Category: Change

How We Need to Learn to Say ‘No’ – and Get Others to Say ‘No’ Too

Following up on some highlights of the excellent book ‘Never split the difference: negotiating as if your life depended on it‘ by Chris Voss, he has a quite convincing development on the need to be able to say ‘no’ and get your counterpart in a negotiation say ‘no’ too.

It “is difficult for many people because they go directly against one of society’s biggest social dictums. That is, “ Be nice” We’ve instrumentalized niceness as a way of greasing the social wheels, yet it’s often a ruse. We’re polite and we don’t disagree to get through daily existence with the least degree of friction. But by turning niceness into a lubricant , we’ve leeched it of meaning.” As a result it becomes quite impossible to know exactly what the person is feeling.

““ No ” is the start of the negotiation, not the end of it. We’ve been conditioned to fear the word “ No” But it is a statement of perception far more often than of fact. It seldom means, “ I have considered all the facts and made a rational choice” Instead, “ No ” is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo. Change is scary, and “ No ” provides a little protection from that scariness.”

Chris Voss goes on presenting a number of techniques aimed at provoking a clear ‘no’ as a starting point for earnest negotiation. He even mentions that if it is not possible to get a ‘no’ there is probably something hidden that is worth uncovering.

Let’s give ourselves and our counterpart the permission to say ‘no’. It is an excellent foundation for further discussion and negotiation.

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How the Trump Campaign Already Brings Serious Lessons About Social Segmentation Capabilities

In this excellent post ‘Trump’s Digital Campaign for 2020 Is Already Soaring‘, Frederic Filloux explains how the Trump 2020 campaign is already extremely active, focusing on voter segmentation so as to serve the most effective targeted propaganda through social networks. And it seems that the scale is quite unprecedented.

Trump digital campaign has started almost just after the election and has already spent much more money than any other campaign: “we’re doing top-level funnel marketing and what that is, is we need to find every person that’s going to vote for the president and would vote for the president and go find them now. It’s a lot cheaper to go find them now, not when the media gets all and the advertising is more expensive and we have to rush to find them. Why not find them three years out?“

The important thing is that now targeting is not any more at the group level – it is at the individual level and extremely fine. Messages can be adapted to address individual concerns and worldview. Therefore the potential for influence is extreme, because potentially people will be engaged individually with messages that are deemed adequate for them.

The power of this approach remains to be seen in the next elections, but it is of course quite worrying to observe how this is becoming an influence machine that borders on manipulation.

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How the French School System Develops the Feeling of Unworthiness in students

Following up on the previous post ‘How to Respond When You Feel Unworthy‘ I would like to share with my French readers how it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that the French school system specifically develops the feeling of unworthiness in students.

In particular in competitive classes like ‘Preparatory Classes’ for major schools or in elitist high schools, teachers tend to try to motivate students by telling them they are no good, much less clever than the previous class, that they have no change of ever succeeding etc.

This behavior has many consequences: those who survive the treatment self-select themselves, and this fosters the feeling of unworthiness in students which will follow them up all their life.

In many other countries, even in competitive classes, teachers generally seem to tend to be more supportive of students, and encourage their successes.

I would maybe even suggest that this behavior in France has some substantial long-term consequences on the psyche of the elite students which form after some time the country’s elite.

I am not quite sure about the reason for this behavior but it is becoming now quite obvious to me, having been living abroad and having now children than enter those competitive classes. Maybe we should try to change this, in particular in view of the changes in the world surrounding us!

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How to Respond When You Feel Unworthy

I found a lot of personal resonance in this excellent post by Leo Babauta ‘The Universal Narrative: When You Feel Unworthy‘. I recommend the full read. How can we respond when in a certain situation (or more generally), we feel unworthy, we feel that we are not good enough?

The feeling of unworthiness has significant consequences on our life: from procrastination to lack of participation in a group to the quality and genuineness of our relationships.

Of course Leo Babauta reminds us that it is just a story we are telling ourselves. So he proposes two approaches to this issue:

  • write down a mantra that we can use whenever we feel unworthy, to make us believe otherwise over time (his mantra is “The world craves you and your gift“
  • ensure this narrative dissolves by wondering how it would feel if it would not be present

Next time you will feel unworthy, consider speaking out the mantra and dissolve this idea. We should not feel unworthy because we are not.

