FRIENDSHIP

I went to work yesterday with two friends. They are both women: one is Kate Newlin, an extraordinarily easy woman to be with, and Helen Fitzpatrick, a kind, active woman who will delight you with her laugh and disarm you with her smile. Helen together with her partner Phil Keane own a mid-sized promotions agency, Xinc (pronounced Zinc) and among other things they manage thousands of in-store demonstrations around the county in familiar places like Wal-Mart and Sears. For reasons of safety and protection, economies and reach, the demonstration teams consist of two women team who show interested shoppers how products work. The women on these teams (I suppose Xinc also employs men) share a room at night together, eat together, ride in cars together and for the most part, they live and work well together.

But yesterday was a different. Yesterday, the harmony that once held one team together sounded a discordant note: one of the two women had a meltdown. It's hard to know for certain exactly happened, and really doesn't matter, no one ever knows for certain, but after listening to Helen tell us the story I began to wonder: are these women able to make friends? My answer was exactly the same for both of them, so I thought I’d like to share my thoughts about friendship with you today.

For most adults, the simple answer is, yes. For most adults, we don’t have to worry. Most adults already have most of the skills they will ever need to make friends, and if not friends, then good social interactions which can lead to sustainable friendships over time.

As children most of us make a friend or two when we are in kindergarten; and most, if not all adolescents make friends when they go to college. This is true even with shy, introverted people. Shyness or introversion is not as big of a deal in friendship as some people think because it’s attachment not shyness that makes the process of making and holding onto a friend difficult or not.

Psychologists use the word attachment to describe the process of filling up a person’s cup, if you will, with four essential elements: love, comfort, caring, and food. Most often, a parent or significant caregiver becomes the primary “giver” in a child-adult relationship. They become home base. It is from this place a child can begin to explore and discover her world. For the child, this is great: the parent is there to sooth her when she is upset and to frolic and play with her when she is happy. For the adult, attachment is mirroring a child’s needs, emotions and responding to them with unconditional love and devotion.

If the cup is kept full, never emptied by hunger, loneliness, wavering fidelity, or hurtfulness, then the attachment is secure. Our real and rational experience with the world informs us that not all attachments are this secure. No parent is perfect, and no child is asked not to endure some frustration and pain. If the attachment is real and reasonably strong, the basic skills for friendship are there.

A good friendship is the predictor of adult happiness, as good attachment is the best predictor of adult happiness. So how does it work: One way to think about it is to consider some of the skills a person might need to make friendships. You might for example, seek the company of others (even shy people do this), and have a capacity for reciprocity, taking turns, cooperation and sharing. Empathy is important, as is a realistic and generally positive expectation of others will allow you to approach the world with confidence. Problem solving and the ability to regulate aggression and other emotions; as essential is the ability to tolerate frustration and “hold onto others.” Along the same lines, trust that others can and will hold you in mind and self-disclosure, or the willingness to show vulnerability is also important.

As I’m sure you can see there is a clear and present link between early attachment and friendship, and a tangential link between adult relationships and early attachment. We learn to enjoy the company of others when we are infants, and adults learn to experience joy in joining with their child in endless games of peek-a-boo, and funny faces, taking turns smiling, cooing, and interacting. After a while, adults and babies learn that they are separate from one another and they tolerate the loss and separation because of the strength of the bonds developed in early attachment.

Tolerating frustration is hard for a child: hunger demands satisfaction. Waiting to be fed, on the other hand, means holding onto hunger and dissatisfaction, which is unwanted and uncomfortable. Children learn empathy when another person treats them empathically during this difficult time. They also learn to how to read another’s emotions by having another person in tuned with their emotions, thus opening up their own emotions to the regulation of emotion, as well as the emotions of others. This is a very difficult and trying process for an inexperienced child who is feeling these powerful, disruptive feelings for the first time. During these early periods of attachment, I think of adults as guides and scouts who help the young traveler. They help set a direction, modulate disappointment, regulate affect, build bridges over turbulent streams, and give a child someone they can depend and lean on.

At this point, let me be clear: I do not know Helen’s team members and I haven’t the slightest idea whether or not their early attachment cup is full or empty. But let me continue to explore this issue. Later, this means that they can develop friendships that can handle, resolve conflict and find creative solutions to problems, and not be swamped by anger, envy when a friend wins a game, gets a big contract, or a new toy.

If your attachments are consistent and positive in early life, your friendships will be generally positive because you will not expect betrayal or rejection. Early, good and consistent attachments help you in another way; they can help you discern who is likely to be a good friend, and whom you better avoid.

Holding onto others means that when your friends aren’t around you believe they think about you in their absence, and you think about them in their absence. Holding each other in mind means not only thinking of them but thinking well of them. I think that’s where the peek-a-boo games mother’s and children play come in; you hide but you also believe someone is looking for you. You believe that they will find you when you’re lost, when you’re scared and you think your world is a dark and scary place.

