Midlife Mastery Journal » values

When They Stop Listening

Les Brown — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 13:00:23 +0000

Earlier today, a friend told me (and I don’t know for certain whether or not he’s correct) that the Greeks have a saying for when a young couple has their first wall-shaking shout-fest. The bemused neighbors comment, “They’re learning to love each other.” It’s the rare couple (none that I know of) who has never raised their voices at each other. I will say this, though: if a couple is ever going to do verbal battle, it’s going to be at midlife. Healthy couples never stop “learning to love each other.” For those that do stop, they eventually discover that they’ve grown apart, seem to have little left in common, and it’s the perfect time for one of them to drop the “love bomb” — you know the one: “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.”

Must couples in trouble necessarily fail? No, not necessarily: no healthy couple is doomed to failure. In fact, the only ‘doomed’ relationships are those where one or both partners are unapologetically physically or emotionally abusive . Without a doubt, the only realistic option for someone who finds her- or himself in a fundamentally abusive or exploitative relationship is to exit immediately. Apart from that, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem. Let me explain.

It would seem that the person who hears another’s voice, but is no longer committed to listening to what the other has to say has given up on her or his partner, as well as their relationship together. If you look more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that the person has actually given up on him- or herself. Empathetic listening and appreciative inquiry represent a three-fold choice: 1) to accept the other, 2) to trust the other, and 3) to engage with the other. Closing off the lines of communication also represents a choice: to cease accepting, trusting and engaging with one’s partner. Before I relate this to fundamental spiritual principles, let’s look briefly at each choice.

The choice to accept another human being is foundational. True acceptance represents a fundamental option to see in the other person another self, with exactly the same sorts of strengths and weaknesses that we ourselves possess. This choice to acknowledge the other person as another self has two destructive opposites. The first perversion of acceptance we call ‘exploitation‘. Philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these approaches with the terms I-Thou (for true acceptance of the other), and I-It (for exploitation). To see your partner merely in terms of his or her usefulness (like a tool or a piece of furniture) or her or his capacity to satisfy you represents a fundamental denial of humanity on your part. The second perversion of the choice to accept your partner shows itself as conditional acceptance. In brief, “I’ll accept you if you do such-and-such or so-and-so.” Conditional acceptance of another puts you in the position of being their judge, jury and executioner. In fact, it represents nothing less than your attempt to usurp the position in your partner’s life properly held by God alone.

Next, let’s look at the choice not to trust your partner. Why don’t you trust her or him? Because you’ve been hurt before? The refusal to trust your partner goes way beyond self-preservation. Once again, it is passing a judgment of condemnation on another person — another self — who exhibits the same sorts of faults and failings that you yourself exhibit. In fact, if the truth were known, the faults and failings that you find most easy to condemn and most difficult to forgive in others are the very ones that you exhibit most strongly yourself. In fact, the two keys that are absolutely essential to unlocking both acceptance and trust are these: first, to acknowledge an identical humanity in both yourself and the other, and, second, to commit yourself to the path of unconditional forgiveness. Who cannot look at the plight of even the most desperate of people around us and not be able truthfully to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I?” The greatest message of Christianity — and also, I’m afraid, its most forgotten and neglected — is simply this: unconditional, unlimited forgiveness. If you cannot forgive unconditionally, you cannot trust for very long.

The final choice is the choice to engage with your partner. If you refuse to engage with her or him, you thereby give credence to the (Jungian) ego’s false belief that you are vulnerable and need protection. It’s the same force that drives people’s frantic searching for that illusive (and illusory) ‘security’ that they believe will fix everything and protect them from danger. Once again, it would be foolish to put ourselves in harm’s way by engaging with an abusive partner. We owe it to ourselves and to them to take the necessary precautions so as not to allow ourselves to become victims of deliberate abuse. However, if you imagine that refusing to engage with your well-intentioned partner will grant you some sort of immunity from harm and from hurt, you are mistaken. Do you believe that spiritually you are invulnerable and that nothing outside of yourself — not even death — can destroy the essence of you? “Greater love has no one,” we have heard, “than to lay down his life for another.” Oddly, dieing for someone can actually be a whole lot easier than living for them.

Finally, what does the choice not to listen say about that person’s spiritual condition? The testimony it gives is nothing short of damning. Personally, I would liken it to what Christians refer to as the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘unforgivable sin.’ Here’s what I mean. Whenever I write, I use the terms ‘acceptance,’ ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ as synonyms for what are called the ‘theological virtues’, namely: faith, hope , and love. The ‘sin’ against faith is the decision not to accept the will of God exactly as we encounter it in our world. The ‘sin’ against hope is the choice not to trust that our only Source of genuine security is divine providence. The ‘sin’ against love is the refusal to become meaningfully engaged with those we were sent to serve: our fellow creatures who, along with us, share the “image and likeness of God.” If the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ is a refusal to believe that the love of God is powerful enough to forgive us (and so we refuse to ask for forgiveness, and therefore refuse to accept it), then turning a deaf ear to someone we once claimed to love is a ‘sin against love’, for, as we know, the opposite of love is not hate, but deliberate indifference.

