what and how

nobody@vox.com(The Doug) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:11:00 -0700

When you complain about a situation, you ensure your victim position with each utterance. The instinctual goal--which I've engaged in many many times--is to take a vote; to surround yourself with so many people who agree that you have been wronged that, just maybe, you might start to believe it yourself.

My new approach is more proactive, and it applies both to situations that are working and those that are not. For every relationship I'm involved in, every project I'm working on, I ask myself two questions:

What do I want?
How am I going to get it?

The first question involves being honest with myself and with my feelings. I ask the question with no limits. If everything went the way I wanted it to go, what would I be getting out of this?

The second question is where the reality of the situation comes in. The world doesn't just hand you every thing you want on a silver platter (and I wanted a platinum platter anyway). So: I know where I am. I know where I want to be. What steps do I take to get me one step closer to the goal?

Abraham Lincoln was a master of this. You may think that, as President of the United States, that he would finally be in a position where everybody would just go ahead and do what he said. But of course that is not the reality of it. He had to work even harder to maintain the trust and loyalty of those working for him. He had to continually find new ways to motivate and align his staff and his generals.

He could have continually maligned a lot of these people, and be justified in doing so. Instead he encourages those who failed to carry out his orders, and even those who worked against him.

I'm listening to his letters and speeches through books on tape as I commute. As I listen to each track, I ask myself: what did he want? How was he going about getting it?

I find that he wants more than just having people do the jobs he needed completed. He wanted to build working relationships with people, and to maximize the productivity that comes from walking together down that portion of the two life paths that overlap.

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