Obama's Political Character

Professor David Bromwich has captured an important aspect of the Obama political character with great clarity and concision. Link here.

Peter Kramer Disses Sarah Palin

As a famous psychiatrist Peter Kramer knows the dangers of diagnosing people one has never met. He also knows that it is unethical to use diagnoses as ad hominem arguments against people with whom one disagrees. Link here.

Thus, Kramer refuses to jump on the bandwagon of those who have declared that Sarah Palin suffers from narcissistic personality disorder.

And as Kramer correctly notes, it is difficult to call Sarah Palin a pathological narcissist when she has: "a devoted husband, admiring children, a loyal circle of friends, a governorship, and a vice presidential nomination."

One of the first things every philosophy student learns is to avoid the "argumentum ad hominem." This means attacking the person instead of addressing the issue. Those who use these ad hominem arguments are showing themselves unwilling to engage in a rational debate.

I am sorry to say that what Peter Kramer gave with one hand he took away with the other.

Unable to resist the temptation to indulge the ad hominem, he denounced Sarah Palin for possessing a gaggle of character flaws: "She is, in my reading of her behavior, dogmatic, incurious, irascible, vindictive, dishonest, manipulative, trivial in her view of the world, and unjustifiably self-righteous." For good measure he adds that she is "opinionated and erratic."

But surely, it is difficult to believe these things about someone who has a devoted husband, admiring children, and a loyal circle of friends. You would even find it hard to believe if Kramer had gotten the syntax right and referred to her circle of loyal friends.

So, why did Kramer yield to temptation and stoop to the level of character assassination? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he works in an academic community and wants to continue to be a member in good standing of that community.

Within that community Kramer would not need to offer any evidence. Strong feelings, coupled with stereotypes and shibboleths, would suffice.

But Kramer incurs a risk here. He risks falling into the trap of what his profession calls projective identification.

For those who do not belong to the therapy profession, you can understand this as the boomerang effect. After you sling a bunch of mud at someone it gets caught in a wind gust and comes back to hit you in the face.

Kramer's list of Palin's character flaws could also apply to Kramer himself. Does his attack not sound dogmatic, vindictive, irascible, opinionated, incurious, and erratic.

And when Kramer riffs about how Palin seems to be fully integrated into her home community-- thankfully he does not say that it is primitive-- he invites us to think of his own, academic, community.

How well do his adjectives apply to today's academic world.

Dogmatic, check.
Incurious, check.
Irascible, check.
Trivial in [its] view of the world. Check.
Unjustifiably self-righteous. Double check.

The moral of the story is that people who live in an academic world where everyone thinks exactly the same thing, where diversity of opinion is severely proscribed, and where self-righteous moralizing counts as serious thought... should not yield to the temptation to engage in character assassination.

To end this post on an up note, I am happy to link a great article by Carl Cannon about the one relationship that should engage our interest: the one between Sarah Palin and the press. Cannon is a non-denominational journalist, and he buttresses his arguments with facts. It is a long article, but it is well worth the read. Link here.

Hat tip to Neo-neocon for bringing it to our attention and for her own comments. Link here.

"Leadership Is the Art of Good Conversation"

In the best cases life does not imitate art. Take leadership. People learn to lead by first learning to follow. Once they have learned to follow they learn to lead by leading. Often they emulate those who are known to be good leaders.

Call this learning by experience.

But what about the person who is thrown into a leadership position without having had the requisite experience. Lacking the experience of being led; lacking examples to emulate; lacking mentors... he will imitate what he knows. If he has never seen effective leaders, he will fall back on fictional leaders he has read about.

He might try to lead the way Jack McCoy or Lt. Van Buren does on Law and Order. Or he might emulate the blustery executive on a movie of the week.

If he tries to make his life into an imitation of the artistic representation, he will likely begin with the belief that leadership involve giving orders to people who are obliged to do your bidding. He might look to develop the dramatic tension that occurs when people bristle at the orders they are being given.

