I mentioned that all the management trainers mentioned Stephen Covey's book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I have no intention of reading it and fortunately I don't need to. Mr Covey has provided a useful summary on his website, and it's that I'm going to refer to. The Habits are fairly simple, it's the gloss he puts on them that's objectionable, but I'm not going to discuss it.
Habit One tells you to focus on you Circle of Influence (what you can do something about) instead of their Circle of Concern (what you worry about but can't change); Habit Two tells you to develop an Personal Mission Statement, defining what you want to do, on your "plan for success"; Habit Three suggests you do what's important to you first; Habit Four, that you should stick to your true feelings and commitments, express your ideas with courage and believe there is plenty for everybody; Habit Five suggests you should listen to what people say before rushing in to say your piece; Habit Six that you value the differences between people so you can co-operate with others who can do things you can't; and Habit Seven suggests you should exercise, eat well, keep learning, make meaningful friendships and practice meditation or some other spiritual discipline. You can guess there is a noticeable lack of statistical tables contrasting the surveyed behaviour of "effective" people with that of "ineffective" people. It isn't that kind of book. It's a guru book. It's sold in the gajillions, but nobody knows how many of those copies were abandoned fifty pages in and turned to good use as a door-stop (it's a big book).
There are four rules for pseudo-guru advice. It should be unqualified in scope and apple-pie in content, so you're not likely to suffer prima facie disagreement; it should be something people don't do naturally or can't do easily, so we can get some good guilt trips going; it must have no political consequences; and it should not be an analytical discussion of the ideas involved, let alone refer to actual psychological research (therapies and advice come out as mostly ineffective when researched). One of the rules must be that you are responsible for the state of your life and for changing it. In self-help literature, the economy and politics is random like the weather. It wasn't Wal-Mart that put your Mom-and-Pop store out of business, it was your own damn inability to adapt to the times. Gurus never say "get on your bike" but only because their editor told them it would make them look unsympathetic. This responsibility thing is a huge subject that I will discuss elsewhere.
So let's get to the advice. Of course we should eat well, exercise, meditate and develop our minds and relationships. Good luck doing that when you work on an industrial estate an hour's drive from home where the only food is supplied by a sandwich van and there is nothing but grey delapidation all round. And when you get back, the kids want to play, your spouse needs attention and you have to get to bed by half-past ten to get eight hour's sleep before waking up at half-past six. Weekends? By the time you've gone shopping, entertained the kids, washed, ironed, housekept and slumped... you know the score. Here's the thing: instead of blaming the organisation of post-modern capitalism, you blame yourself. Neat huh?
An effective person only listens to someone whose co-operation they need, and they are only listening for the buying signals. The rest of the time, they no more listen than the rest of us. We don't need to. Most people state their views not for discussion but for expression. They don't mind what's called "an exchange of views" and a lot of perfectly good conversation is just that. When someone is angry with you? They don't want you to engage with what they say, they want you to witness their anger and be contrite. What matters is the tone, not the words. If you pull that reflective listening schtick on them, they will throw things at you and you will deserve every bruise.
Guru advice is often willfully naive. For instance, most people don't fret about things outside their Circle of Influence because they are silly and ineffective. They do it to sound as if they are involved in the Great Issues of Our Time ("Think Global, Act Local" is worthy of an advertising agency and was probably devised by one. It gives an entirely specious significance to acts that are utterly insignificant. It's right up there with "The Personal Is The Political", which gave feminist significance to every little fight a wife picked with her husband.) Or more sadly, they do it as a displacement activity, because they have no real opportunities to get involved in anything significant. (We're back to that thirteen-hour work day and those lost weekends again.) A few people do fret about stuff they can't affect and not for show or displacement, and they do need to see a therapist. They are also the very last people who would and they certainly won't read self-help books. Besides, every activist started off fretting about something that was only in their Circle of Concern, until they decided to get active and extend their Circle of Influence to include the cause.
While we're on naivety, as for believing there is enough for everyone? Because we live on a finite planet, the amount of anything is limited. There's an amount of "everyone" which is too many for any given resource (other than World Peace). So if you really want to think that there's enough to go around, what you're really thinking is that there's a manageable amount of competition for the available resource. That doesn't have quite the same spiritual ring to it.
A "plan for success"? This assumes that you have by now found out what you want to do with your life, that it is legal and moral and that you can make a living doing it. None of this is guaranteed. Very few people make money doing what I want to do, so I have to have a day job. In post-modern capitalism, your "plan for success" is going to be more a "plan for adaptation" as house prices whistle skywards beyond your ability to raise the funds, your employer makes you redundant, your sex life dries up because being out of work is such a turn-on... you know the score. None of that matters. If you don't have a home of your own, it's your fault, I mean, it's for you to take action. You can do it, Little Engine.
The reason the gurus get away with this stuff is that we want to believe them. They don't need to put in the qualifications to their advice, because they know we will do it for them. They don't need to deal with the political and economic issues because we don't want to either: we want to be told that it's our responsibility because we'd rather be lazy and spiritually weak than economically and politically powerless. I might almost suggest that most self-help books are bought - or at least read all the way through - by people who want reasons to blame themselves for their failure. Because the alternative is to take political action, and no-one, not even The Invisible Committee, knows what that looks like.
Besides, from my experience, highly effective people have the following traits: 1) lots of energy; 2) not dealing with people and things that don't advance their cause; 3) a do-able plan and the resources to carry it put; 4) a product or service that meets a need; 5) either actual justified confidence or the ability to blag others into believing they can do it; 6) nothing to lose and 7) a neurotic need to achieve and succeed. Achievement takes special efforts. There are no well-balanced millionaires, creative artists and scientists, political activists, award-winning sports(wo)men, war-winning generals, Special Forces operatives, CEOs or elected politicians. And if the guru tells you that those things aren't a measure of effectiveness, they really are moving the goalposts.
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