Shake, Rattle, and Roll

Bartleby is an admittedly humorous caricature of the conflict-avoidance strategy, but the story highlights just how sneakily effective the strategy is, especially against those who approach conflict through the voices of power and reason. The voice of avoidance is a learned voice. It's difficult to imagine a two-year-old like Louie having his toy snatched away and then deciding that he just doesn't want to get into another fight about this right now. What separates this voice from the voices of power and reason is its ability to hide--there are no outwardly expressed rules around avoidance or consequences for breaking those rules. There aren't any Fortune 500 companies that paint conflict avoidance on their walls as a core value or hold yearly conflict-avoidance conferences and workshops. And yet, according to Margaret Heffernan, author of Willful Blindness, when you ask employees, Are there issues at work that people are afraid to raise? The choice to avoid conflict doesn't come without consequences, even for the people doing the avoiding. Sweden's former policy of neutrality is a recent example of a country choosing to listen to its collective voice of avoidance. The country took this position due to setbacks in the Napoleonic Wars, in which it lost a third of its territory, including Finland, to Russia. She won't get to see me do so many things. She's missing what I think are my best years. She didn't get to see me get married, although I still ain't married (looks to my boyfriend for the answers! She didn't see my son graduate from high school. She won't read my first article. There's so many she won'ts that I could focus on. And, honestly, I'm not perfect at this grieving shit, but you know why I can't let myself suffer? I've been so afraid that if I allow myself to suffer, to constantly think about the she won'ts, then I won't be able to remember the great parts of our world. And, oh my God, we had so many great parts! There were our family movie nights. It is open to innovation, adopting new structures, and even reinventing the organization's core culture and values if needed.

Members look at the organization as being their family, and they take a responsible role in cultivating the organization's values and encouraging quality relationships among main stakeholders. They are aware that the organization is part of a larger system, and that whatever decision the organization makes will have an impact on other elements of the system. Mindful board members have a strong sense of duty and purpose--they are building a better world. They take the questions Why does this organization deserve to operate for the next century? How will it contribute to the common good? What must we put in place (structure, values, culture, relationships, etc) to support that purpose? The board members work together with multiple groups within the organization to foster creative thinking and a wide range of solutions. How to make the transition among the levels of operation. Let's imagine a company called Patriarchilia. In his life he did many good and many bad things and he received a lot of bad and a lot of good in return. Now he has become a conveyer, a transmitter only of GOODNESS, and he does this as much as his capabilities allow. There is an interesting point about him though, and I just want to reflect on it. Many times during our get-togethers he emphasized that we are not allowed to lie because lying is a sin. I don't believe this to be always the case. There are situations when it is justifiable, actually better, to lie than to say the truth. I was waiting for the right moment to describe to him a few such situations. Here is one: A friend, or many times a stranger, comes to your restaurant and asks you to help him out with a bit of money. And what do you do? In almost all cases you give them money, even if you are in huge debt yourself. Jim would have said that while I was waiting at the exit, the train was chugging towards its end in any case.

Everything changed when I realised that I was just wasting my time--it was the present that mattered most. Nabeel laughed as realisation dawned upon him, `Yeah! I'd spent so much time waiting for some casual girlfriend to come along, or for the pusher to deliver drugs, or something totally random. But I don't feel that way anymore, strangely enough. I'm not waiting for anything these days; I'm just happy to be here, doing whatever I'm supposed to be doing in the moment. Nabeel had changed so much over the course of the programme. He'd gone from being a sad, closed boy, suspicious of everyone else, to being an open, expansive, quietly impressive man, a good friend to many in his batch. He grinned, but now Arpita seemed confused, so I explained. He quickly responded that there weren't any. I was not surprised. It took awhile for him to recall a positive experience, but with no pressure and with my gentle, reassuring voice, Carlos finally looked directly at me and relayed the following story: Carlos told me that his first-grade math teacher was having a difficult time getting her class to regroup in addition. Carlos didn't understand how to regroup in addition either--at first. Shultz demonstrated again, and this time Carlos got it! His best friend Oscar, however, did not. His teacher asked Carlos to help Oscar. When Oscar learned how to regroup with Carlos's help, he said he felt good. Carlos lit up and grinned from ear to ear just from telling me his story. Remember, this was a story from first grade! The feeling of freedom, without any weight on your shoulders, is a feeling that you may become addicted to, which will cause you to start letting all of those secrets out!