What can you do if you find yourself failing to listen? Remember the futility of protecting yourself. What can you protect yourself from? Even more importantly, what are you protecting yourself for? After all, your mission here in this world is not to try (futilely) to keep yourself safe. It’s to share with your fellows (and especially those in relationship with you) the same kind of acceptance, trust, and engagement that your God has shown to you. God hears his people’s cry . . . can you do any less?

And what about you who find yourself ‘learning to love one another’ and your words keep falling on deaf ears? You, too, have the opportunity to pass on the love of God. Your acceptance of the other can be renewed continually. Your trust of the other need never fail or fade. You may stand ever at the ready to engage. However, engagement (love) requires reciprocity. God does not condemn, so how could you? God does not constrain, either (because love can never be forced), but rather waits for all eternity for the other to emerge from his or her isolation and re-engage. You can have the willingness to re-engage, whether or not the other ever seeks it. You may never re-engage as you once did: time and the world goes on while the other chooses to isolate, stagnate, or (what’s worse) repeat the same self-defeating choices and behaviors with other partners. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to accept and trust and engage with people at every stage and every condition of your life: people who, like you, have chosen to listen not only with their ears, but with their hearts.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Begin with the End in Mind

Les Brown — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:05:35 +0000

I want to begin my article series for 2010 with the seemingly incongruous topic of ‘death’ for a number of very good reasons, the first of which would be having experienced the unexpected death of a favorite aunt only a few days ago on New Year’s eve. We certainly had not planned on ringing in a new decade with the rituals of mourning. However, life’s vagrancies pay no attention to our expectations. Not ever. Yet, as a culture, we seem to be obsessed with the denial of death. We’ve even changed our language so that we don’t even have to use the word ‘death.’ Nobody dies anymore; they just ‘pass away.’ After all, isn’t ‘death’ such a morbid subject? We wouldn’t want to be accused of having a morbid fascination, would we? So, our culture attempts to expunge death from our lives by hiding it under platitudes and insulating us from it as much as possible by hiding (or hiding from) the evidence.

Obviously, the middle ages were infused with what we would consider a ‘morbid fascination’ with death. Yet, they had good reason. Back then, there was no hiding from the end of life. Infant mortality was rampant. Life was short (the average age at death was 40 or less). Disease swept Europe in waves that killed millions. Families encountered death ‘up close and personal’ on a disturbingly regular basis. Death, back then, was certainly an unavoidable ‘fact of life.’ Indeed, the experience of death and dying was so pervasive that it was completely taken for granted, like eating and sleeping. People needed to be reminded of what it meant: “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris” (“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” from the Ash Wednesday service). Even Thomas Moore, Lord Chancellor of England under king Henry VIII adopted a famous motto: “Memento Mori” which is a Latin pun meaning both ‘remember death’ and ‘remember Moore.’ We would not want to return to the fixation on death that characterized the medieval period. Yet, what have we replaced it with?

Rather than focus on our ultimate destiny, leaving this world behind, our culture has chosen to replace a morbid fascination with death with a morbid fascination with rigidity and changelessness. Our obsession with youth and nostalgia for an imagined halcyon age in times gone by permeates not only our decision-making processes, but also the meaning we give to the world. ‘Living in the moment’ seems to have become ‘living for the moment.’ Haven’t our lives been overtaken by an obsessive pursuit of security? How much thought, time, and resources have you devoted in the past year alone to achieving security for yourself and your family? Even the term ‘conservative’ has shifted from meaning a forward-looking, thoughtful decision-making process to meaning a kind of reflexive instinct for self-preservation. Yet no real security can ever be attained.

Sometimes the discipline of philosophy can bring sense to a worldview that appears confusing and contradictory. Medieval writers spoke of everything having a ‘final cause.’ That meant for them that things happen with an inner logic that drives them forward (whether or not we are aware of what that logic might be). If the universe had a beginning (and it did: the ‘big bang’), then it has a direction and an inner logic that drives its evolution toward some future, as yet unknown, ending. The universe is not static. It’s not rigid. It’s not eternal and changeless. The only constant in the universe is change. Although its inner logic drives it forward, the universe’s unfolding is anything but ‘secure.’ All we know for certain is that, at some point, the earth will be swallowed up by the sun, the sun will become a super-nova and die, our galaxy will collide with others and be ripped apart, and the forces of the entire universe will eventually play themselves out. Time and space as we know it will just cease.

