In Good Repute

Life is not about what you can get away with.

To get ahead, on the job, with friends and even within your family, you should follow certain basic ethical principles.

Kathryn Tuggle summarizes them in a new column. She gleaned them from a relationship management consultant named Eric Schifter, but, hopefully you know them already.

It should be fairly obvious that no one has ever lied his way to the top, but Schifter explains, more importantly, that you cannot tell one person one thing and another person another thing.

Consistency counts in business. Colleagues, co-workers, bosses and employees need to know that your words mean something. If two of your colleagues discover that you have told each of them something different, they will conclude that you are two-faced.

If you learned in college that words never really mean what they say or say what they mean, demand a refund. Anyone who follows that amoral principle will end up dysfunctional, unemployed and broke.

And then: do what you say! When you promise to do something, deliver it, ON TIME. Otherwise, Schifter say, you will lose everyone’s respect. Worse yet, if other people need your input to do their jobs you are messing with their time. You will develop a reputation for being unreliable and untrustworthy. 

Respect, once lost, is very difficult to regain.

If college taught you different ways to make excuses for handing in assignments late, it has taught you a very bad habit.

As a corollary, don’t call in sick unless you are really, really sick. And don’t take a vacation day when an important project is due.

You must show your commitment to the job and you must show that you know how to function as part of a team. If you sacrifice the good of the team for reasons that appear self-indulgent, your career prospects will suffer.

And then, of course, you should treat everyone with respect. Everyone means everyone, from the receptionist to the janitor to the CEO.

If you try to assert your importance by talking down to others, everyone will understand that you are trying to cover your own lack of confidence.

By now you know that when you are invited to have your job interview over lunch, your prospective employees will be noticing how you interact with the waiter or the busboy. You do not have to be best friends with the staff, but if you disrespectful, curt, condescending or dismissive you will not be getting the job.

And finally, take personal responsibility when something goes wrong. Do not shift the blame. You should do so even when you are not entirely to blame.

If others bear some responsibility, it’s for them, not for you, to say so.

It’s about being part of a team, but it’s also about exercising leadership. Leaders are responsible. Followers are not.

Tuggle summarizes the point:

When you're quick to point the finger at others, it makes you look like you're not only separate from the team, you're actually working against the team. This can lead to resentment from colleagues and may mean that people no longer want to work with you on any major project, she says.

When a mistake is made that's not entirely yours, take ownership, even if it hurts to do so, says Tom Gimbel, president and CEO at LaSalle Network, a Chicago-based staffing firm.  

"Whether a co-worker had a typo in a project you spearheaded, or there was a mistake in a presentation a colleague proofed, take accountability. No one wants to be thrown under the bus," he says.  

Mastering the Art of Conversation

Just in time for Christmas and New Year’s: a column explaining how to get along with other people. (Via Maggie's Farm)

Whatever the value of the advice, Eric Barker’s first sentence sets an infelicitous tone: he wants you to learn how “to make people like you.”

Why do you want to make people feel a certain way toward you? If they come to suspect that you have been using some clever scientific tools to manipulate their feelings, the chances are good that they are not going to like you very much at all.

In truth, the best way to elicit positive feelings in another person is to show positive feelings toward that person. Extending a hand of friendship is better than trying to seduce people into doing something that they might not want to do. Remember the old line: do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

I would venture that you would rather not have your mind manipulated by other people.

These caveats having been stated, let’s examine some of the recommendations that Barker has gleaned from contemporary psychology.

First on the list: encourage other people to talk about themselves. 

One finds it hard to disagree with this tidbit of wisdom. I would add that when someone is talking about himself, you must show interest. If you look bored you will give the impression that the other person is not sufficiently entertaining.

Whatever your new acquaintance is talking about, you want him to feel like he has all your attention.

I would add, politely, that if you ask another person to talk about himself you had best be ready to reciprocate. If you ask too many questions you will end up sounding like an inquisitor. It’s no way to make friends and influence people.

If the other person spends most of your conversation talking about himself, he might eventually feel that he has been performing for an audience of one. It’s no way to make friends and influence people.

I quote Barker’s next suggestion:

If you use questions to guide people toward the errors in their thinking process and allow them to come up with the solution themselves, they're less likely to feel threatened and more likely to follow through.

What makes you think that someone will like you if you are trying to correct the errors in their thinking? And what makes you think that you are right and they are wrong? Who do you think you are? A schoolmarm?

The master of this technique was, of course, Socrates. We know how that worked out.

I don’t want to sound too contrary, but when trying to connect with another human being it is better to establish areas where you agree, not ways to correct the other person’s errors.

The third suggestion is this: ask for advice.

Wharton professor Adam Grant explained:

Asking for advice encouraged greater cooperation and information sharing, turning a potentially contentious negotiation into a win-win deal. Studies demonstrate that across the manufacturing, financial services, insurance and pharmaceuticals industries, seeking advice is among the most effective ways to influence peers, superiors, and subordinates.

