There is so much good in this article. So much that can help people not be in conflict, and distant from each other. This is just one article, of so many others of this type, that are out there to help all of us overcome roadblocks to peace and understanding in our relationships. Sadly, the bigger roadblock to benefiting from this wisdom is the ego itself that keeps someone from reading it in the first place, or taking it as an instructive moment with a sense of humility about one’s own issues. An ego that leaves no door open to question itself, is an ego with no room for anyone else’s. With that, I ask anyone visiting here to please try and read this post, no matter how much you think you don’t need to. Just try.
Did you ever have a fight that you really didn’t want? It doesn’t have to happen ever again. It may take some practice, but it will work. And, by the way, it will help you with any kind of negotiation or conflict resolution in any place, almost without exception. I’ll even tell you about the few exceptions.
The cause of arguments and fights is lack of mutual, empathic understanding. When empathy is not engaged, then people revert to a self-protective mode and become judgmental. The result is bad feeling on both sides and no happy ending.
Here is how empathy so commonly gets bypassed. We all tend to want to get to the “bottom line,” the solution that will resolve the conflict. That’s exactly the wrong thing to focus on, yet. Imagine that you are feeling short-changed. You dare to say something about it: “I don’t think you are paying your fair share.” Partner is immediately on the defensive and begins to present a case for why he/she did nothing wrong. You don’t agree, but Partner isn’t even listening to the counter-argument. From then on, things escalate unless someone decides to break it off. Either way, nothing is decided.
If that that was a business negotiation. It might result in a compromise, but it wouldn’t leave either party feeling good. What is missing is an understanding of the others’ motivations, likes and dislikes. Why have each of you taken the position you have? This isn’t unfamiliar. We all want to be understood. When you really feel that you understand the other person and they understand you, then it is completely natural to be willing to give and take. In fact, the bottom line becomes easy rather than hard. A happy compromise becomes quite obvious.
So here’s the rule: You are not allowed to say a word about any possible solution until you have a thorough understanding of the other person’s feelings and feel equally understood by them. Until then, you have to keep working towards that understanding.
Of course that is a tough rule, but if you can’t achieve understanding, then you may not have a good outcome. So here’s how to get there.
Understanding feelings is quite unnatural for many of us, especially men. Humans are often not used to understanding their own feelings and would rather fix (can you see the premature bottom line coming?) a problem than understand feelings. They may even have principles against delving into feelings, so it may require some teaching or even convincing at the outset that understanding each other is really the best way to arrive at a win-win. solution. After all, winning is about feeling. It means feeling good about the outcome, and that only happens when you understand and feel understood.
How to do it is to “interview” the other person about his or her feelings, and when you have a thorough understanding, then ask if the other person would like to hear about your point of view.
How to Interview for Feelings
Rule 1: Follow your natural curiosity about why. Why is that important to you? Why is it sooo important? I wonder what makes you feel that way?
Rule 2: Recognize an incomplete answer and keep asking. “Because.” Or “I just feel that way” are not good enough. Those are off-putting non-answers. “Maybe you haven’t thought about it, but I really want to understand how important this is to you and why.”
Rule 3: Be aware of what you still don’t know. “It’s just how I am.” And you respond, “Yes, I hear that, but I’m curious about how you got that way, because it does seem to be a big deal for you.” When I really ‘get it,’ then I’m sure I’ll feel more ready to value your point of view and even make a compromise.”
Rule 4: Wait till you understand before you ask if your partner would like to understand you. They will be feeling better, so they will usually say, “Yes.”
“You know, I think it’s because I am constantly worrying about money. I worry that we’ll run out, even though I know it’s not realistic. And I worry that you aren’t as careful as I am. I always try to limit what I spend, partly to have some left and partly to set an example. I’ve been resenting your spending for a while, but didn’t dare say anything about it. I didn’t understand why you felt that was a good way to use what we’ve earned. Now I do get where you are coming from.”
This is beginning to sound like someone ready to compromise. It took a lot of work to get there, but ending the conversation short of that level of understanding would surely have left underground resentments seething and an unhappy ending.
What are the exceptions? Some people are really dedicated to not knowing their own true feelings. Narcissistic people have trouble admitting to being less than perfect. People whose feelings are too fragile may not be able to cope with full honesty. Young people who are not yet ready to grow to the next level may not be able to look at themselves honestly without judgment. They may need help in getting to the point where they are happier owning the truth than hiding from it. Everyone else will benefit right away from your having the patience to hold back and keep asking till you get to a full, empathic understanding of your partner’s feelings.
“I’m bored.” It’s a puny little phrase, yet it has the power to fill parents with a cascade of dread, annoyance and guilt. If someone around here is bored, someone else must have failed to enlighten or enrich or divert. And how can anyone — child or adult — claim boredom when there’s so much that can and should be done? Immediately.
But boredom is something to experience rather than hastily swipe away. And not as some kind of cruel Victorian conditioning, recommended because it’s awful and toughens you up. Despite the lesson most adults learned growing up — boredom is for boring people — boredom is useful. It’s good for you.