Most executive coaching begins with disabusing people of these false stereotypes. And the same applies to relationship coaching and marital counseling. People who think that relationships involve one person bossing the other one around are not headed for lasting success.

Thus, I was struck by this statement by C. West Churchman: "Leadership is the art of good conversation."

John O'Neil quoted this line in an article on executive leadership. He offered this comment: "Think about it, he was right. Good conversation involves careful listening, shared learning, reflecting, building consensus, motivating, resolving dilemmas for higher order solutions. These are the right traits for excellent future leaders not greed and self-promotion." Link here.

One thing that is lacking in good leadership, as in good conversation, is drama. When conversations degenerate into drama and when your workplace is filled with dramatic confrontations... then there is a failure of leadership.

It's the difference between art and life. Leadership that cannot produce full cooperation has gotten something wrong.

Fiction and other forms of storytelling must create dramatic tension because they are trying to engage the interest of people who have no real stake in what is going on.

If there is drama, if there is a lack of harmony, you as a spectator or witness will feel that your help is needed or wanted... as though you were being called upon to resolve the drama.

The reason you are interested in what happens to Hamlet has much in common with the reason why you slow your car down when you pass a wreck. The accident engages you in a way that normal traffic does not.

A good conversation involves reciprocal exchanges of information and feeling. It seeks to find a middle ground, not to sharpen differences. If it works as it should, it will not be of very much interest to anyone outside of the conversation.

"10 Worst Work Habits"

If Aristotle is right that character building involves replacing bad habits with good ones, then recognizing a bad habit when you have it is clearly a good thing.

Today Anthony Balderrama offers an excellent list of some of the worst bad work habits. Link here.

Whether you are looking for a job or trying to hold on to the one you have, reading through this list and developing a plan to replace your bad work habits with good ones will surely be time and energy well spent.

Common Courtesy: The Post-Interview Thank-You Note

Everyone knows that the first thing you should do after a job interview is to write a thank-you note. You get points for doing it; you lose points for not doing it.

In today's difficult job market, where you have lots of competition, failing to write a thank-you note sets you apart as someone who is not serious and not interested in the job.

How can we explain this? Today Amy Rauch Neilson offers a good discussion of post-interview thank-you notes. Link here.

For many people, Neilson suggests, the injunction to write a thank-you note sounds like something their mothers told them to do-- or even, forced them to do-- when they were in the third grade.

Thus, the whole process was tainted. Writing the note still feels like giving in to pressure and being dispossessed of one's autonomy.

Thank-you notes fall within the category of common courtesy. And we live in a culture that looks down on people who are common and courteous.

The culture tells us that we should be uncommon, unique, independent individuals. How better to signify uncommon strengths than not to do what is expected.

People who fail to respect protocol often feel like they are distinguishing themselves from all of the lemmings who take orders and automatically write thank-you notes. They feel they are showing off their creativity.

As it happens, no corporate hiring officer will interpret bad manners as a sign of creativity. He will see it as a sign of bad attitude, the one thing he least wants in the workplace.

Some people refuse to write thank-you notes because they do not feel very much gratitude. If they have learned that they should express their feelings and that they should not express anything more or less than their true feelings, they will not be able to say thank-you when they are not feeling it.

They leave an interview with a complex set of emotions. If they rummage through said emotions, they will be unable to find gratitude in the mix. No feelings of gratitude; no thank-you note.

A thank-you note is a formality. It is a required ritual observance. It is not the place to show off your unique individuality or to express what is really in your heart.

It doesn't matter how it feels to write it; it matters how it feels to read it.

The note must sound sincere. It cannot sound glib and forced. It cannot sound perfunctory and should not be loaded down with excess verbiage.

Clear, concise, to the point... but not too clear, too concise, or too much to the point.

You can best accomplish this by following a formula I invented to help people write these notes. A good thank-you note should contain three and only three sentences.

This also applies to the note you send to express gratitude for a gift, but that is for another day.

