boss’s errors, and, perhaps more important, other managers will view with the gravest sus- picion a subordinate who withholds crucial information from his boss even if they think the boss is a nincompoop. A subordinate must also not circumvent his boss nor ever give the appearance of doing so. He must never contradict his boss’s judgment in public. To violate the last admonition is thought to constitute a kind of death wish in business, and one who does so should practice what one executive calls “flexibility drills,” an exercise “where you put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye.” The subordinate must extend to the boss a certain ritual deference. For instance, he must follow the boss’s lead in conversation, must not speak out of turn at meetings, must laugh at his boss’s jokes while not making jokes of his own that upstage his boss, must not rib the boss for his foibles. The shrewd subordinate learns to efface himself, so that his boss’s face might shine more clearly.

In addition to including the voices of those most affected by mass incarceration in the conversation about ending it, we must pay attention to lessons from an earlier era of deinstitutionalization: that of mental hospitals in the second half of the twentieth century. It is crucial that we not repeat the experiences of the dismantling of that system - a system that at peak was of a scale on par with mass incarceration, affecting about 700 per 100,000 adults in the U.S. population. Deinstitutionalization of millions of mental hospital patients took place beginning in the 1950s and lasting through the 1970s, by which time more than 95 percent of all U.S. mental hospital patients had been discharged, and most of the large institutions that warehoused them had been shut down. That earlier process (also called 'decarceration' at the time) was publicly presented as a progressive initiative to get people out of the medieval conditions of many old mental hospitals. At the time, the plan was for mental health services and care to be rendered through community-based programs. Unfortunately, those programs never materialized due to the budgetary demands of the Vietnam War and the death of President John F. Kennedy, who had driven the initiative from the start. The earlier failure of public policy affected many of the same populations we see in prisons today, where about 50 percent of inmates carry major mental health diagnoses. We must certainly insist that prison decarceration not repeat the wholesale abandonment of follow-up care that occurred after the earlier decarceration.

Over a three-month period in 1995, Holbrooke alternately cajoled and harangued the parties to the conflict. For one month, he all but imprisoned them at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio—a stage where he could precisely direct the diplomatic theater. At the negotiations’ opening dinner, he seated Miloševic´ under a B-2 bomber—literally in the shadow of Western might. At a low point in the negotiations, he announced that they were over, and had luggage placed outside the Americans’ doors. Miloševic´ saw the bags and asked Holbrooke to extend the talks. The showmanship worked—the parties, several of them mortal enemies, signed the Dayton Agreement. It was an imperfect document. It ceded almost half of Bosnia to Miloševic´ and the Serbian aggressors, essentially rewarding their atrocities. And some felt leaving Miloševicć in power made the agreement untenable. A few years later, he continued his aggressions in Kosovo and finally provoked NATO airstrikes and his removal from power, to face trial at The Hague. The night before the strikes, Miloševic´ had a final conversation with Holbrooke. “Don’t you have anything more to say to me?” he pleaded. To which Holbrooke replied: “Hasta la vista, baby.” (Being menaced by a tired Schwarzenegger catchphrase was not the greatest indignity Miloševic´ faced that week.) But the agreement succeeded in ending three and a half years of bloody war. In a sense, Holbrooke had been preparing for it since his days witnessing the Paris talks with the Vietnamese fall apart, and he worked hard to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Crucial to the success of the talks was his broad grant of power from Washington, free of micromanagement and insulated from domestic political whims. And with NATO strikes authorized, military force was at the ready to back up his diplomacy—not the other way around. Those were elements he would grasp at, and fail to put in place, in his next and final mission.

But if the same man is in a quiet corner of a bar, drinking alone, he will get more depressed. Now there’s nothing to distract him. Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.2 Here’s another example. One of the central observations of myopia theory is that drunkenness has its greatest effect in situations of “high conflict”—where there are two sets of considerations, one near and one far, that are in opposition. So, suppose that you are a successful professional comedian. The world thinks you are very funny. You think you are very funny. If you get drunk, you don’t think of yourself as even funnier. There’s no conflict over your hilariousness that alcohol can resolve. But suppose you think you are very funny and the world generally doesn’t. In fact, whenever you try to entertain a group with a funny story, a friend pulls you aside the next morning and gently discourages you from ever doing it again. Under normal circumstances, the thought of that awkward conversation with your friend keeps you in check. But when you’re drunk? The alcohol makes the conflict go away. You no longer think about the future corrective feedback regarding your bad jokes. Now it is possible for you to believe that you are actually funny. When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes. This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, distilled version of their sober self—without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety. You got the real you. As the ancient saying goes, In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.” But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations. That is what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self. So who were the Camba, in reality? Heath says their society was marked by a singular lack of “communal expression.” They were itinerant farmworkers. Kinship ties were weak. Their daily labor tended to be solitary, the hours long.

His experience on the bench was crucial in forming Taft's political vision. He disliked the rough and tumble of partisanship; he much preferred the quiet of the study. The image of the dispassionate jurist weighing the competing arguments of the litigants embodied how he saw the governing process. Elections, campaigning, and pressing the flesh were to him necessary evils in a democratic society, but Taft thought that he was a gregarious creature who loved humanity. However, such traits were for the golf course or the salon or the friendly conversation. When it came time to make policy, the ethos of the jurist dominated.

But there is another case for curating as a vanguard activity for the twenty-first century. As the artist Tino Sehgal has pointed out, modern societies find themselves today in an unprecedented situation: The problem of lack, or scarcity, which has been the primary factor motivating scientific and technological innovation, is now joined and even superseded by the problem of the global effects of overproduction and resource use. Thus, moving beyond the object as the locus of meaning has a further relevance. Selection, presentation, and conversation are ways for human beings to create and exchange real value, without dependence on older, unsustainable processes. Curating can take the lead in pointing us toward this crucial importance of choosing.

Your self-esteem--how you feel about yourself--is directly affected by self-talk. Whether you realize it or not, your mental conversation is constantly in a state of flux between supportive and unsupportive thoughts. When you notice that your self-talk is tending toward unsupportive, cut yourself off and re-state your thoughts and words so they speak highly of you. A heightened sense of awareness of self-talk is crucial to making this happen.