Staying Motivated In order to ensure that you continue to feel inspired and motivated, you need to have healthy and relevant habits in order to keep the focus on your goals that you plan to accomplish. Find creative ways to remind yourself of the things you need to do, and the steps that you need to take every day in order to get what you want. This can help to make things just a little bit easier on you, as well as keep you motivated to take action the next day. If you are someone who believes that you are confident, but are just sitting around without taking any type of action, this is not really displaying any kind of confidence; It does you no good to feel confident if you are not consistently taking step towards achieving your goals, this is where true confidence and self-esteem comes from, working hard and being proud when something is accomplished. Sometimes, it can be pretty difficult to keep yourself motivated if you are going through a rough time in your life, this can cause you to want to take a break or just give up on what you are trying to do. You also have to try to remain disciplined enough to make sure you do what you have to do each and every day, so this can be a challenge, especially those days you feel extremely tired or stressed. Every one of us has taken a fall to the ground. Then they get into a class that they do not excel in. They are having a hard time comprehending the information they need to learn, and the grades they are getting are not what they are used to. This causes them to become fearful. They worry that they will not be able to move on to the next grade because of this class. Then the thought comes into their mind- maybe I am just stupid and that is why I am failing this class. What if I was only doing well in the other ones because they were easy and now I see how stupid I really am! All of their life, they have thought of themselves as a good student and now things are happening to them to make them question that. When someone is not happy with their life, a common response is that they should look on the bright side because other people are struggling with worse problems. This is not a fair thing to say to a person with this disorder because they do understand that their situation could be a great deal worse than it is. You know that others have it worse than you, but that doesn't mean your problems aren't significant. The Swedes received a lot of criticism for their neutral stance in World War II, when they ended up supplying Nazi Germany with port access and some resources, and have since reversed a portion of their neutrality policy when they chose to become a NATO affiliate.

Eventually, the voice of avoidance becomes as accountable as any of the others, but that accountability is a bit delayed. It's just a different way of optimizing for short-term results. As seen in Sweden's history, a strategy of avoidance might work best when the conflicts are low stakes. When the world isn't literally at war and we aren't being held to completely unfair demands, choosing not to participate in a conflict has few negative consequences other than maybe annoying the more conflict-tolerant people around us. When we don't trust that anything we say will make a difference, it's easy to see why not saying anything is attractive--we get the same end result without the hand-wringing. The only problem with this is that avoidance doesn't fix the problem; The voice of avoidance is like the oxalis bulbs hiding deep in the soil, taking root, quietly biding their time. But while avoidance isn't the key to the art of productive disagreement, it does point us in the right direction: acknowledging that the voices of power and reason sometimes aren't enough. There must be a better way. They were always epic to me, mainly because of the comedic relief my parents' love for movies and sleep offered up. Both of them would fall asleep and somehow magically wake up whenever me or my brother tried to change the channel. I wish that social media was around back then because that battle should have been captured and shared with the Internet. I think it would have gone viral. On special Saturdays (my mom declared which ones were special), we'd spend nearly an hour driving to have dinner in Delaware. Delaware was where the closest malls and restaurants were. And even though my dad dreaded the drive, that's where we'd spend our Saturdays whenever my mom asked to go out to dinner. My mom loved Red Lobster, and my dad loved It's those memories that keep me from letting my pain transition into suffering. And because of that, suffering just isn't an option for me. Its board members are all male, the average age is 60, and they are all white--even though this company creates products for young women.