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How Not To Believe in Your Thoughts

I like this quote of Byron Katie: “I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that.”

Now the issue is of course, how not to believe in one’s thoughts. Leo Babauta in this post ‘A Simple Mindful Method to Deal with Tiredness, Loneliness & Stress‘ provides a step-by-step method.

The thing is that we need to “notice that the thoughts are causing our difficulty. Not the situation — the thoughts.” And then work to be in the moment, observe our thoughts and consider how different we would be without those thoughts. Sometimes it may require a good night’s sleep to overcome those thoughts, or maybe some entertainment to think about entirely different things for a while.

I understand it takes practice, but when one has gone through the exercise, it is very rewarding. Observe your thoughts, they have something to tell you. But don’t believe them!

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How Innovation Cycles Became More Frequent Than Generation Cycles

I recently read an analysis of the current issue facing our societies which I found interesting: the fact that in recent times, the innovation cycles have become shorter than the typical 25-30 years generation renewal cycle.

Accelerating innovation cycles since 2 centuries

We know that it can be difficult for a generation to accept new ideas and concepts and that it often takes a generational renewal to transform beliefs and usage (by the way this effect is particularly important in scientific, academical and research circles).

With innovation cycles now becoming shorter than a typical generational cycle, we raise the challenge of people having to transform their worldview, way of working and usage of technology within their own generation. And it is clear that our society is not particularly well prepared for that challenge: for example, the lack of adult education and the fact that studies are generally uniquely undergone in younger years.

I like the idea to consider this observation as a potential root cause of many tensions and issues we observe in our current society. It is powerful enough to create a lot of good questions about the need to support current generations through a workplace and social transformation that will create 2 or 3 major transitions through their adult life.

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How Technology Providers Should Care About Their Externalities

Following up on our post ‘How to Manage Unintended Consequences of Technology‘, in this interesting piece ‘Embracing externalities‘, Seth Godin remind us that externalities should be accounted by industrialism for the better.

“The opportunity is simple to describe but requires real effort to achieve: the community must enforce systems that build the external costs into the way that the industrialist does business. Faced with an incentive to decrease bycatch, waste or illness, the industrialist will do what industrialists always seek to do–make it work a little better, a little faster, a little more profitably.”

This thought is quite interesting to apply to the externalities created by technology, for example social networks. How can we make sure companies that create value from those products compensate for the externalities they necessarily create?

” Industrialism can’t solve every problem, but it can go a very long way in solving the problems that it created in the first place“. So do any technology provider: ‘Technology can’t solve every problem, but it can go a very long way in solving the problems that it created in the first place’… We should not forget that regulation can achieve this goal.

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How to Manage Unintended Consequences of Technology

New technology always has unintended consequences, and possibly unintended usage. In this interesting post ‘Managing the Unintended Consequences of Technology‘, some take-away points from the 2018 Unintended Consequences of Technology Conference are exposed.

The main recommendations I noted from the post are:

  • hire a more diverse workforce (to better anticipate unexpected usage)
  • de-bias the data sets used for developing new technology, to avoid unexpected algorithmic discrimination
  • develop a product impact advisory board

In a complex world I believe it is quite impossible to predict what technology will be used for, but we can certainly try to avoid unexpected consequences. I am a strong believer in the need to have more diversity to avoid blind spots related to cultural and social backgrounds.

The fact that there are conferences on the subject looks like quite a good starting point to work on the subject!

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How the New Service Platforms Bring More Self-Respect Into Service

In this opinion post ‘The Servant Economy‘, a few interesting discussion points are raised about the transformation of the service economy brought by the intermediation platforms such as Uber, delivery companies etc. Those are around since about a decade, so it might be time to take stock of the changes they brought.

Old fashioned servants

Can we describe what happened by the “unkind summary […]: venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance“? There is some substance in this description, but I am not so sure it describes it all.