Ironically, asking for advice is not the same as helping another person to see the error of his ways. Thus, this suggestion contradicts the previous one, but, why quibble.

When you ask for advice you are showing respect for the other person. You are also humbling yourself in front of him. And you are showing yourself willing to engage in a cooperative enterprise.

All told, it’s good to ask for advice. It’s even better when you take it.

Most people find it very difficult to take advice. It is an acquired skill, one that you should have mastered before you ask for advice. Otherwise, your interlocutor will think that you are just going through the motions of asking for advice because someone told you that it was a good conversational ploy.

Barker’s version of the fourth suggestion goes like this:

Ask them about something positive in their life. Only after they reply should you ask them how they're feeling about life in general.

For my taste this all sounds inquisitorial. You should think of what you can offer, not what you can extract. If you offer something positive about your life, your new friend is likely, according to the law of reciprocity, to do the same.

If someone walks up to you at a cocktail party and asks you to say something positive about your life, you are likely to feel put upon. If he asks you how you are feeling about life in general, you are also likely to feel put upon. Besides, isn't it slightly idiotic to ask someone how he feels about life in general?

This line of question, which Barker calls a two-step, feels intrusive and invasive.

You should be connecting with the other person, not manipulating him.

Next, Barker suggests that you repeat the last three words of your interlocutor’s sentences.

Apparently, this works well in hostage negotiations.

Yet, the minute your interlocutor figures out what you are doing he risks being grievously insulted. Sounding like someone’s echo chamber might massage his narcissism, but it is no substitute for the ability to find points where the two of you agree.

Finding common ground is far more productive than trying to manipulate someone’s feelings.

The last suggestion is to gossip, but positively:

So, say positive and pleasant things about friends and colleagues, and you are seen as a nice person. In contrast, constantly complain about their failings, and people will unconsciously apply the negative traits and incompetence to you. 

Obviously, it’s better to be positive than to whine. It’s better to see the good in people than to obsess about their faults, foibles and flaws.

If you like the way one person is dressed and do not like the way another person is dressed, focus first on the first more than the second.

Of course, commentaries about your surroundings, the weather and the Super Bowl are not gossip.

But, keep in mind, it is not a good thing to present yourself as a gossip. If you reveal too much information, positive or negative, about your friends and colleagues you are announcing to your new acquaintance that you cannot keep secrets. That tells him that you are indiscreet and borderline disloyal. No one wants a friend who is indiscreet and disloyal.

Self-Assessment

I’m not sure how or why this Wikipedia entry made it onto the Monday Morning Links at the Maggie’s Farm blog, but I am happy it did.

The link takes us to a page about psychological research into what is called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

David Dunning and Justin Kruger offered a thesis about the relationship between one’s actual competence and one’s estimation of one’s competence. See articles here and here.

To put it briefly, incompetent people tend systematically to overestimate their competence. Perhaps we should not be surprised to discover that such people are not even competent at evaluating their own incompetence.

Since incompetent people do not know they are incompetent, they do not try to overcome their incompetence. Being near-fanatical about their belief in their own competence, they have the greatest difficulty overcoming their incompetence.

By extension, competent people know what they do not know and therefore are constantly striving to improve their competence.

Happily enough, the Wikipedia entry offers some earlier versions of the same idea. Psychologists proved the point a dozen or so years ago. Great minds seem always to have known it.

For example:

Confucius: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."

Bertrand Russell: “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."

Charles Darwin: “… ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

What does it all mean?

It might be telling us that those who have acquired real knowledge and competence have had to work at it. They know the joy of acquiring knowledge and competence by working at it, and thus, they are more likely to be more humble about their abilities. Don’t humility and doubt motivate people to keep on learning?

It might also be telling us that people who lack competence try to compensate by masking their inadequacy with a near-delusional belief in their own ability.

If they believe that they know more than they know they will be telling themselves that they need not work to learn more. Then again, their arrogant belief in their competence might have made it more difficult for them to put in the time and effort to acquire real competence.

A humble person is more likely to work harder to achieve competence. The arrogant person is more likely to rest on his laurels.

In principle, Dunning explains, people learn about their level of confidence by getting good feedback from others. They will strive to improve themselves when they see others doing better than they are.

This works well for people who are competent. They have a better accurate assessment of what they know and what they do not know. Those who are incompetent have far more difficulty overcoming their failings because they refuse to recognize that anyone is better than they are.

When faced with someone who has real skill, incompetent people refuse to recognize it. Here is an instance where setting a good example, becoming the kind of person that others will want to emulate, does not work.

Dunning explained it in a New York Times interview:

…  people at the bottom, if you show them what other people do, they don’t get it.  They don’t realize that what those other people are doing is superior to what they’re doing.  

Dunning suggests that the best way to form an accurate self-assessment is to key off the feedback you get from other people. You will never know your competence level if you rely on how you feel about yourself.

In his words:

The road to self-insight really runs through other people. So it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting.  Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded?  If you watch other people, you often find there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things.  I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on.

