When I feel tired, scared, angry, or even joyful, it is easy to forget that what I say and how I say it affects others. Everything any of us says and does has consequences. It is instant karma. Not in the Hindu or Buddhist sense that actions in current and past lives decide our fate in future existences but now, in this moment and the next. All we have control over is what we say … Read more…
People’s beliefs about us influence how we behave. This is known as the Pygmalion Effect, after George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1916). In it, Professor Higgins transforms a Cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, into someone who passes for a duchess. As Shaw has Higgins express it, “The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in … Read more…
If you could change one thing about meetings at work or in your community, what would you change? If you could change one thing about the way you interact with others, what would you change? I’d like people to listen more attentively so they could understand one another better. And I’d like to be less impatient with and critical of people who tend to talk over others. Here’s the good news: we can change both … Read more…
Ground Rules might seem infantile, like rules for a kindergarten class: “Be nice to others.” However, they are essential to effective meetings because they are agreements on how we want to treat one another. They remind us of how, in the best of all possible meetings, we want to behave and get things done. They are important because each of us comes to interactions with unconscious expectations about how other people should behave. Here are … Read more…