Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (3 page)

I ran into a guy
I hadn’t seen for a while, and he told me he’d reunited with a former girlfriend and they’d gotten married. Life was great, he said, except for a few things he needed her to change. Six things, in fact. He opened his wallet and proudly presented me with a business card with some writing in ink on the back. In small, neat print, it said:

1. Quit smoking.

2. I get my Lexus back, and you drive your Jeep.

3. No dogs.

4. Tidy up the kitchen when you make a mess.

5. Get a job instead of just living off your inheritance.
(I can’t remember the sixth.)

He said it was a list of demands he’d given his new wife. Handed to her. On that very business card.

Surely, he was kidding.

He wasn’t.

“Um … how did she take it?” I asked.

“She stopped talking to me for a week.”

YAPPING DANGEROUSLY

With a little forethought, we can usually predict the effect that something we say or write will have on another person, yet apparently rational and intelligent adults pull pudding-brained stunts like sticking a business card with a “must don’t” list in their wife’s face and demanding she comply. Free speech
is
an important right. In the words of that Aristotle of episodic television, Abe Vigoda, guesting on
The Rockford Files
, “Everyone gets to work their mouth; that’s the American way.” Interpersonally, however, things tend to go better if we recognize that merely having a thought isn’t reason enough to release it into the atmosphere and if we apply what I see as the three essentials for getting through to people. The Big Three are:

• Listening

• Empathy

• Dignity

Listening and Empathy: Are you communicating or just pelting somebody with words?

Fran Lebowitz laid bare the reality of many people’s approach to conversation: “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.”
²

The sorry truth is, even waiting is sometimes too much for us. And by “us,” I mean me. Let’s just say I was reminded that I had listening issues when my boyfriend was forced to interrupt my interrupting him with “Hello? Gregg now has the talking stick!”

I’ve improved a lot in the listening department thanks to the thinking of Mark Goulston, an LA–based psychiatrist, business coach, and hostage-negotiation trainer who had an epiphany about how to get through to people—how much it means to them to be
understood
—which he wrote about in a 2006
Los Angeles Times
op-ed. Goulston had a session scheduled with a despondent female patient who, before being referred to him, had made multiple suicide attempts and been institutionalized for depression. He feared that he was failing her. In six months of sessions with him, the woman rarely spoke and had yet to even make eye contact with him, instead staring off to his left or right.

By the time he started his session with her, he had been up for thirty-six hours evaluating the mental condition of patients in various LA emergency rooms. He was so blisteringly exhausted that at one point, his office furniture appeared to be melting and everything seemed to go drab and colorless.

He worried that he might be having a stroke or seizure—until he suddenly had the notion that he was seeing the world through the depressed woman’s eyes, as filtered by her despair. “I never knew it was so bad,” he blurted out to her. “And I can’t help you kill yourself, but if you do, I will still think well of you, I’ll miss you, and maybe I’ll understand why you needed to.”

Goulston was horrified that he’d basically given the woman permission to off herself, but for the first time, she met eyes with him, giving him a funny look, smiling slightly. “If you can really understand why I might need to kill myself,” she told him, “maybe I won’t have to.” The woman, in time, went on to recover, get married, have two children, get a degree in psychology, and become a therapist herself, and Goulston came to recognize the value of hearing people “from their inside out” rather than from his “intellectual understanding in.”

Of course, we’ve all heard the advice that we
should
listen a kajillion times before, but Goulston taps into the nuances of
how
to listen—and why. He explains in his book
Just Listen
that almost all communication is an effort to persuade people, whether we want them to give us a job, agree to a date, or just find us witty. We think we persuade people by using reason and facts. But, Goulston explains, they won’t hear our reasoning unless we connect with them—ask them about themselves, truly listen to them, and make them feel heard, valued, and
understood
. This breaks down their resistance. They can stop fighting us off and relax, and it’s only then that they can hear what we’re saying, consider it, and maybe come around to doing what we want them to do.

Empathy is essential to the listening process—putting yourself in the other person’s shoes and then making them feel “felt,” as Goulston puts it, by letting them know that you get how they feel.
³
For example, when speaking to somebody who seems at the end of their rope, he says things like, “I bet you feel that nobody understands how hard it is when you have to (whatever it is that they have to do).” He got the antagonistic CEO of a company in trouble to open up by saying, “You’ve been burned before, haven’t you?” (These aren’t canned responses on Goulston’s part; he’s paying attention and doing his best to sense what they’re feeling.)

Even if you guess wrong about what somebody’s going through, by asking yourself
What is it like to be that person right now?
and by attaching an emotion to how you
think
they’re feeling, you show them that you care about their feelings and you’ll be more likely to get them to open up to you in response. Once they do, you need to put in the effort to
really listen
—in a heartfelt way, with a mind as open as you can make it; you can’t just cock an ear in the direction of their moving mouth and ride on your assumptions.

Because our default position is
ME! ME! ME!,
drawing people out and truly listening to them will probably take preplanning—reviewing these steps, resolving to use them, and reminding yourself to do it. I put Goulston’s advice into practice in the weeks just before and after I had him on my weekly radio show, and then I mostly reverted to being the unrelenting self-promoter I too often was when meeting new people.

I didn’t do this because I have a huge ego. Like many writers, I’ve seen some tough times. When I was in my twenties and living in New York, things once got so bad that I couldn’t afford both rent and a bed, and for about six months, I ended up sleeping on a door laid across two milk crates. (The fond way some people reminisce about their first car, I look back on the first mattress of my adult life.) Out of fear that I’d end up eating cat food at eighty (or fifty), there was always part of me—my inner PR department—that was never off duty; it was always looking to persuade
somebody
to hire me for
something
.