The life that each of us enjoys can be understood as a microcosmic reflection of the universe itself. For us, as for the universe, there is no security, no stability, no guarantees. We grow and our lives play themselves out by an inner logic over which we have only limited influence. We call that inner logic our ‘destiny’ — that complex of possibilities that work together with our understanding and our decision-making powers to determine who and what we shall become. We absolutely must look backward to appreciate where we’ve come from. However, in life, there’s no room for sentimental nostalgia. We can’t — we shouldn’t want to — turn back the clock. At midlife, youth has gone; good riddance! Enlightened by the past, our decision-making power must be focused rather on achieving our destiny whatever that may be. Our choices need to be forward-looking, enlightened by our ultimate end, our ‘final cause,’ our purpose for being here. Looking forward gives meaning and direction to our lives; obsessing on the past can only leave our lives frustrated, empty and meaningless.

Now how do we put this understanding into practice? One of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits is, “Begin with the end in mind.” How will you know if you’ve made the right decisions if you have no idea where you’re going? As the Cheshire Cat told Alice, “If you don’t know where you’re going, then any path will take you there.” As you begin this new year, do you know where you’re going? Do you have a clear mission for your life? Defined values? A vision for the next 12 months? A written intention statement that defines specifically what you want to accomplish? If you knew that death awaited you a year from now, how much differently would you live today? Death overtook our aunt while the rest of us were making plans for the New Year. Every time something like that happens, it’s a wake-up call that reminds us with stark finality of our own end. Most of those who read this will end this year with a greater or lesser degree of success (however you choose to define that). Yet, some of you may not. Eventually, each of us will come to a year without a New Year’s eve. Should we not begin this one with the end in mind? Indeed, “Memento Mori.”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

When Making the Right Choice Goes Wrong

Les Brown — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:04:20 +0000

Quick: stop reading right now and write down your top three core values. Do it now! . . .

How hard was that? How long did it take you? Did you have to stop and ask yourself, "What does he mean by ‘core values’?" Did you have to stop and think, confused by a long list of things that seem very important to you? Did you find it tough to choose the top three, or did you just write down the first three values that popped into your head? It doesn’t matter to me (at least not right now) what your top three core values were: I want you to have the experience of stopping whatever it was you were doing (obviously, reading this article) to think about it. The more difficult you found this exercise to be, the less thought you’ve given to your core values recently. What does that indicate?

There’s a good chance that, if you haven’t taken the time to explore your core values in a while, you may not be aware of the principles that are driving your decision-making. Would you trust your GPS to guide your driving if you haven’t updated its software in years? Yet, your core values determine many more important choices in your life than when to make a left or right turn in traffic. Let’s review (for the sake of argument, I’ll call it a ‘review’) how your core values function in your decision-making process.

Your core values are those principles that you use, often subconsciously, to evaluate your choices: that is, to determine the relative value of one choice over another. Is it better (that is: more valuable or more advantageous) to select this possibility over that possibility? Does this seem obvious? Now consider this: almost exclusively, people make their choices based on what feels right to them, rather than what makes better sense to them. The most confrontational question you can possibly ask another person is, "Why did you do that?" Asking them ‘why?’ immediately puts them in the position of justifying (rationally) a decision that was probably made emotionally. When it happens to you, you’d probably have to admit (at least to yourself) that you don’t really have any rational justification for your choice, it just ‘felt right.’

When you make a decision, you subconsciously engage your core values. That suggests that, if you want to determine what your core values really are, you should look at the decisions you’ve made over the past week or so and ask yourself what reasons you had for making each of them. If you can be honest about it, your collected reasoning will show you what’s really important to you (your values). In this context, the old saying makes sense: "Your actions are shouting so loudly that I can’t hear what you’re saying." Your choices, based on your core values, will cut through even the smokescreen of self-delusion and rationalization that you may use to cover up bad choices (and poor values) with good reasons.

I hope you’re able to see the importance of making your core values explicit. Knowing these values and keeping them in your conscious mind not only helps you to make your decision-making more rational, it also serves to keep yourself aligned with your chosen purpose and goals. Here’s something else to consider: people (wrongly) think that your core values determine what you do in the present. It seems as though your core values should guide your rational decision-making process, choice by choice. However, since most decision-making is not rational, but emotional, in fact, most of the time, when you make most of your decisions, you’re not engaging your reason at all. From this perspective, your core values determine, not your present choices, but your future choices. The more you align yourself with consciously-chosen core values, the more likely your emotion-driven future decisions will be informed by those values.

