Where do values come from? Every value comes from a deeper value. Each value — that is, each condition that we desire — is motivated by our valuing some other condition even more. For example, I want to pick up my telephone because I want to buy a plane ticket to Boston. I want to buy an airplane ticket to Boston because I want to go to Boston. I want to go to Boston because I want to attend First Annual International Symposium on Where Values Come From. I want to attend the symposium because I want to present my ideas about where values come from. I want to present my ideas because… And so on.

Each value links to others, and the links form a Value Chain.
Each link connects a less important value to a more important one. Buying the ticket is more important than picking up the phone. Going to Boston is more important than buying the ticket.

Each value is linked to the next through a cause-and-effect belief, a belief that satisfying this value will partially or wholly satisfy that more important value. I believe that if I pick up the phone, I can buy a ticket, and that if I buy a ticket, I can go to Boston.

Each of our values, then, becomes a value through our belief that it contributes to an even more important value. My desire to buy a ticket comes from my desire to go to Boston combined with my belief that if I buy a ticket I can go. If I didn’t want to go to Boston, or if I didn’t believe that buying a ticket would help me to go to Boston, I wouldn’t want the ticket.

One way to explore a Value Chain is to use the experiments I described in my article about “The Value Question.” Another way is to start with any desire you want to explore, and state it in the form, “I want (this desire) in order to __________.” Then fill in the blank. That tells you the deeper desire that is motivating the first one. Now state that deeper desire in the same form, and fill in the blank. Repeat until…

Hey, wait a minute! If every desire comes from a deeper desire, then a Value Chain goes on forever. Are Value Chains endless? Not quite. As we trace any value through a Value Chain we eventually arrive at a value that we desire in and of itself, and not because it supports a deeper value. Connirae and Tamara Andreas, in their marvelous book
Core Transformation
call these values Core States. Though people use various names for their deepest values, the Andreases have identified five common Core States: Being, Inner Peace, Love, OKness, and Oneness. Every Value Chain leads to a value like one of these Core States. In other words, every value is a value because we believe (in most cases tacitly) that it leads ultimately to a Core State.

I believe each Value Chain continues at least one step beyond a Core State, but in a way that we cannot access consciously. I suspect that there is a single deeper value that motivates all of the Core States: express and sustain the force of life.
And I suspect that the reason that this value is inaccessible to us is that it ultimately serves not us as individuals, but the force of life itself.

We have lots of these Value Chains, because we have many relatively independent values and desires. Right now, I want to post this article on my web site. I also want to read a chapter or two of a book I’ve been reading. I also want to get to sleep within the next few hours. Each of these desires has a Value Chain.

Our many Value Chains interconnect into a web that I call a Value Hierarchy.
Some values lead to more than one deeper value. For example, going to Boston supports my attending the conference, and it also allows me to visit my family and friends in New England. And some values motivate more than one lower-level value. Wanting the attend the conference motivates me to travel to Boston and also to book a hotel room.

Value Chains — values linked through cause-and-effect beliefs to deeper values — are central to my approach to resistance and power. If you want to increase your influence, learn whatever you can about your Value Chains and those of the people around you.

Reference: For more information about Core States, I highly encourage you to read Connirae and Tamara Andreas’s
Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within
. You may notice that I recommend lots of books. If you read only one of the books I recommend, Core Transformation is the one. This book helped me more profoundly than any other to understand people, especially myself.

Listening is a crucial skill. You’ve heard that so often that it has become a platitude. I’m sad about that because… well… because listening is a crucial skill.

Crucial for what? If you want to unstick a stuck conversation, you will need to listen well enough to understand what the other person is saying. If you want to respond to resistance, or to resolve a conflict that involves a significant emotional component — and nearly all conflicts do — you will need to listen for the other person’s motivations. If you want to maintain or strengthen or repair a relationship, you will need to listen for the other person’s feelings and needs.

Okay, listening is crucial. That’s still a platitude unless we put some details behind it. If listening is so important, what are some practical steps we can take to improve? I’ve found a number of tests that help me sharpen my listening.