I wanted to change this, so a few years ago, I stuck a Post-it note on my bathroom mirror that said just “Goulston: Listen!” Days later, when heading off to an annual party for LA journalists, bloggers, and authors, I vowed to say as little as possible about myself all evening—to only briefly answer questions when asked. The difference in the sort of time I had, in how I connected with people, and how interesting and fun the evening was, was stark—so stark that it became a turning point. Now I don’t have to try to shut up and listen; I
want
to listen and do.

Getting in the habit of listening socially has helped remind me in stressful situations to muster the self-control to listen and communicate instead of just barking out my points. This isn’t to say I always succeed, but ultimately, I’ve found that being a better listener makes me not only more persuasive but a better friend, a better girlfriend, and less likely to give new people I meet the impression that I’m looking to strap them down, put their head in a vise, and force them to hear me talk for days.

Dignity: The value in making people feel valued.

Although I like to joke that I’m not violent, just hostile, I sometimes feel the urge to take a Nerf bat to passing strangers. I’ll be walking around my neighborhood, see some person walking toward me, and I smile and say hello. People mostly say hello, smile, or give a little nod. But now and then, somebody will just walk on, stone-faced, saying nothing.

I’m immediately enraged. I continue on my way, but I long to run after the person, get in their face, and jeer, “Oh, was ‘hi’ too big a word for you to squeeze out?! A little civility too much for you, ASSFACE?!” (I do love combining calls for civility with words like “ASSFACE.”)

And yes, I get that my feelings are out of proportion with the actual offense—just some stranger failing to acknowledge my greeting. And who knows—maybe they’re deeply introverted or their dog died and they’re lost in thought. But such a minor offense bites unexpectedly hard because it’s a violation of our dignity—the sense of well-being we have when we’re treated as if we have value.

Psychologist Donna Hicks, a Harvard University conflict resolution specialist who has mediated entrenched disputes in the Middle East, Central America, and Northern Ireland, finds that fostering dignity is fundamental to dispute resolution. In
Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict
, she observes that a “missing link in our understanding of conflict” is “our failure to realize how vulnerable humans are to being treated as if they didn’t matter.”

Respecting people’s dignity takes what I think of as applied grace. It involves extending yourself to make people feel they belong. It also involves giving them the benefit of the doubt (using Hicks’s suggestion to start from the premise that they are acting with integrity). And it involves treating them like their opinion and feelings mean something.

Hicks believes that a violation of our dignity—having our worth dismissed—probably has such a devastating effect on us because of our evolved drive to protect our reputation. Shame wells up in us, and our frequent default reaction—rage—is what psychologist Daniel Goleman, in
Emotional Intelligence
, calls an “emotional hijacking.” Even though the wound from a dignity violation is social, not physical, a signal that we’re under attack heads off to the brain, and the amygdala, the brain’s emotion center, reacts instantaneously; the brain’s reasoning center isn’t consulted. The amygdala messages our adrenal glands to mount a defense. Adrenaline and other stress hormones surge, and we’re driven to save face in an instinctive fight-or-flight way that’s overkill in our world, where we’re usually combating slights and insults, not hungry tigers.

Expressions of rage are powerful and can sometimes be the right choice for sending the message “Don’t tread on me! (again)” to an unrepentant bully. But with someone who appears to have some conscience, you can compose yourself and tell them (face-to-face or in writing) that their treatment of you was absent dignity—that they could have accomplished the same thing more kindly, charitably, humanely. Getting someone to feel remorse for demeaning you unnecessarily is probably more effective in inspiring them to mend their ways than trying to make them fear you, especially if you aren’t a particularly scary person. Perhaps more important, by calling somebody on their rotten treatment of you, you become a person who refuses to take crap from people, bolstering your dignity in your own eyes. You can’t always stop people from kicking you when you’re down, but you don’t have to roll over for them so they can land better blows.

TALK IS CHEAP. EXCEPT WHEN IT’S EXPENSIVE.

My neighbors are lovely people who treat me like part of their family. They always invite my boyfriend and me and an older female friend of theirs to join them and their three kids for cozy Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners. These are meant to be warm family affairs, not debate sessions, so I avoid any discussion of politics and economics, which, in turn, helps me avoid my temptation to go after weak or illogical thinking in these arenas in the way a coyote is tempted to go after a wobbling cow.

At their 2010 Thanksgiving dinner, this sweet but very emotional older friend of theirs, who works part-time at Whole Foods, ranted about the grocery chain’s new “wellness”-promoting policy giving employees a discount on their health insurance for meeting certain health benchmarks. “They’re like the Nazis!” she bayed. A response billowed in my head and hammered to get out: “Um, sorry, but unless they are shoving their workers in ovens with their tofu bake…” My boyfriend gave me the look one gives a dog about to pee on the living-room rug. I smiled and said nothing.

As we’ve all learned and as we have a tendency to forget or ignore, the brain has yet to prove itself able to outrace the lip. It’s essential to make yourself wait for it to catch up before speaking, as you can throw yourself in social purgatory (or claw your way out of it) through what you say or refrain from saying to others. This is why, in addition to becoming accomplished in The Big Three of communicating—listening, empathy, and treating people with dignity—it’s important to become versed in The Next Four: the four other brain-engaging essentials that make up a full communication skill set:

•
Request management:
Ensuring that you have full use of the human vocabulary, including the word “no.”

•
Honesty management:
How and when to be imperfectly frank.

•
Behavior management:
How to politely and effectively persuade people to mend their ways.