One might say that competence is dynamic while incompetence is static. Those who know what they know and know what they don’t know feel that they are competent to learn more. Those who do not know what they do not know lack confidence in their ability to learn anything at all.

They might well consider themselves and their views to be of equal value to everyone else’s. Isn’t that what democracy is all about? Thus they will become opinionated fools, unwilling and unable to acquire any knowledge or competence.

Dunning said:

Psychologists over the past 50 years have demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones.  You can call it self-deception, but it also goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done describing the shape or the size of that catalogue.  All this rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs they should really reconsider.

Let’s say that you are a politician and want to persuade a group of people to vote for a different political party. If these people are basically ignorant, it will be very difficult to entice them to change their minds without letting them feel that they have been foolish to vote as they did?

Apparently, it’s easier to continue doing as they did and remaining convinced that they are competent than to accept that they have been fooled, even tricked into voting against their own self-interest.

If you pretend to know more than you do, even about your own self-interest, you will reject anyone who questions or challenges your competence. Better to livean illusion than to accept that you look like a fool.

Wisdom from the Sisterhood

You take your good advice where you find it. This time I found it in the “sisterhood.”

No, not that “sisterhood.” I am thinking of what a young woman can learn by belonging to a sorority.

These days, I suspect that students learn more about life outside the classroom. If you want to build your character, you should join an athletic team. You will learn more about how to work with others by playing on a team than you will by listening to a professor drone on about political correctness. If we are to believe Becky Graebner—we have no reason not to— sororities teach young women the art of conversation.

There are few more useful, and, unfortunately, neglected social skills.

I hope I do not need to list all the situations and circumstances where good conversational skills will be valuable. If you insist, I will tell you that the correct answer is: everywhere-- from job interviews to cocktail parties to conventions to relationships to friendships to family dinners to chance encounters.

Few people really emphasize its importance, but the ability to engage in a good conversation is vital to a successful life.

Graebner shows how she acquired the skill through her participation in a sorority. She learned it by working at it, over many years and through hundreds of different encounters.

The lesson to be gleaned: you do not learn how to converse by taking a weekend seminar in how to pick up people. You do not learn how to converse by talking to a therapist who does not talk to you. You do not learn how to converse by trying to find out how you really, really feel and what you really, really want.

What’s the point of knowing what you want if your inadequate conversational skills make it nearly impossible to acquire it?

As Grabner makes clear, conversation is not about how well you express yourself. It’s about how good you are at connecting with another person. The more you are absorbed in yourself the less you will see that another person is there.

Graebner’s first lesson is: learning how to talk to strangers:

… we learned how to talk to strangers really well.  (In this case, unfamiliar sorority girls.)  This might seem like a basic skill, but most humans are really bad at a) striking up a conversation with a stranger, b) continuing this conversation for 20 minutes to an hour, and c) coming off as welcoming and interested throughout it all.  Recruitment challenges you to do this hundreds of times during your college career.  We are the masters of conversing with shy girls, mute girls, crazy girls…etc.

She applies the skill to job interviews, because, after all, the situation is set up to challenge you to make contact with a perfect stranger. she correctly adds that this skill will do wonders for your job interview anxiety: if you are comfortable talking with strangers you will feel less anxious at job interview. 

Second, Graebner explains that you should learn how to talk about anything, no matter how trite or trivial. The skill is especially useful when talking to someone who is shy and reticent, thus, where your assignment—should  you choose to accept it—is to bring the other person out of her shell:

Sometimes in recruitment you were dealt a “clam” (aka a girl that was so nervous/shy that making conversation was almost painful).  If even the strangest of topics caused this kind of girl to open up and speak, we ran with it and put everything we had into it.  I once had to talk for 20 minutes about goats (yes, the animal)—but I did it because the visiting girl I was talking to blossomed when the subject came up. 

The first task in any conversation is to connect with the other person. The best way to do it is to show that you care about her by engaging her in a discussion of something that she knows well and that interests her. 

To coin a phrase, it’s the right way to reach out and touch someone. That is, anyone will be touched and moved by your willingness to engage in a conversation about something that interests her.

Besides, how many men would love to know how to make a girl blossom? Well, now they know—learn to talk about goats. Or else, as Graebner discovered on another interview: have something to say about brass knuckles!

Graebner is correct to point out that a firm handshake speaks volumes about you. Strictly speaking, it belongs to the art of conversation. Hopefully most people know it already.

Finally, Graebner emphasizes the importance of reading people and situations.

Perhaps the point is not self-evident, but someone who is good at conversation is neither self-absorbed nor self-involved. She is reaching out to the other person and reading the cues that the other person is sending.

She is, as I have mentioned, trying to achieve harmony by showing respect. She is not learning the useless skills that relationship counselors often promote: how to fight and to argue effectively. Have you noticed how much time counselors spend talking about constructive arguments and how little time they spend teaching people how to converse?

If she is reading the other person’s body language and studying the situation, a woman is not performing a role. She is trying to make a connection.

Of course, it's more than a feeling. A woman who is reading the situation will be adjusting her comportment and demeanor. She will be changing topics according to the subtle signals that are part of any conversation. If you learn how to do this well your interlocutors will think that you can read their minds.