In any situation in which listening is especially important, my first goal is to make sure I am prepared to listen. To test how well I am prepared to listen, I ask myself, “To what extent am I willing to be changed?” If I enter a conversation intent on persuading the other person to my point of view, unwilling to change my own point of view, I limit my ability to listen.

This is just a test, not an admonition. I’m not recommending that you go into each conversation prepared to abandon your most cherished beliefs and values. Into each conversation you bring a suite of plans, intentions, conclusions, interpretations, judgments, beliefs, and values. You may be willing to change some of these things, and inflexible about others. The key is not to put all of these up for negotiation, but to be mindful of what you’re holding onto, and mindful that inflexibility may limit your ability to hear what other people are saying. Are the things you’re holding onto more important than listening fully? That depends on the specifics of the situation. My way of sorting out the specifics is to notice what I’m holding onto and to remind myself of my choices. I ask myself, “What am I holding tightly to in this conversation? Is this more important to me than listening with empathy to what others are saying?” If so, fine. If not, I’ll want to relax my grip so that I can listen.

The first test is about being prepared to listen. The next test tells me whether I am understanding what another person is saying. To test for understanding, I say what meaning I’m making of the other person’s words, then ask “Is that what you mean?” If the person replies, “Yes, that’s what I mean,” I’ve understood. If not, I haven’t.

In most cases, if I didn’t understand well the other person will point out the parts I misunderstood or rephrase them in some way. Every now and again I have to prompt for clarification by asking, “What parts did I misunderstand?” After the person clarifies, I can test again for whether I understand.

This is a test of understanding, not of agreement. I may understand perfectly well, to the other person’s satisfaction, and still disagree.

The second test tells me whether I have heard a piece of what another person is saying. Now I want to know whether I’ve understood all of what the person wants to say. To test whether I have listened fully, I ask, “Is there more that you want to say?”

Sometimes the person has more to say, and says it. I use the “test for understanding” to make sure I’ve understood the new information and how it fits with what the person said earlier. Then I ask again, “Is there more?” When the person says, “No, there’s no more I want to say,” I’ve listened fully.

The second and third tests tell me whether I’ve fully understood the person’s meaning. Sometimes I want to go further, to empathize to make sure I’ve understood the feelings and needs behind what the person is saying. To test my empathy, I ask, “Are you feeling            because you are needing           ?” And I fill in the blanks with whatever feelings and needs I think the person is experiencing.

How do I know what the other person is feeling and needing? Sometimes the person expresses feelings directly: “I’m angry” or “I’m disappointed” or “I’m really looking forward to this.” Sometimes the need is clearly expressed: “I’m worried about losing my job.”

Sometimes the signs are less direct — shouting, a crack in the voice, changes in gestures, body position, facial expressions, or skin tone. I never know for sure what these mean. Sometimes, especially when I notice a sudden change in one of these signals, I ask, “What’s going on for you? What just happened?” Other times, I take the advice that Kelly Bryson offers in his book
Don’t Be Nice, Be Real
: guess! As Bryson says:

You do not have to guess right. Just guess human. Just imagine a human feeling and need that might be behind their words. Guessing feelings and needs at least puts us in the camp of humanness, instead of judgment.

The best way I know to build skill in understanding other people’s feelings and needs is to learn more about my own. As I learn to distinguish my feelings and needs more accurately, and to empathize with them, I am better able to imagine what others may be feeling and needing. The Center for Nonviolent Communication web site includes helpful lists of human feelings and needs.

Whew! That’s a lot of work! Is all of this squishy, touchy-feelie stuff necessary? Sometimes no. Sometimes yes. Empathy is important whenever the conversation involves strong feelings that may interfere with communication. And empathy is important whenever I want to maintain, strengthen, or repair a relationship. That is, whenever I care about the person and our relationship, and I want to show that I care.

References: I learned the “willing to be changed” test from Amy Schwab, who learned it from David Schmaltz, who learned it from Sharon Bennett. The “test for understanding” and “test for listening fully” come from Harville Hendrix’s audio book
Keeping the Love You Find
. Though much of this book is specific to love relationships, Hendrix’s techniques and exercises about listening apply equally well to other kinds of relationships. The “test for empathy” comes from Marshall Rosenberg’s
Nonviolent Communication
and Kelly Bryson’s
Don’t Be Nice, Be Real
.