If kids don’t figure this out early on, they’re in for a nasty surprise. School, let’s face it, can be dull, and it isn’t actually the teacher’s job to entertain as well as educate. Life isn’t meant to be an endless parade of amusements. “That’s right,” a mother says to her daughter in Maria Semple’s 2012 novel, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.” “You are bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.”
People used to accept that much of life was boring. Memoirs of pre-21st-century life are rife with tedium. When not idling in drawing rooms, members of the leisured class took long walks and stared at trees. They went motoring and stared at more trees. Those who had to work had it a lot harder. Agricultural and industrial jobs were often mind-numbing; few people were looking to be fulfilled by paid labor. Children could expect those kinds of futures and they got used to the idea from an early age, left unattended with nothing but bookshelves and tree branches, and later, bad afternoon television.
Only a few short decades ago, during the lost age of underparenting, grown-ups thought a certain amount of boredom was appropriate. And children came to appreciate their empty agendas. In an interview with GQ magazine, Lin-Manuel Miranda credited his unattended afternoons with fostering inspiration. “Because there is nothing better to spur creativity than a blank page or an empty bedroom,” he said.
Nowadays, subjecting a child to such inactivity is viewed as a dereliction of parental duty. In a much-read story in The Times, “The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting,” Claire Cain Miller cited a recent study that found that regardless of class, income or race, parents believed that “children who were bored after school should be enrolled in extracurricular activities, and that parents who were busy should stop their task and draw with their children if asked.”
Every spare moment is to be optimized, maximized, driven toward a goal.
When not being uberparented, kids today are left to their own devices — their own digital devices, that is. Parents preparing for a long car ride or airplane trip are like Army officers plotting a complicated land maneuver. Which movies to load onto the iPad? Should we start a new family-friendly podcast? Is this an O.K. time to let the kids play Fortnite until their brains melt into the back seat? What did parents in the ’70s do when kids were bored in the way-back? Nothing! They let them breathe in gas fumes. Torture their siblings. And since it wasn’t actually for wearing, play with the broken seatbelt.
If you complained about being bored back then, you were really asking for it. “Go outside,” you might get, or worse, “Clean your room.” Was this fun? No. Was it helpful? Yes.
Because things happen when you’re bored. Some of the most boring jobs I’ve had were also the most creative. Working at an import factory after school, I pasted photos of ugly Peruvian sweaters onto sales sheets. My hands became encrusted with glue as the sweaters blurred into a clumpy sameness. For some reason, everything smelled like molasses. My mind had no choice but to drift into an elaborate fantasy realm. It’s when you are bored that stories set in. Checking out groceries at the supermarket, I invented narratives around people’s purchases. The man buying eggplant and a six-pack of Bud at 9 p.m.: Which was the must-get item and which the impulse purchase? How did my former fifth-grade teacher feel about my observing her weekly purchase of Nutter Butters?
Once you’ve truly settled into the anesthetizing effects of boredom, you find yourself en route to discovery. With monotony, small differences begin to emerge, between those trees, those sweaters. This is why so many useful ideas occur in the shower, when you’re held captive to a mundane activity. You let your mind wander and follow it where it goes.
Of course, it’s not really the boredom itself that’s important; it’s what we do with it. When you reach your breaking point, boredom teaches you to respond constructively, to make something happen for yourself. But unless we are faced with a steady diet of stultifying boredom, we never learn how.
The idea isn’t that you suffer through crushing tedium indefinitely like Neville (“N is for Neville who died of ennui”) of “The Gashlycrumb Tinies.” It’s that you learn how to vanquish it. This may come in several forms: You might turn inward and use the time to think. You might reach for a book. You might imagine your way to a better job. Boredom leads to flights of fancy. But ultimately, to self-discipline. To resourcefulness.
The ability to handle boredom, not surprisingly, is correlated with the ability to focus and to self-regulate. Research has shown that people with attention disorders are particularly prone to boredom. It makes sense that in a hyperstimulating world, what at first seems captivating now feels less so; what was once mildly diverting may now be flat-out dull.
It’s especially important that kids get bored — and be allowed to stay bored — when they’re young. That it not be considered “a problem” to be avoided or eradicated by the higher-ups, but instead something kids grapple with on their own.
We’ve stopped training children to do this. Rather than teach them to absorb material that is slower, duller and decidedly two-dimensional, like a lot of worthwhile information is, schools cave in to what they say children expect: fun. Teachers spend more time concocting ways to “engage” students through visuals and “interactive learning” (read: screens, games) tailored to their Candy Crushed attention spans. Kids won’t listen to long lectures, goes the argument, so it’s on us to serve up learning in easier-to-swallow portions.
But surely teaching children to endure boredom rather than ratcheting up the entertainment will prepare them for a more realistic future, one that doesn’t raise false expectations of what work or life itself actually entails. One day, even in a job they otherwise love, our kids may have to spend an entire day answering Friday’s leftover email. They may have to check spreadsheets. Or assist robots at a vast internet-ready warehouse.