Graebner explains:

I’ve become very good at reading other people and then adjusting my behavior to complement the style and demeanor of the person interviewing me. (Knowing how to carry oneself around a reserved interviewer is vastly different from a bubbly, type-a interviewer.)  Like the example with Miss Brass Knuckles above, I knew I could get away with being more candid and relaxed—and I used this opportunity to tell stories and let her get to know me at a deeper level.  However, later in the process, I was interviewed by an executive who was more rigid.  She leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms, and didn’t smile.  She reminded me of the recruitment girls who had already made up their minds and didn’t want to visit my sorority house.  I knew I had to switch from telling her stories to selling her on my skills.  I switched up my rhetoric and changed my body language to match her.  By the end, she and I were telling personal stories. (Again, being able to talk to anybody).  Being able to change gears seamlessly and interact appropriately with whomever you meet in life is extremely valuable. 

Prozac and Your Identity Crisis

Surely, Elizabeth Wurtzel offered the best account of growing up on Prozac, but Katherine Sharpe has made an excellent contribution to the topic in her book: Coming of Age on Zoloft. Recently, Maria Popova wrote an interesting commentary on it for the Brain Pickings blog.

Popova summarized the issue:

Sharpe points out a troubling corollary: In permeating everyday life so profoundly, antidepressants also embedded themselves in youth, with an ever-growing number of teenagers taking psychopharmaceuticals to abate depression, ADHD, and other mental health issues. And while relief from the debilitating and often deadly effects of adolescent depression is undoubtedly preferable over the alternative, it comes with a dark side: Antidepressants confuse our ability to tell our “true self” from the symptoms of the disease, and from the effects of the medication, at a time when the search for selfhood and the construction of personal identity are at their most critical and formative stages.

In other words, how do you know whether your feelings are really yours? How do you know whether your complacency is really a sign of what is going on in the world and not an artificial, chemically-induced emotion? If you are feeling upbeat and optimistic does that mean that you have reason to feel confident or that you have been drugged? If you are not feeling anxious about lurking danger, does that mean that there are no lurking dangers?

Prozac will do wonders for your moods, and, Popova notes, in some cases that is all to the good. Yet, in others, it places vulnerable individuals in a condition that, strangely enough, resembles what happens when someone is traumatized.

If you have been hurt or abused, your mind will go into trauma avoidance mode. You will become overly sensitive to some stimuli and numb to others. Thus, you will not be able to trust your emotions.

Knowing your mind, in the sense of knowing what you are feeling is critical for your ability to negotiate your world and navigate everyday life. If you cannot trust your emotions you will be disoriented and disaffected.

Sharpe offers what appears to be the view commonly held by today’s therapists. Adolescence, therapists believe, is a time when young people are supposed to find themselves, thus to discover what they feel when they feel like themselves:

Worries about how antidepressants might affect the self are greatly magnified for people who begin using them in adolescence, before they’ve developed a stable, adult sense of self. Lacking a reliable conception of what it is to feel “like themselves,” young people have no way to gauge the effects of the drugs on their developing personalities. Searching for identity — asking “Who am I?” and combing the inner and outer worlds for an answer that seems to fit — is the main developmental task of the teenage years. And for some young adults, the idea of taking a medication that could frustrate that search can become a discouraging, painful preoccupation.

Allow me to correct some of this. If you feelings are a guide that can help you to make your way through reality, you need to know how to read them correctly, how to read them as a function of current reality and not as a function of past trauma. The issue of how it feels to be Me or You does not make a lot of sense, to me at least.

For example, if someone walks up to you and asks: Who are you?, the correct answer is to state your name. You may be Frank Jones or Jocelyn Martin… but, until the new order arrives, that is who you are.

Surely, when someone asks you who you are you do not respond by saying that you feel mad, glad, sad or bad. Such information may or may not be relevant to your interlocutor, but first, he needs to know who is feeling these feelings.

It is also fair to mention that if your mood shifts one day from mad to glad, you will not think that you have become someone else. Regardless of what you feel, if you are Frank or Jocelyn when you are sad you are Frank or Jocelyn when you are in love.

The concept of identity requires clarification. First, we must first notice that identity is a relationship. We say that something is identical to something else. Or else, we can say that it differs from something else. You might want to believe that X is identical with itself or that X is identical with X, but that feels like a tautology. It is useful for creating a formal logic, but it will not solve your identity crisis.

Furthermore, your identity is not just something you feel inside you. As the Chinese would say, it involves your face more than your feelings. Your face is what you present to the world; it signifies your social being.

If you feel that you are Frank and everyone you meet sees Mac, you will quickly be unsure of whether you are Frank.

Were it not for therapy people would not be overly confused about who they are. Yet, it is not enough to know your name; you must begin, during adolescence, to establish your good name.

Adolescents do not need to discover what they feel. They need to know what they should do. Scientists generally agree that the area of the brain that controls ethical behavior does develop until a child reaches adolescence.