If you look at my list of favorite books of 2003, you’ll notice that over the past year I’ve been a student of conversation and relationships. I’ve been especially interested in how we can make our conversations more rewarding for ourselves, for others, and for our relationships.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High

by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler helped me to make a big leap in that direction, and that’s why it is my favorite book of 2003.

A few years ago my friend Kay Pentecost, knowing of my deep interest in communication and relationships, recommended Crucial Conversations very highly. I bought the book a few months later, and finally read it in September, 2003. Of the ton of helpful ideas in Crucial Conversations, I found four most helpful: starting with heart, filling the pool of shared meaning, safety, and stories.

Starting with heart means clarifying your purpose in the conversation. Before starting the conversation, ask yourself, What do I really want for myself? What do I really want for others? What do I really want for the relationship? If a conversation becomes difficult, return to your purpose by asking the questions again, and by asking, How would I behave if I really wanted these results?

Filling the pool of shared meaning. The authors define dialogue as the free flow of meaning between two or more people. We each enter a conversation with a personal “pool of meaning”, the combination of our opinions, feelings, theories, and experiences about the topic. “People who are skilled at dialogue,” the authors say, “do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool.”

Safety. What makes safety important? “At the core of every successful conversation lies the free flow of relevant information.” When people feel unsafe in conversation, that flow is blocked. “As people begin to feel unsafe, they start to move down one of two unhealthy paths. They move either to silence (withholding meaning from the pool) or to violence (trying to force meaning in the pool).”

Crucial Conversations offers many ways to test and maintain safety. One key idea is that if we want to maintain safety, we must attend to two “safety conditions.” The first is mutual purpose. We can maintain mutual purpose partly by “starting with heart.” The second safety condition is mutual respect. “In essence, feelings of disrespect often come when we dwell on how others are different from ourselves. We can counteract these feelings by looking for ways we are similar.” The authors say that in many cases, “If you simply realize that your challenge is to make it safer, nine out of ten times you’ll intuitively do something that helps.”

Stories. Like several other books I read in 2003, Crucial Conversations emphasizes the importance of stories in our communications and relationships. “Just after we observe what others do and just before we feel some emotion about it, we tell ourselves a story. That is, we add meaning to the action we observed. To the simple behavior we add motive. Why were they doing that? We also add judgment—is that good or bad?”

This sequence is very similar to Virginia Satir’s Ingredients of an Interaction, the model of communication that I describe in my article “Untangling Communication.” I like the author’s use of the word story here, because it gives me a richer, more dynamic way to talk about how we make meaning.

My review has only scratched the surface. I highly recommend Crucial Conversations.
And Kay, thank you so much for recommending this book so strongly.

Here is an example of how
our stories affect our potential as agents of organizational change.

Susan, the Director of Human Resources at a large paper company, was leading a project to implement self-directed work teams in her organization. She was bumping into some resistance, and asked me to help.

“Most people are really excited about what we’re doing,” she said. “But then there are the resisters.” They don’t want anything to do with teams. Mostly, the resisters are people who have been here more than twenty years. Every time they come to a meeting, I already know what they are going to say.” As she said this she made a motion of pushing away with her hands.

I said, “Instead of calling these folks ‘resisters,’ suppose you think of them as people who are resisting this change at this time.”

She considered this in silence for minute, then looked at me and said, “Wow. That makes a big difference. When I think of them as resisters, it’s as if I have them all figured out, that they’re just resistant to change. When I think of them as resisting this change at this time, I see them more as people. Maybe they have reasons for resisting.”

I said, “Now, instead of thinking of them as resisting the change, what if you think of them as responding to it?”

Again she went silent. After a moment, she said, “Thank you! Now I know what I need to do!”

I talked with Susan several months later. She had met several times with the “resisters,” and focused on listening carefully to what they had to say. After a few long discussions, together they came up with an idea that worked for everyone: These company veterans would become mentors. When new people joined the organization, the mentors would help them to learn “how we work in teams around here.”