Look at the three-sentence formula this way. One or two sentences feels dismissive; it says that you know that this is a formality and that you want to get it over with the minimum effort.

Hopefully, you do not want to be communicating this message to a potential employer.

If you write too much, as one executive explained to Neilson, you sound desperate and needy.

Desperate and needy does not inspire confidence. It tells your interviewer to question why you have suffered so many rejections.

Three sentences, but not just any three sentences.

The first sentence should thank the interviewer for giving his time and for providing you with new and exciting information about the company.

The second sentence should echo something specific from the interview. This will help the interviewer remember you. If you forgot to provide some information about something that was discussed, you can mention it in the second sentence.

The third sentence should be forward looking. You cannot presume that you are going to be hired, but you need to express how honored you are to be considered for the job and how willing you are to provide further information, as needed.

In addition to this, Neilson says that it is acceptable to email a thank-you note, but that you should do so within 24 hours of the interview.

Since a thank-you note is an important communication, one where you want to show yourself as conscientious and diligent, the kind of employee they are looking for.

Take some care with the note. Rewrite and edit it. Do not use any abbreviations that might be suitable for texting. And remember that you are not writing to your bff.

The Power of Negative Thinking

Time Magazine calls it the newest thing in psychotherapy. No longer should you try to puff up your self-esteem by self-cheerleading. Do not try to replace your negative feelings with positive ones.

No, you must embrace your negative thoughts and feelings. Get comfortable with the fact that you suck. Overcome the impulse toward "Yes, I can." Now your new therapeutically-correct mantra will be: "Yes, I suck." Link here.

Clearly, this is intended as a corrective to cognitive therapy. According to Time, cognitive treatment tries to change "self-defeating attitudes into constructive ones."

Apparently, the cognitive approach needs correcting because when you tell someone whose self-esteem is on life support that he is wonderful, engaging, brilliant, talented and competent... lo and behold... he does not believe you. In fact, he thinks you are patronizing him and insulting his intelligence. He might even imagine that you do not even know who he is. Thus, he ends up feeling worse.

Dare I say that this represents a caricature of cognitive technique. Cognitive therapy uses many different techniques to invite the patient to re-evaluate his sense of his own self-worth.

Is he correct to think that he is worthless? Does the evidence of his experience support that judgment? Or are those thoughts about self-worthlessness merely a mental tic?

Cognitive therapy emphasizes balanced judgment. It tries to show that while there might be good reasons to think ill of oneself, there are also reasons to think well of oneself. To me this does not seem to be quite the same thing as giving dishonest pep talks that attempt to invalidate negative emotions.

All of these techniques have a problematic side. They tend to imagine that it is all in your mind.

This is the message that the new issue of Psychology Today is touting in its cover article about jealousy.

It is saying that when you feel jealous you must look inside yourself, the better to overcome your insecurities and your feelings of not being sufficiently lovable.

But what if the emotion has something else in mind? What if every negative emotion is not an invitation to do more therapy?

Perhaps your negative emotions are not inviting you to do mental gymnastics to develop one or another mental muscles. Maybe they are directing your attention outside, into the world, into your life.

How many times have you heard of people who were feeling jealous, and who were told that they were delusional? Many of them were instructed to get some therapy to get over their negative emotions and to open their hearts to love.

Now, ask yourself this: how many of these people subsequently discovered that they had good reason to be jealous?

My last post was about whether or not coaching works. In researching this post I fell upon another article from Time Magazine, from a few years ago, that explains some positive results produced by a new therapeutic technique. Strangely enough, this new technique resembles coaching.

According to Time, research performed at the University of Washington concluded, as follows: "Among more severely depressed patients, behavioral techniques like setting up new routines and scheduling activities worked as well as an antidepressant and significantly better than cognitive therapy." Link here.

Does Coaching Work?

An independent study commissioned by the International Coach Federation and carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Association Resource Centre suggests that coaching is markedly effective.

Here is a link to the press release announcing the study's results. Link here.