Adolescents need to begin to create an identity as ethical beings. The first rule that a teenager should learn to follow is this one: to be good to his word, to keep his promises, to do what he says he will do.

If his actions correlate with his vows, his commitments and his promises he will gain an identity. Thus, he will be to others what he says he is… there will never be a doubt of who is he or what he is going to do.

If you say you are going to do one thing and then do another, you will never know which is the real you—the you who promised to do this or the you who did that. Rummage through your emotions all you want… you will never find out which one is really you. Of course, no one else will know either.

Good Friends Show Up

Woody Allen gets the ultimate credit for the idea, but Wendy Atterberry offers great advice on what it takes to be a good friend, how to know whether your friend is a real friend and what you should to do make and sustain friendships.

Her advice: Show up!

The injunction is more important in an era where people are accustomed to communicate via text messaging. True friends are the ones who are there for you.  They are not, Atterberry says, the ones who you had the most fun with, and they are not, she implies, the ones who share their most intimate feelings. They are the ones who put in the time to be physically present at important and even not-so-important moments.

Atterberry writes:

… the best friends aren’t necessarily the ones you have the most fun partying with but are the ones who SHOW UP. Showing up is THE single most important thing you can do as a friend.

Show up for film premieres and plays and races and weddings. Show up for your designer friend’s fashion show and your artist friend’s gallery opening and the dinner to celebrate your friend finally getting her PhD. Go to baby showers even though they’re kind of a drag. Better yet, offer to throw one because you love your friend and this is a big deal. Go to your friend’s mother’s memorial even though it’s a two-hour drive away and it will eat up half your weekend. Go to retirement parties and milestone birthday parties and parties celebrating the end of a nasty divorce. Offer to pet-sit or babysit or house-sit. Cook casseroles and coo over new babies. Drive to airports and weddings and reunions. Drive your friend to her chemo appointment and sit with her afterward and talk to her about whatever she wants to talk about. 

When choosing friends, take account of why shows up and who is too busy or is constantly canceling on you.

The show-up test matters because it offers an objective standard to guide your choice of friends. It does not depend on how you feel or how the other person feels. Get closer to those who consistently show up and take your distance from those who keep letting you down. Atterberry is obviously recommending that you choose among people you like.

She explains:

The key to long-lasting friendships, I think, is to weed out the ones who keep letting you down — not just once, but over and over — and to hang on to those who keep showing up, as long as they are people whose company you enjoy. 

Small Talk

It has often been noted that young people who grow up communicating via text message have more difficulty learning how to sustain a conversation.

People seem to be avid for the latest piece of advice about how to develop a relationship, how to get a job and how to keep a job. And yet, the answer is staring them in the face: learn how to conduct a conversation. And that involves perfecting what I called the art of the schmooze and that others call small talk.

Small talk does not have a very good reputation. Most people consider it to be superficial blather, akin to gossip, empty of meaning and depth, inauthentic.

One suspects that therapy has contributed to this situation. Clearly, you do not go to therapy to engage in small talk. You go there to explore your issues, in depth. In therapy you are supposed to get in touch with your feelings and to embrace them as your own.

Since the process is supposed to be beneficial, many people come away with the impression that all human conversations should be modeled on therapy. Thus, they believe that a genuine human connection involves the tactless display of deep feeling.

One must mention that the practice of free association, intrinsic to Freudian psychoanalysis tells patients that they must say whatever come to no mind, no matter how painful or how trivial. 

Freud was not promoting idle chatter. He was saying that even the most idle chatter can point to hidden meanings. We have rendered them trivial, Freud might have said, because we cannot accept the dire truths that they are obscuring.

People often fail at conversation because they believe that they are being called upon to share deep feelings or to offer serious philosophical reflections. Worse yet, they imagine that conversation is about finding out whether you both think the same thoughts and feel the same feelings. Obviously, this makes the connection akin to what the French call a folie à deux.

If may feel like common ground, but you can never really know that you feel the same feelings and think the same thoughts. You can know, to a much higher degree of certainty that you are both standing on the same line at the movie theater.

Today Elizabeth Bernstein provides some useful guidelines that will help people to learn how to engage in small talk. I will follow her outline, but not very strictly.

The first principle of conversation is the need to find common ground. Common ground is not common feeling, and it is certainly not a battlefield. If you are going to connect with a stranger you need to connect over objectively verifiable facts. You might be sharing the same space or attending the same performance. If so your opening gambit should be to remark on something that you both have in common—the room, the chairs, the paintings on the wall. 

Of course, an opening gambit is just that. With it you are offering an open hand of friendship, reaching out to another person. It’s an invitation, no more and no less.

At best, it should not sound like a quiz and does not seek to put the other person on the spot. Also, it should not be deeply personal. When first approaching a stranger you will not talk about your hemorrhoids and should not offer an opinion on politics or religion.  

You want the stranger to feel comfortable with you and to feel like the two of you are on an equal footing.