Experiment: Think about Susan’s role in her initial story, the story about “resisters.” If you were to name Susan’s role, what would you call it? What about the company veterans’ role? What would you call that?

Experiment: In Susan’s later story, the story about meeting several times with the company veterans, what role did Susan play? What role did the veterans play?

Experiment: Notice that there is another story being told here: my story. What role did Susan play in my story? What was my role? What role, if any, did the company veterans play?

Experiment: Notice that by telling you this story, I am enacting yet another story: my ongoing story about you and me. What does my publishing this story, and my offering all of these experiments, tell you about the story I’m creating about you and me?

Experiment: What story are you creating about all of this?

A relationship is a story. I don’t mean that as a metaphor. I mean it literally: A relationship is a story. In particular, a relationship is a story about two people responding to each other and with each other over time.

Like all stories, the story of a relationship is told from a particular point of view — some person’s point of view. The nature of the story, the nature of the relationship, depends a great deal on who is telling the story.

If you want to influence others, relationships matter. Of the four factors that affect the way people respond to your proposals and requests — expectations, communication, relationship, and environment — relationship may be the most important to nurture. Every time you talk with someone, your relationship enters the conversation before you do. You each bring a story into the room, a story that carries your history and expectations, providing the structure that integrates this conversation with your past and your future, and the context within which you attach meaning and significance to each other’s words and behaviors. As you interact, your story guides your experience — perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors — even as you weave your experience back into the ongoing, unfolding story.

I’ve been thinking about this idea, about relationships as stories, for a few weeks. It feels like a rich vein for me — every thought leads to three more thoughts. I struggled for days to start this article because I didn’t know where to begin. I struggled for hours to write it because I didn’t know where to stop.

I’ll stop here for now, having set out only the basic idea, and leave you (and me) with a few thought experiments.

Experiment: Think of a relationship that you are enjoying. If you were to tell an empathetic listener about this relationship, what would you say? What story or stories would you tell? How did the relationship begin? What events or patterns of events stand out for you as being especially important to you? What happened? What meaning did you make of those events? How did you feel? What role do you play in the story? How do you describe yourself? What role does the other person play? How do you describe the other person? What do you think will happen in the relationship over time? How does all of this affect the way you interact with the person? How does it affect the way you think and talk about the person when you’re apart?

Experiment: Think of a relationship in which you are feeling some stress or pain or frustration. Answer the same questions as above.

Experiment: Compare the two relationships from above. What similarities do you see? What differences?

Experiment: How would the other person in each relationship answer these questions?

Agile software development methods are relatively new. Many months ago, in response to hearing many people demand “proof” that Agile methods work, Scott Ambler explained why he thought that asking for proof was not likely to be fruitful, at least for now. Last week, Mr. Ed, a self-proclaimed skeptic of Agile methods, pointed out what he sees as many logical fallacies in Scott’s article, and offered his analysis as evidence that “the quality of discussion surrounding Agile methods is often low.”

Members on the Extreme Programming mailing list talked briefly about how or whether to respond to Mr. Ed’s article. Some of the members, convinced for a variety of reasons that Mr. Ed is not merely skeptical, but hostile, questioned the wisdom of bothering to reply.

Noticing that all of this discussion is public, and perhaps read by many people, I suggested that there may be value in replying. Even if the person you’re replying to is hostile and unlikely to be swayed, other people will read your reply. You can play to the audience. If you respond sincerely, respectfully, and non-defensively, you may attract some of the readers who are more open to your ideas.

A colleague wrote to me privately, saying that he understood why I’d recommend replying sincerely and respectfully. But why non-defensively?

I’ve learned that defensiveness serves me poorly.

I respond defensively only when I feel threatened. One way I respond defensively is to overstate my position. Now, as the words leave my mouth (or my fingertips), I know deep down that I’m overstating. And I know that if I were truly confident in my position I would feel no need to overstate it. So when I overstate, I reinforce my private doubts about my position while at the same time increasing my public commitment to it. Instead of reducing my sense of threat, I reinforce it.