This sounds boring, you might conclude. It sounds like work, and it sounds like life. Perhaps we should get used to it again, and use it to our benefit. Perhaps in an incessant, up-the-ante world, we could do with a little less excitement.
Pamela Paul is the editor of the Book Review and a co-author of the forthcoming book “How to Raise a Reader.”
I barely remember this film for many of the reasons cited in this effectively illustrative review. Reading now, I am on my mission to seek it out and live through everything that writer Petra Mayer describes here. I was a prime audience member of the Monkees time on the public stage, both during and after their heyday, including most poignantly, the national and world events attached to their demise. Deep chords struck.
If you’re of my vintage, perhaps you will be too. Read the article, and find the movie to watch. Here’s a link on YouTube that might go away eventually, so check it out if you can in time.
In Head, the Monkees made a play for creative and cultural respect. Did it work? No. Was it a strangely great movie? Heck yeah.
Photo by Moviestore/Shutterstock
I don’t think, as a teenage fangirl, that I realized exactly how bitter, how cynical, how teeth-grittingly furious the Monkees’ 1968 movie Head is. How it starts with — more or less — a suicide: Micky Dolenz running in a panic through a municipal ribbon-cutting ceremony and taking a leap off of a shiny new suspension bridge, tumbling through the air and crashing into the water to the stately chords of “Porpoise Song” while the rest of the band watches in consternation from the railing. How it ends the same way, except this time it’s all four of them jumping. How the Gerry Goffin-penned lyrics that play over both scenes go “a face, a voice/an overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice.”
Washington state social worker Alan Naiman, photographed in 2013, left most of his $11 million estate to children’s charities.
Friends remember Washington state social worker Alan Naiman as being frugal. He wore old shoes held together with duct tape, bought his apparel at the grocery store, drove jalopies and ate at cheap restaurants. But when he died of cancer in January 2018, at age 63, the people around him learned that he had quietly saved millions for a higher cause.
Naiman left most of his $11 million estate to organizations serving abandoned, impoverished, sick and disabled children.
“He left it all to charities — mostly to kids, the section of society that couldn’t really help themselves,” his friend Shashi Karan told NPR.
Naiman had no spouse or biological children. But his elder brother, who was disabled and died in 2013, “kind of colored the way he looked at things,” his friend Susan Madsen told The Associated Press.
Before spending two decades at Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services, where he reportedly earned about $67,200 a year, Naiman was a banker.
“He made a career change into social services probably around the time he was fostering,” Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families spokeswoman Debra Johnson told NPR. A dedicated and valued employee, he shared fond memories of the children he fostered, she said.
Despite living a modest life, he amassed a great deal of wealth by saving his work wages, taking on side jobs and inheriting millions from his parents.
Before he was diagnosed with cancer, Naiman thought about taking more road trips or moving to a house with a view, Karan said. But those dreams receded after the diagnosis. Instead, he spent his time researching charities.
He would joke that he was doing “work at the foundation,” alluding to Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, Karan said.
Naiman was buoyed by the knowledge that he was leaving the organizations his money. Karan recalled to CNN that Naiman said, ” ‘My gift is going to be bigger than their annual budget. It’s going to blow them away.’
He was right.
Naiman gave a reported $2.5 million to a Washington state charity that helps newborns who were exposed to opiates, cocaine and other drugs.
“We first became aware of Alan’s generosity last fall when we received a $10,000 donation from him online,” the Pediatric Interim Care Center said. “Thinking that large amount might be a mistake, we called him to make sure he had entered the right number of zeroes! Yes, he told us, the donation was right, and there would be more to come in the future.”
Naiman then wrote a letter to staff that explained why: One frantic night in the early days of his career at the Department of Social and Health Services, he was trying to find a home for a fragile baby. The center’s founder came to his office to take the child.
The organization announced that it would use the funds to pay off the mortgage on its building.
Naiman also surprised a foster care group called Treehouse, Chief Development Officer Jessica Ross told NPR. He made a first-time donation of $5,000 in the months before he died — a lot of money to the organization. “Then, shortly after his passing, we learned he would be donating an additional $900,000. The donation is completely unexpected,” she said.
He told staff that he brought his foster children on shopping sprees at Treehouse’s free clothing store.
The money will help fund a planned expansion of a graduation support program as well as career services for fostered youth, Ross said.
Other children’s charities that made Naiman’s cut included Little Bit Therapeutic Riding Center, which provides therapeutic horseback riding for people with disabilities, and WestSide Baby, which distributes new and used items to low-income families.
Naiman also gave money to his parents’ Catholic church and to Disabled American Veterans, according to Karan.
“For someone to live their life the way Alan did — and then leave a legacy like this to so many worthy organizations — is an inspiration,” Ross said. “We’re so thankful to be a part of this. What a generous, loving man.”