An opening gambit requires follow-up. It is often good to work off your interlocutor’s response.  You might echo what you just heard, elaborate a point or ask a question requiring some further discussion. You should offer a comment that affirms that you have heard what he has said, that you have understood it and that you value it.

At first, you should try to keep the conversation impersonal, the more impersonal, the better.

If the first conversational principle involves finding common ground, the second is the rule of reciprocity. Good conversations eventually move to more personal matters. You do need to know whom you are talking to. Here the rule is: each participant must disclose an equal amount of information about Self.  

If one person mentions that he was just at the butcher’s, the other person should mention that he was at the cobbler’s. If one person says that he is coming from work, the other should not to say that he just had a major fight with his wife.

No one person should hog a conversation. If you do all the talking about your new acquaintance does all the listening, you are entertaining him, not conversing with him. As all theatre people know, when you become an entertainer an invisible wall rises up to separate you from your audience.

The process of self-disclosure must proceed incrementally. If your partner has failed to reciprocate, then you were probably oversharing. You accomplish nothing by calling out your new friend for being too reticent. If he has not responded it means that you have gone too far, exposed too much.

Finally, conversation is not an opportunity to express your feelings, to get in touch with your feelings or to regale your interlocutor with how you really, really feel.

In a good conversation, the feelings that matter are those of your interlocutor.

A good conversationalist shows tact and consideration for the other person’s feelings and does everything in his power not to embarrass him.

It is also good to listen so intently that you close out everything that is going on around you. A distracted listener is a bad listener.

I have occasionally stated my belief that when you are doing a job interview what matters is not selling yourself, but buying them. You will do better to show that you have studied up on the company that is interviewing you and that you have formulated good questions about it. Such a strategy is far better than boasting about your accomplishments.

In any conversation, even in a job interview, provocative topics are going to come up. If so, your task is to avoid turning common ground into a battlefield. Try to find some basic facts about the topic that you can both agree on. They, you should downplay your disagreements and negotiate your differences.

Despite what many people believe, negotiation is not merely about splitting the difference. In a good negotiation, both parties come away feeling that they have won.

Sun Worship

Let’s hope it’s true, but there seems to be only one place left where skin color really does matter: the beach. Or, maybe, the pool.

Now that vacation time is upon us, more and more people will start obsessing about their skin color. Some will go to the beach, while others will lounge around the pool, slathered with sunscreen, inhaling the chlorine fumes.

I have yet to figure out why people who douse themselves in SPF 75 worry about their tan.

Unfortunately, the sun is not your friend. It is not your skin’s friend and it is certainly not your face’s friend.

Too much sunshine applied indiscriminately to your skin will turn it into leather. Do you know how much moisturizer it takes to make that leather-like texture feel like soft skin?

Too much sun applied to your face will produce a script of lines and wrinkles. So much so that, if you are a true postmodern you will run screaming to your local cosmetic surgeon.

Fewer and fewer people believe in God, but pagan idolatry is alive and well. Citizens sport their atheism with pride, but they worship at the altar of the sun god.

It’s what’s wrong with our minds. We worship the uninhibited glory of youth, yet we conspire with the sun to look older than our years.

In the name of vanity we do serious damage to our skins, only to do penance by squandering a small fortune on lotions, potions and masks. When that fails we move up to Botox and face lifts.

All the while we forget that the best way to have our skin age gracefully and healthily is… to stay out of the sun. Next best is to wear sunscreen.

How can you age gracefully, without trying too hard to altar your appearance to the point where no one knows who you are? Go to the movies; go to the library; sit under a shade tree. You will not look like a tomato or an orange; your skin will not feel like a football; you will not need to numb your face with Botox, suffer cosmetic surgery or submit to hours of facials.

Keep in mind, when those cosmetic treatments work their magic they will make your face look like a Noh mask… porcelain and immobilized.

Ironically, you will think to yourself that the medical interventions will help you to save face. Unfortunately, when your face is loses its character lines, to the point of becoming barely recognizable, you will have lost face.

In olden days, age lines on your face denoted maturity, wisdom and experience. A young face might be more pleasing aesthetically and erotically, but if your face lacks the right kinds of lines you will look like you have not lived very long or very much. Or else, you will look like a simple-minded poser.

Surely, the great historical competition of our time is between youth-worshiping America and a China that practices filial piety.

For all the prattle about the love of nature, a cult to youth stands in defiance to natural progression. Once the glory days of your youth have passed, nature will age you… inevitably and inexorably.

A nation that worships youth is setting itself up for failure. If youth is the gold standard, most of your life is downhill. It’s depressing. If you believe that your best days were when you were a young adult, time will put more and more distance between you and your best days.

So, add some Prozac to the potions and lotions and cosmetic procedures.

Or else… try a little filial piety. 

The Problem with Unconditional Love

It’s one of the great modern questions: how do you keep desire alive in a long-term relationship? You know, in a marriage.

Many young people believe  that if they have found “the one” and if they are both totally in love, that desire will always be there. Older people know better, but prefer not to disabuse the young of their illusions.