It’s unlikely that my defensive responses will fool people into thinking that I am confident. Though the content of my response may express great confidence, the form of my response sends a different message. People are very good at picking up these mixed messages, and at knowing which message conveys the greater truth. As Jerry Weinberg says, “When the words and the music don’t match, trust the music.” So my defensive responses tell people that I want them to believe that I am more confident than I am. This message may be murky, but people get it. Instead of increasing my credibility, I undermine it.

Defending against a skeptic’s questions says that I feel not only threatened, but attacked. If the skeptic was intending to attack, my defensiveness validates the attack, in my audience’s mind and in my own. If the skeptic was not intending to attack, my defensiveness suggests (to my audience and to myself) that I feel threatened by sincere (if skeptical) questions. Either way, my defensiveness sends the message that my position cannot withstand skepticism.

Sometimes, as in this example from April, I defend my position by attacking. When I attack, I legitimize attack as a way of interacting.

Defending sends the message that I imagine ill intent, that I am unable to empathize with the positive intentions behind the person’s claims and questions. This makes it harder to find and create common ground.

When I focus on defending my position, I am less able to hear the other person’s position cleanly and fully. This builds a barrier that ensures that my needs and intentions can not be heard cleanly and fully. I am less able to learn from the interaction.

Defending my position often provokes the other person to attack or retreat. This makes it less likely that the other person will be able to hear my position.

And finally, defensiveness feels like crap. Most of the time I don’t notice when I’m feeling defensive. I recognize only later what I was feeling. Sometimes, as in the episode in April I recognize my defensiveness only when someone points out my strange behavior. When I’m able to notice my defensiveness in the moment, I’m usually able stop and find a way to respond sincerely, respectfully, and non-defensively.

Defensiveness doesn’t defend us well, and often increases the very “threat” that we are defending against. As Sharon Ellison writes in her book
Don’t Be So Defensive!
, “The irony is that in the name of self-protection we thwart not only the growth of our own self-esteem but also our actual competence. Instead of becoming connected through open interactions, we become isolated.” (See pp 12–14)

Experiment: What makes a response defensive, rather than merely a response?

Experiment: What factors trigger you to respond defensively when someone challenges or questions your ideas or positions? Something about the challenges or questions? Something about the idea or position? Something about your relationship to the idea or position? Something about your relationship with the person issuing the challenges or questions? What other factors?

Experiment: What happens when you respond defensively to challenges and questions?

Often when I write about resistance, I struggle to find the right word for the change agent’s action, the action people are resisting when they resist. Would-be change agents offer advice, requests, demands, mandates, proposals, and lots of other… what? What is the category that encompasses all of these offers?

I haven’t yet found that single category. Last night, after several hours of late-night etymological research, I arrived at two categories: proposals and requests. People can resist change agents’ proposals, and they can resist change agents’ requests.

The common element of proposals and requests is that each offers a course of action that the listener may take. The main distinction between the two is the intended beneficiary of the course of action. The intent of a proposal is to benefit the listener. Though the proposer may also intend the proposal to benefit the proposer and others, the defining characteristic of a proposal (a sincere proposal, at least) is that it is offered for the benefit of the listener. The intent of a request is to benefit the requester. Though the requester may also intend the request to benefit the listener and others, the defining characteristic of a request is that it is issued for the benefit of the requester.

I’d love to find a useful, single word that encompasses both requests and proposals. If there is such a word, the key is in what’s common between requests and proposals: each offers a course of action that the listener may take. Is there a good, evocative word for that?

The word offer is a step in the right direction. Dictionary.com defines offer as “to present for acceptance or rejection; proffer.” This definition is more general than I’m looking for — it doesn’t evoke the key idea of a course of action. What’s the word for “offer a course of action?”

I’m starting to think that the right word is proposal, and that a request is a kind of proposal. If that’s right, then the distinction that I drew above isn’t quite right. I may need to drop intended to benefit the listener as an essential characteristic of a proposal. A proposal is a proposal as long as it presents a course of action for acceptance or rejection, regardless of whose interests the proposer intends to serve.

Alas, I’m now mired in The Definition Game. Regardless of what words we use, the nature of our offers is important to our success as change agents. Whose interests are we serving by offering the courses of action we offer? What forms can our offers take? In what sort of relationship would each form be appropriate? What does the form of our offers imply about our view of our relationships with our listeners?