Some early attachments were not well formed. These people are clingy, anxious, nervous, distrusting, rigid, unsure of their place in the world and untrusting of others. If the skills of attachment weren’t developed early, they need to be developed in new connections that are safe and meaningful.

Friendships skills are built a thousand times over a lifetime; it’s never too late; friendships take skill and practice, and maybe someone of the other side cheering for you, maybe a friend.

Don’t Do Anything Interesting

Don’t even read this. Just hit the delete key. You don’t have time. I understand. You don’t have time. You can’t afford it. It’s not fast enough. Nothing is fast enough. Fast forward isn’t fast enough. Fast food is too slow. Too long. Too everything.

Seriously, we don’t have patience. If you work with people, you know this. We don’t have the patience for each other.

Anyone can see this, and that’s the shame of it. We don’t have the patience to listen, to learn things and stay awake.

It’s real work. Anyone who does it, anyone who tries, anyone who really listens as much with their eyes, their ears, their heart and imagination hears what others are doing and what they’re doing too. That’s what the making of anything is all about. Anyone can do it.

But I get it, you don’t have time. You don’t have time to hear completely. You don’t have time for what others are doing.

Listen. Instinctively, you’ll know what can be done and what you can do. It’s the difference between trying to look like something and being something. Anyone can do it, anyone who can balance contemplation and reflection with action.

Like you, I learned by watching others do things. We have all derived our cultural norms and givens from watching. We internalize those that we watch – parents, loved ones, those that cared for us and those who hurt us, and then, like a mime, we play them back. Hurt, we furrow our brow. Anger, we stalk, yell and scowl. Our security, empathy, sense of self and others are all hard earned balances learned during times of great imbalance in early childhood and throughout our adolescents, adulthood and later maturity.

Through each life stage, each balance, we get in and out balance as a natural part of human development, but sometimes we don’t gain our footing. Like a mime at the end of a performance, we must scrub the already thought response away and find a way to simply be present and aware if we want to grow. If you can’t do it on your feet, maybe you can do it from a chair, or in front of an easel, a camera, or typewriter.

Can you be a better teacher by being a better student and going to school? Can you be a better business executive by being a better photographer? Can you be a better police officer by being a better poet? It’s a bit hard to prove this works. It’s a bit hard to prove that learning to give up control in one area of your life can make you more alive and aware in other areas of your life. It’s hard to prove that if you don’t do try to do anything interesting, you’ll do interesting things.

All I can offer as proof is a platitude: an open eye sees more.

Anyone can do it. Anyone can regain their balance. Just put one foot in front of another. Stasis ends when something new stands out against a field of sameness. No one knows where it will be, or what it will be like. I don’t know it for me and I certainly don’t know it for you. I only know that the way to move in its direction is to be new yourself, to be courageous enough to see and think so that you will know it when it comes to you.

So try not to do anything interesting.

Just stay awake and be ready to let go.

Conflict Up

It’s tempting to think that the world would be better without conflict, where everything would succeed and nothing would fail. Every idea would win approval; every person would welcome you and every group would find you interesting, intelligent and good. Everything you touched would reveal gold. As the fantasy goes, people would be happy, the skies would be sunny and everything would stay delightfully the same.

You can understand this fantasy. Who wouldn’t welcome a little less pressure, a little less demand, and a little more sameness. But it’s a mistake. In a world of change and change agents, buzz marketing, viral ideas, podcasts, blogs and “adgrams,” you need to have more than one idea in a lifetime, no matter how good that idea is. And even though that one idea may be a big, life altering, award winning, stock jumping, star shooting, anti-gravity making bonanza, it can only last so long.

You have to let it go. You have to replace one idea with another, and trick is to accept that fact. It’s not easy. It means you have put your fame, your awards, and sometimes, your notoriety aside and put things in risk again. You have to get off your laurels. You have to go out and welcome the conflict. You have to find your own will and courage.

I talked about conflict, the primary grist in the mill of new ideas and personal and organizational transformation to Inc. Magazine writer, Adam Hanft. Hanft gets it. And in case you didn’t get this month’s issue of Inc. Magazine, you can read it below. It’s a great article and I’m proud to be featured in it.



The Joy of Conflict
The impulse is to seek workplace consensus
But sometimes it’s better to fight
From: Inc. Magazine, August 2005
By: Adam Hanft

When it comes to U.S. foreign policy these days, it’s all about the Bush Doctrine’s fundamental refusal to shrink from conflict. But in the world of business, it’s quite the opposite. You might say it’s all about the Rodney King Doctrine: Can’t we all just get along?

In the workplace, our primary impulse is to turn down the tension thermostat. We paper over real and meaningful disputes in an anxious rush to create consensus even if that consensus is largely artificial. Simply put, we are uncomfortable with conflict, perhaps because we are trained from pre-K to make nice.