Are you finding it difficult to achieve the ends for which you think you want to strive? Perhaps its because your present choices are being driven by old values (those ‘old tapes’ that people often talk about). Those old and often-dysfunctional values will continue to infect your decision-making process until you’re able to replace them with strong, consciously-chosen core values of a different sort. Here’s where coaching can be a great help to you. When you engage the help of a coach to discover your core values, you have a better chance of getting out of the always-present trap of self-delusion. Then, once you’ve determined your core values, you need to review them ofen — even daily — to make sure that they’ve sunk in to the deeper levels of your awareness. Only then can they serve to take charge of your decision-making process and keep you aligned with the purpose and meaning behind the person you really want to become.

What Will Your Transition Cost?

Les Brown — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:13:46 +0000

On paper, it seems obvious that people should plan for a major shift in perspective that should occur just about the time they settle in to their relationships, their careers and their sense of personal achievement and well=being. That’s all very fine to speculate about before the fact. Yet, a huge problem arises around the question of midlife because a) you don’t know what you don’t know and b) the criteria that you use to evaluate your life before midlife are made obsolete by it. Midlife involves not only a paradigm shift, but a values shift, as well, and that’s what makes planning for it such a difficult assignment. Consider this: what good does it do you to calculate carefully the cost of driving your car (gas, maintenance, insurance, etc.) when you suddenly decide you want to sell it and ride a bicycle to work every day?

Right now, you’re planning and directing your future based on your specific life vision: in most cases, it’s something that’s been with you a very long time. That vision has been meticulously constructed over the course of your lifetime (up until now) and it provides you with an invaluable context in which you can live your life. From your vision, you derive a sense of purpose and direction, as well as your sense of what matters to you and what doesn’t. The ‘crisis’ of midlife comes upon you when, for a variety of reasons, that vision no longer speaks to you. You find yourself in the situation where all those things that used to matter most to you now don’t matter at all and things that you never even considered now appear as the most important things in your life.

When you, as an adult planning for the midlife transition, begin to take stock of what it’s going to take to get you through it successfully, you need to take into consideration the fact that your priorities will change — and change drastically. Under ordinary conditions, the next step after creating your basic plan of action would be to do a risk assessment (formal or informal). This involves, first of all, taking an inventory of things that could happen along the way that could deflect you from your goal. The assessment involves deciding just two things for each eventuality: 1) how likely each event might be, and 2) how seriously each event might negatively impact reaching your desired ends.

A problem of crisis proportions arises when your goals and values change. Suddenly, everything that was orchestrated to see those goals through to completion loses its meaning and purpose. Everything loses its importance, and everything (or almost everything) that had once seemed out of the question winds up back on the table again. Once your life has lost its core meaning and direction, what sense will anything else have? How do you perform a risk assessment to determine the importance of any aspect of the future direction of your life when your entire value system is in flux? Up until this point, you’ve assumed that you knew what was important to you and what not, but now all that is up for grabs. You can assume no longer.

Performing a valid risk assessment at middle age puts many men into a serious conundrum: many, for the first time in their lives, have to reevaluate the basic assumptions of life, from "What do I really want?" to "What is really right (or wrong) for me?" Whereas women had their cultural models handed to them in from the post World War II era popular culture (magazines, films, books, TV, etc.), and they’ve had over 60 years to critique and accept or reject them, men’s cultural models haven’t evolved nearly so drastically. Instead of the cultural revolution that women have fomented, men have been left to a more or less reactive role: trying to find how their cultural model ‘fits’ into a changing world. This has worked most often to their detriment.

Rather than critique their core views and values, men have too often either turned a blind eye to them, or put up some fairly severe emotional barriers to change. When masculinity is too rigidly defined as ‘Joe six pack’ or the ‘Blue Collar Comics’ ("Git ‘er done!"), then even exploring the deeper goals and values of life falls under a cultural taboo. And men pay a high price for this. When core values shift (as they must at midlife), and self-reevaluation is either culturally unsupported or even a taboo, the probability of suffering a true midlife crisis (and the disorientation that accompanies it) rises nearly to certainty. When your goals and values are gone, how do you plan? How do you calculate the risks of any potential course of action? Obviously, you can’t.

If you want to know in advance what your midlife transition is going to cost you, you’re going to have to be very clear about where you want to go and how you want to get there. It’s going to take focus, and it’s going to take embracing a bit of masculine counter-culture: being prepared to do some deep and hard self-examination. What are your core values? What are your motives? What’s really important to you? Until you’re ready to take the time and energy to engage yourself fully in this quest for personal meaning, the cost to you of an eventual midlife crisis may be too high to bear: it could cost you everything you hold near and dear and leave you with precious little apart from an empty or broken heart (yes, men have them, too). It’s a price you really don’t ever want to have to pay.