But I still want a word. Is proposal the best word, or is there a better one?

Experiment: In what situations are requests appropriate? In what situations are proposals appropriate?

Experiment: What different kinds of proposals can you think of? What distinguishes each kind of proposal from the others? What would have to be true in a relationship in order for the listener deem each kind of proposal to be appropriate?

Experiment: What different kinds of requests can you think of? What distinguishes each kind of request from the others? What would have to be true in a relationship in order for the listener deem each kind of request to be appropriate?

The Craft of Research
, by Booth, Colomb, and Williams, advises writers about how to write clear, effective research reports. The central part of the book describes how to support a claim (or assertion) with reasons and evidence. The authors also offer a way to evaluate whether a claim is worth reading about, and therefore worth writing about:

After its accuracy, readers will value most highly the significance of your claim, a quality they measure by the degree to which it asks them to change what they think. While you can’t precisely quantify it, you can gauge significance by this rough measure: If readers accept a claim, how many other beliefs must they change?

If you want your readers to change many beliefs, you will need to provide lots of compelling reasoning and evidence to support your claim. The greater the change you ask your readers to make, the more support you must provide to motivate that change.

I think that the same is true for proposals for change. The significance of a proposal is the degree to which it asks people to change their beliefs and behaviors. The more significant our proposal, the more strongly people will resist. The greater the change we ask people to make, the more support we must provide to motivate that change.

If we turn this around, we can understand resistance as information about the significance of our proposals. When people strongly resist a proposal, that’s a clue that we are asking them to change beliefs and behaviors that they value highly.

Note that the significance of our proposals is determined not by us, but by the people we are asking to change. To test this claim, consider The $2.10 Game from Jerry Weinberg’s
The Secrets of Consulting
:

I toss a coin. If it comes up heads, I give you $2.10. If it comes up tails, I give you nothing. Now, consider how much you would pay to play the game. [p 30]

I’ve played The $2.10 Game in many of my workshops. To make the game real, I tell people that I will play the game with one person for the fee they offer. I ask people to write their offer on a card and show it to me.

As Jerry predicted, some people will pay $1.05 or more to play the game. Some people offer less. Some will not risk even a penny to play. The difference gives me clues about the significance each person attaches to the game. But those clues are fuzzy. To understand the significance more clearly, I ask people how they decided how much money to offer.

One woman offered “$0.00″ to play. I asked her how she chose that amount. She said, “I have exactly 35 cents in my pocket, and the bus ride home costs 35 cents.”

Resistance tells you that there is something important for you to learn about the significance people attach to the change. The penny you thought you were asking people to risk may turn out to be bus fare home.

Experiment: For the next week, each time you make a proposal, ask people how they decided whether to accept or reject it.

Experiment: For the next week, each time someone makes a proposal, make a note of your reasons for accepting or rejecting it.

Yesterday, the U. S. Department of Labor released its latest labor statistics. An online community in which I participate had a conversation about the unemployment rate, which was reported at 6.2 percent. Several people told stories of their difficulty finding jobs. One person offered some historical information, and said that from a historical perspective, “6% unemployment is really considered pretty danged good.” Another replied, “I only deal in what I know from my own experience… Probably a quarter of the people i know are out of work… In this case, historical perspective is just worthless.”

These comments got me thinking about we create meaning. We make meaning of facts by placing the facts in some context, some frame of reference. Our choice of frame both generates and constrains the kinds of meanings we will make. An unemployment rate of 6.2 percent looks pretty danged good or pretty danged bad, depending on what frame of reference we place it in. The meanings we make of a fact may be determined more by our frame of reference than by the fact itself.

How do we choose the frames of reference by which we interpret what happens around us (or even within us)? As we interpret the latest unemployment rate, is sixty years of history an appropriate frame of reference? Is “a quarter of the people I know” appropriate? What would lead us to choose one frame over the other? What makes one frame more appropriate than another? Is it possible, or useful, to accept both frames, along with the conflicting meanings they generate? I’d like to hear your thoughts about these questions.