Now, Daniel Bergner offers what seems to be a paradoxical suggestion: the belief in, expectation of and longing for unconditional love is “the ultimate assassin of desire” in such relationships.

The idea feels so strange that it is probably true.

After all, if the therapy culture is prescribing unconditional love as the cure for all that ails you, you can be confident that unconditional love is a problem.

Bergner has just written a book  called What Do Women Want?, so he has done what we like to call field research.

He formulates his idea in a chatty paragraph:

What I've been saying—and what, all self-mockery aside, I do believe, based on the years I've spent listening to researchers and therapists and just living life—is that the longing for unconditional love is the enemy of lust, that the ideal of being loved no matter what is the ultimate assassin of desire in long-term relationships. From our parents we can hope for the unconditional, but with our partners we have to constantly earn love and win lust or love will fade and lust will disappear for both partners.  

But, Bergner asks, why should this be so?

I would say that unconditional love is infantilizing and patronizing, and that it is very difficult to continue to lust after someone who treats you like a child.

I would also say that someone who loves you unconditionally must ignore both your virtues and your vices. It may feel like win/win, but it is also lose/lose.

If you gain nothing by doing well and lose nothing by doing poorly, then you are being diminished and demeaned. You are being told that it doesn’t matter what you do. And if it doesn’t matter what you do, why do anything?

Someone who loves you unconditionally will love you even if you are a scoundrel, even if you betray his or trust, even if you are disloyal.

In your experience, is such behavior a turn-on or a turn-off?

To look more closely, I would modify only one point in Bergner’s argument. Perhaps this shows how old I am, but, in times of yore, unconditional love was the province of mothers, more than fathers.

Traditionally, mothers have loved their children unconditionally while fathers expect their children to earn their  affection.

To clarify the point, a child expects to be loved and nurtured by his mother, regardless.  At least at first, at a time when a child is most vulnerable and most in need of his mother, she will naturally love him unconditionally. As he grows, her love will also need to be earned, but he will always know that, if push comes to shove, his mother will love him no matter what.

A mother’s nurturance does not need to be earned. It does not require compensation. In many ways, it’s instinctive behavior and it is, like virtue, its own reward.

When it comes to fathers, things change. A child really needs  his father to be proud of him, and pride must be earned through achievement.  

Won’t his mother also want to be proud of him? Yes, she will. And won’t she expect him to earn her pride? Yes, she will. For her, however, her feelings of pride will never eradicate her willingness to offer unconditional love.

The more a child functions in a social world, the more he will need to learn how to earn love, not to expect it to be given with no strings attached.

In truth, a child will be better motivated to improve his behavior if he knows that his mother will always love him but that his father will not. 

A child who receives unconditional love from both parents will be more likely to believe that he can get away with anything. A child who receives conditional love from both parents will be more likely to believe that he must never fail.

Mothers love their children unconditionally because their relationship normally contains no sexual desire. As a sidelight, if this is true, then Freud’s belief that sexual desire originates in a taboo against incest turns out to be nonsense.

Mothers nurture; fathers socialize. Of course, mothers also work to socialize, but they never lose the feeling of nurturance.

But, what happens when a school offers children unconditional love. It becomes a nurturing, but not a socializing environment. If it is stoking their self-esteem and protecting them from the possibility of failing is, pardon the expression, mothering them. This will naturally make  it more difficult for these children to take their place in society. It will also make it more difficult for them to experience the pride in achievement.

If the possibility of failure has been eliminated, then the chance of building pride, to say nothing of character, has also been eliminated.

If you cannot fail you cannot succeed either. You will become demoralized, feeling that you gain nothing by getting things right. Once you know that you cannot get it right or wrong you are more likely to give up, thus falling into depression.

As we know, depression stifles sexual desire. When people are depressed they lost their confidence and their pride, but they also, notably, lose their appetite, for food and for lust.

If a woman offers a man unconditional love she is, effectively, treating him like a child. This level of disrespect will demoralize him and cause his desire to wane. No man wants to be treated like a child and no man lusts after a woman who treats him that way.

If a woman allows a man to believe that she will forgive him anything, she is sacrificing her self-respect by trying to make herself purely motherly.

We expect that a wife will stand by her husband in time of trouble. But that does not mean that she should stand by him no matter what. 

If she stands with him it’s not because she loves him unconditionally but because she has a moral obligation to remain loyal, even to a fault.

Loyalty, given and received, might be confused with unconditional love, but loyalty has limits. If someone betrays your trust, you are under no moral obligation to continue to be loyal.

Has Therapy Killed Conversation?

Ever since Freud told his patients that they had to say whatever came to mind, no matter how repulsive or trivial, psychotherapy has been undermining the art of conversation.

Think about it… if you follow Freud’s rule of free association you will become, alternately, a boor and a bore. Try engaging a good conversation by following that rule.

Many of today’s therapists no longer require their patients to free associate. Yet, they encourage their patients to give full throated expression to their deepest feelings, regardless of how a sentient human listener might react. Patients are taught that they have a right to offend with impunity and that anyone who thinks otherwise is being judgmental.