I assumed this was just part of doing business until I met Bob Taraschi, founder of Milestone Consulting, a firm in Dedham, Mass. All consultants make promises, but Taraschi struck me as particularly compelling. He promises the miracle of ‘conflict transformation’.

This is different from conflict management, which gives people tools to deal with their anger. Taraschi is aiming at a much deeper place. For example, he was brought into an Internet company where the CEO was in a seemingly intractable struggle with her Web development team. The CEO was demanding outstanding work and expected her developers to take ownership of their projects and work independently. But her team members felt she was unwilling to cede real authority and that nothing they presented was good enough. (Sound familiar? It does to me.)

The typical conflict-management guru might have helped the company come up with a new set of rules to govern workplace behavior. Taraschi did something different: He helped the CEO see that her conflict came from a fear that if she actually granted her team independence, some of her own importance would fade. It was a powerful insight. By recognizing the loss that comes from ceding autonomy, the CEO was able to transform conflict into interdependence.

It’s nice to pretend that we work in a no-conflict zone. But that’s a “myth”… an unhealthy, even disastrous, one. Unresolved conflict stirs up anxiety, fear, and frustration. Elaborate defense mechanisms arise, which hamper an organization’s ability to operate effectively. A classic example is the space shuttle Challenger and its infamous O-rings. Problems with the seals were identified four years before the first shuttle flight but disregarded by NASA, notes Howard Schwartz in his book Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay. He calls the episode perhaps the most tragic example of the exportation of conflict.

Think about the way conflict gets exported in your business. Is it considered a “good meeting” when everyone agrees? That’s the worst. I’ve been in dozens of feel good meetings, at which the important issues weren’t challenged until after the meeting officially ended. I am guilty of the same thing. A few years ago, for example, I brought a minority partner into the company, elevating him over a long-term and valuable senior exec. This created no end of stress and conflict, which I was aware of but chose to ignore, believing it would work itself out. It didn’t. My long-term colleague felt betrayed, and while his dedication didn’t wane, I now realize that he spent unproductive time trying to prove himself, establish zones of independence, and restore his battered sense of significance.

In retrospect, I should have set clearer lines of accountability. But more important, I wish I had confronted the problem directly, throwing myself into the middle of the dispute rather than avoiding it. As Taraschi points out, the journey of the hero is always through conflict. If I had focused on the company’s struggle’s and the two executives roles in it, both might have found a heroic path. But most companies prefer to tell their stories in terms of how they go around conflict rather than through it. More truth-telling and less myth will enable people to make the trip.

Adam Hanft is founder and CEO of Hanft Unlimited, a Manhattan-based consulting, advertising, and publishing firm.

INTUITION

He was a perfect picture of disdain and distance. He sat perfectly relaxed in a black Aeron chair brought into the room for this one in a series of one-on-one interviews. The logic was perfectly reasonable: if you want to know something about security why not talk to someone who makes you insecure.

“They put me in the basement,” he said, of his parents. “I was guilty. I was the only man in the joint who was guilty,” he said snickering of the sentence he served for kidnapping a young man and tying him to chair and leaving him in a backyard shed. “But I never hit him, took his money or stole his credit cards.”

It’s never hard to imagine the face of innocence, but this; its opposite was not so easy. In prison, his innocence was lost, and in its place, he grew muscles, a beard and became a scholar. “I remember everything I read,” he said to me, tipping his chair against the wall, drinking a Coke. He studied religion, the ancient texts in dozens of correspondence courses he took from prison prior to his release. “I wrote the guys from the University of Chicago, Harvard, Yale and by the time of my release, they were writing me.”

He was no ordinary man, although this view of him was not so much proclaimed, it was never denied. He was smarter than most people and more intuitive. “I know stuff. I sense things. I see things that will happen,” he told me.

He drank Coca-Cola with a relish I had never seen. It was the kind of relish that man denied things experiences when they cross his path. He wore an Old Navy-grade denim shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbow, revealing the slightest hint of a prison tattoo, and a pair of jeans. He used the interview for a few quick dollars and an opportunity to spar. He liked to unsettle me. Once during the interview he stared so intently at me that I began to feel that the room was growing smaller and I was the one being interviewed. He won that round.

You don’t have to look far to find work if you’re attractive, well-spoken, ironic and not desperate. He found his, after a few missed appointments, at a security firm. He had been sent by the security team to evaluate the personal security systems for many of their clients. The money was excellent.

He confessed the learning curve for security systems was steep, but he read all the manuals, memorized all of the code, and relied on his own judgment to test the weaknesses in the system. Naturally, he preferred his own judgment best.