While of course those platforms have created a gig economy and no “real jobs” they have also provided substantial opportunities to many people, making them free agents instead of having them subject to the arbitrary will of bosses and employers. They have created more self-respect for more people. Some may be struggling with this, but I believe it is a fact.

The post also asks what is really the value added by those new services. “Looking at this incredible flurry of funding and activity, it’s worth asking: These companies have done so much—upended labor markets, changed industries, rewritten the definition of a job—and for what, exactly? Now you can do stuff that you could already do before, but you can do it with your phone“. And of course most of those companies are not profitable and rather consume huge amounts of capital. Still they do provide services that were difficult to access, and have transformed the personal transformation industry across many countries. I am using the global nature of those applications on quite regular basis to resolve local transportation issues when I am travelling.

I would thus not be so pessimistic about the changes brought by the new service platforms. They bring change, and I also believe that they have the potential to bring more self-respect of the independent agents that they bring together.

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How to Practice at Our Edge to Progress More Quickly

Following up on our previous post ‘How We Need to Dose Our Self-Transformation Effort‘, I like this post of Leo Babauta ‘The Rule of the Edge‘. It is quite simple actually: “practice at your edge most of the time“. “And this rule is what will help you grow the most, over time“.

The idea is to stay just on the edge, but not more: “Your edge isn’t pushing yourself until you’re ready to collapse. It’s not pushing to injury, pushing so that you can’t practice tomorrow. It’s not studying all day long until your brain has melted. It’s going to the edge, not diving off it.”

What I like in Leo Babuta’s approach (and I encourage reading the full post) that what is proposed is to accept that it is not possible to be at one’s edge all the time. We need to be mindful about our body and mind, and accept that we need some rest from time to time.

What’s amazing of course is to see how our edge shifts over time when we are practicing at the edge often!

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How We Need to Dose Our Self-Transformation Effort

Following on our previous post ‘How to Accept to Stop Chasing Perfection – a New Trend for Self Help?‘ and the
Guardian article ‘Want to transform your life? Stop chasing perfection‘, I want to share an interrogation that pervades my study of self-improvement. There are a number of philosophies that encourage passivity and acceptance, while obviously some effort is needed to improve; on the other hand it should not become a struggle. How to encounter the just middle? How to dose our effort?

This is well expressed in the Guardian article: “Transformative self-reinvention may be an overoptimistic dream, but defeatism about change is its own kind of false comfort, too: both are forms of absolutism that serve to justify passivity.“

It seems obvious to me that passivity is not the response. Self-improvement is needed, a minimum being what is required to adapt to changes in the society and environment that surrounds us. Some effort is thus needed. Too much effort will lead to suffering, and possibly be counter-productive by cutting us away from important social ties.

It seems to me that the answer is given by the theory of flow: flow is achieved when faced with a somewhat difficult task, but not so difficult that it strains us too much. It is all a question of dosage – being just outside our comfort zone but not too far.

How is currently your dosage? Are your objectives too challenging? Are you rather too easy on yourself?

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How to Accept to Stop Chasing Perfection – a New Trend for Self Help?

In this excellent Guardian article ‘Want to transform your life? Stop chasing perfection‘, the issue of perfectionism and how it influences negatively our lives is addressed in a straightforward manner. The main idea of the article is that we should learn to be more contented with what we have rather than trying to be perfect – and that this trend would show in the recent self-help literature.

The main recommendation is “Give up the rat race, accept reality and have the courage to be disliked – the latest self-help trend is not about self-reinvention but finding contentment in the life you have“

According to the author, “In response to the prevailing mood, there has been a noticeable change of tone in the world of self-help, a publishing genre historically dedicated to promising massive, near-effortless transformation overnight, or in a couple of weeks at most“. The author then describes a number of trends including some trends inspired by Buddhism about living in the present and accepting one’s being instead of chasing for transformation.

I am not so sure about this trend in a world that exposes us increasingly to the more than perfect pictures of others on social networks and thus to emotions of envy and wishes to transform one’s lives. There is definitely a tension between several views of the word: living a contented present with minimum means, and self-transforming to a better self. And both co-exist without being necessarily opposed.

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