Try engaging a good conversation by making it all about you.

Then again, does anyone really care about learning how to conduct a good conversation? The signs are not encouraging.

The most conversationally deficient among us, that would be young men, now take seminars in pickup artistry. Apparently, they believe that the ne plus ultra of human communication is finding the clever quip, the dazzling one-liner that will entice a woman they do not know to allow them to show off their sexual prowess.

Young people, and some not-so-young people have been taught to express their feelings openly and honestly. When they discover that this dubious talent does not produce anything resembling a human connection, they fall back on the random, anonymous hookup. They believe that it’s better than nothing.

Therapy has not merely taught people to speak about themselves. It has told them that others are obliged to listen to them, no matter how offensive or numbing their discourse. It has told them that anyone who does not reciprocate their shameless oversharing is emotionally repressed, in sore need of whichever medication is currently supposed to cure the condition.

It’s not a formula for good conversation. It’s a formula for permanent psychodrama. 

Let’s assume, for the sake of this post, that many people do not know how to conduct a good conversation. If conversation is a skill, it needs to be learned and developed.

Anyone who imagines that if he feels good about himself, through a combination of therapy and meds he will automatically know how to converse has overdosed on therapy.

If you want to develop your conversational muscle you can do a lot worse than to read the advice offered by Cecil Hartley in his book The Gentleman’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness. As the title suggests it was written over a century ago, in 1875. This makes it mid-Victorian, but it also makes it pre-Freudian.

In his book Hartley offered a list of the rules for good conversation. They have been reprinted on the blog: The Art of Manliness.

Perhaps these rules are offered to men because men are more likely to manifest conversational incompetence, but they are not, you will be pleased to note, gender specific.

As Hartley prescribes, conversation should be more about light than heat. He counsels against heated discussions, pitched arguments, raised voices and dramatic displays.

Thus, he recommends that you avoid controversial topics. If a point of disagreement threatens becoming an argument or a fight, you should back away from it as quickly as possible.

At the risk of being obvious, this perspective differs radically from that of those therapists who teach their patients how to fight and argue constructively.

There is no redeeming virtue in arguing or fighting. There is no ultimate reward for making a display of intemperate emotion.

One understands that in our narcissistic age, people have been trained to speak about themselves. They do so because they believe it to be therapeutic. To Hartley, it is rude and arrogant.

Hartley explains:

Never, during a general conversation, endeavor to concentrate the attention wholly upon yourself. It is quite as rude to enter into conversation with one of a group, and endeavor to draw him out of the circle of general conversation to talk with you alone.

And also:

Speak of yourself but little. Your friends will find out your virtues without forcing you to tell them, and you may feel confident that it is equally unnecessary to expose your faults yourself.

The same applies to bragging or touting one’s own achievements. Men (and women) of accomplishment are modest about their achievements. If you brag about yourself you are putting down your interlocutor, and this is not the formula for good conversation. Besides, if you have really done well, your achievements will speak for themselves.

Hartley also suggests that you not bring up technical topics that you alone understand. Showing off your intellectual prowess is not the way to connect with another person.

Being good at conversation means knowing how to sustain a harmonious exchange. To do so you must be a good listener.

What does it mean to be a good listener? First, it means not interrupting someone who is speaking. Second, it means not completing or correcting someone else’s sentences. Third, it means not affecting an air of boredom or disaffection while someone else is talking. Fourth, it means never trying to speak over another person. Fifth, it means paying close attention to what you are hearing, even to the point where you can make remarks that will allow the speaker to elaborate his points.

The second point has a certain amount of amusement value. How many times have you heard people tell you that they discovered they were in love when either they saw that they were completing each other’s sentences?

According to Hartley, such activity is rude and disrespectful.

Conversation is an exchange. It is not a theatrical performance. It is not stand-up comedy. Those who fashion themselves fascinating creatures, great jokesters or brilliant raconteurs end up being anything but:

Be careful in society never to play the part of buffoon, for you will soon become known as the “funny” man of the party, and no character is so perilous to your dignity as a gentleman. You lay yourself open to both censure and bad ridicule, and you may feel sure that, for every person who laughs with you, two are laughing at you, and for one who admires you, two will watch your antics with secret contempt.

As for how a Victorian gentleman should converse with a Victorian lady, Hartley has sound advice:

Avoid flattery. A delicate compliment is permissible in conversation, but flattery is broad, coarse, and to sensible people, disgusting. If you flatter your superiors, they will distrust you, thinking you have some selfish end; if you flatter ladies, they will despise you, thinking you have no other conversation.

A lady of sense will feel more complimented if you converse with her upon instructive, high subjects, than if you address to her only the language of compliment. In the latter case she will conclude that you consider her incapable of discussing higher subjects, and you cannot expect her to be pleased at being considered merely a silly, vain person, who must be flattered into good humor.

Are you surprised to see a Victorian man advising other men to speak respectfully to women, to engage them in conversation on “higher subjects?” It’s a long way from pick up artistry.