He told me of a couple in their early forties who wanted a home security system: he, a gruff investment capitalist who obviously “liked the hunt more than the game,” and she a wealthy, idealist who couldn’t wait to find a cause worth fighting, were looking to protect their “collection.” She was talking to him about the resignation of Sandra Day O’Connor, women in business and the plight of the underserved. Immediately, he intuited that she was an academic struggling with her dissertation and her place in the world. His intuition connected with her in the blink. Next, thing he knew, he was discussing with her the U.S. Constitution, Plato, Strauss, and deconstructionism. Yes, said the young woman, astounded, it is responsibility of my family to help those in need.

They discussed philanthropy at length. Then, before he knew it, his intuition saw the fatal flaw in her in the current revision of her dissertation and knew exactly what and how her dissertation needed to end. So he told her what reversals of logic she needed to make. His advice was so detailed, so far beyond any expectation, he felt himself uplifted in the wish to be helpful. This generosity was new to him. She was immediately grateful and went to work on the changes.

There were other satisfying experiences involving a combination of intelligence, intuition and prescient advice. He helped in marital difficulties and life directions. All of the solutions came to him with absolute clarity. As a result, he made a discovery, not about people, but about himself, which he was willing to share with me. “Our jobs are alike,” he said to me.

“You see,” he said leaning toward me. “It’s really easy to solve someone else’s problems.”

REAL ESTATE

In the housing market, or any other market for that matter, what goes up must come down. Housing prices have been rising faster than incomes since 2000, and the ratio of housing prices to incomes is now the highest since the Depression.

Home owners dedicated to compensate for this lack of income are borrowing more than ever, before the dream of home ownership slips away from them. In order to facilitate, some might say in their own demise, homeowners have less and less equity in their homes and, more and more debt. In order to qualify for larger and larger mortgages, more home buyers are in the great tradition of American fast-food “super-sizing” their risks. They’re using adjustable rate mortgages, zero-interest mortgages, which in a downturn leaves them with not a lot of wiggle room when interest rates rise or housing value decline.

In Boston, my home, average home prices are still rising. But there are early signs of a softening. Every newspaper, talk show or early morning coffee shop patron has predicting the decline, and with this much idle chatter and fear heating up, everyone worse dreams can only come true.

Nationally housing prices have risen about 15 percent in the past year. This is a huge jump and in some smaller, historically underperforming markets like parts of costal Florida, they have risen as much as 40 percent. Add to this cauldron of hyper-inflation the rising percentage of investor-speculators buying homes and you have an environment that is jittery.

All of this has become possible because of low-interest rates. However, the interest-rate party is coming to an end. Our national debt, which to a large extent not only raises interest rates but it also bursts a lot of bubbles, is getting larger. It’s getting so large that it may require a second-coming to turn the inevitable nastiness, especially for those who have adjustable rate loans around. No one is saying it out loud of fear of political fallout and inevitable retribution that might come during the upcoming mid-term Congressional elections but a crash could depress the larger economy by shrinking people’s net worth and purchasing power.

Even so, a housing market crash is not a stock market crash. The reason is people don’t have to keep their money in stocks but they do have to have a place to live, so the demand for housing is less volatile than the demand for stocks.

Here’s what happens, when people worry about their stock investments, they often are governed by their own fears and the fears of others. They sell their investments that in turn bring about the worst of their fears. The stock market is a good example of the effects of mass hysteria. But when people fear that housing prices will fall, they don’t jump out their window. They don’t put their houses on the market and move into the Winnebago in the back yard. The pain is concentrated among those stretched thin with adjustable rate mortgages, recent home buyers and those with massive home equity loans. For most, however, the housing market moves a little more slowly and most Americans who will see their paper wealth decline, try to ride the downturn out.

For their part, the Bush administration does own part of this problem, but not all of it. What usually gets left out of the interest rate story is the part about bad public policy. During the past five years, the Feds gave us lower than reasonable interest rates to compensate for a stock market crash that was fueled by other bad public policies that rewarded speculation. Add to this our unconscionable large and growing national debt and rising interest rates maybe more than overdue, they are necessary.

Adding insult to injury, the current administration choked off the money supply for new housing subsidies, making the supply of existing homes more expensive and forcing home buyers to go dangerously into hock. The subsidies in the tax code are quite friendly to speculators.

All that said, people need a roof over their heads. As housing costs rise, people have found clever ways to compensate: as more and more people have been downsized, home offices and the savings as well as tax advantages that come from having your office at home are increasing. Some people are taking on room mates, or spending more of their incomes on housing. In Europe, where the land is less plentiful, people pay more for housing, and I think that’s where we are heading.

Closer to home, we are likely to experience something closer to a pause, a moderate or temporary drop in prices, rather than a crash. Unlike other types of wealth or investments, a home is a place you can actually use while you wait for it, hopefully, to appreciate. A home is a real place, a real investment, and I guess they way they call it real estate.