Notice that “resistance” is a frame of reference. I often begin my resistance workshops with a brief exercise. People pair up, and I give one person in each pair a simple action to perform. Until about a year ago, I would next ask the people who did the simple action, “How many of you got some form of resistance?” Almost everyone would say they got resistance.

I stopped asking that question. The question, and the context in which I ask it (a workshop about resistance) creates a very strong “resistance” frame of reference. It lures people into thinking about their partner’s responses as resistance. Given that a big part of my workshops is to reframe resistance as information, setting up a strong frame of “resistance” feels like something of a swindle.

On the other hand, I also want people to experience the meaning-creating power of that “resistance” frame of reference. Maybe I’ll put the question back in. What do you think?

Changing the frame of reference can often be a great way to solve a “problem.” Earlier, I described a conversation I had with Kenneth about a possible consulting assignment to conduct a risk assessment for his project. At the end of our conversation, Kenneth decided not to hire me. A few weeks later, I was talking to Jerry Weinberg about that conversation, and feeling discouraged that I hadn’t landed the job. After listening to my story, Jerry said, “It seems to me that Kenneth took your advice.”

Wow! Jerry’s simple reframing made all the difference. Instead of seeing the conversation as a failure (I didn’t get the job), I now saw it as a success (the client took my advice, probably saving himself a ton of money and aggravation). Same facts. Different frame of reference. Different meaning.

My earlier article about walking to the horizon gives another example of the power of choosing a frame of reference. When I’m trying to improve a process, progress can seem pretty depressing in comparison to where I want to go. If instead I compare my progress to where I started, my progress usually looks “pretty danged good.”

Several years ago, on the day I moved to California, I was carjacked at gunpoint in the parking lot of the apartment complex that I was moving into. For a half hour, two carjackers drove me around in my car, one driving, the other sitting behind me, holding a gun to the back of my head. I won’t go into the details, but I was, as you can imagine, terrified.

A few days later, I was walking across a parking lot to a store. As a woman walked out of the store in my direction, I began to panic and shake. Then I began to panic about my panicking, fearing that I would forever be terrified of people in parking lots.

At that moment, some very wise part of me asked, “How do you feel about being afraid?” After a few seconds, I realized that, at that moment, I felt good about being afraid. My fear didn’t mean that I would always be afraid in parking lots. It meant that, for a while, it would be healthy for me to be more attentive to my surroundings. That reframe was a big step in my recovery.

(That wise question — how do I feel about what I feel — comes from Virginia Satir’s Ingredients of an Interaction, which you can read more about in my article “Untangling Communication.” I call the question The Acceptance Question.)

Reframing is often a simple way to solve a problem. But when you’re stuck in the middle of a problem, that can be the hardest time to think of more helpful frames of reference. Fortunately, other people may not be stuck in the same frame as you, and may be able to offer ideas for reframing the problem. That’s one of the many values of friends and colleagues. And consultants (Hi, my name is Dale!).

Experiment: For the next week, notice the frames of reference that people offer to make meaning of facts. Which frames of reference do you accept? Which do you reject? How do you decide whether to accept or reject a frame of reference?

Experiment: How does the frame of “resistance” affect the way you interpret people’s responses to your ideas? What are two other frames of reference that you could use? What meanings does each frame encourage?

Every now and then, I hear someone say, “People resist change.” Most of the time, the person say this has made some specific proposal, to which some other person has responded by resisting. Other times, one person is saying this to console another who is experiencing resistance. “People resist change” is offered as a kind of explanation. Why are those people resisting? Because people resist change.

How discouraging! If it’s true that people resist change, what hope could I possibly have for any proposal? Yuck.

Fortunately, it isn’t true. That is, it isn’t universally true that every person always resists every change. For example, there’s a good chance that right now you are reading this article in the hope that you will learn something new and useful. You’re not resisting change, you’re seeking change.

Each of us resists some changes, accepts some changes, and actively seeks out yet other changes. Our preferences for which changes we will resist, accept, or seek differs from one person to the next. We might resist a change at one moment and welcome it at another time, in another situation.

If what I’m saying is true, if each person resists some changes and not others, if each person might resist a given change at one time and accept the same change at another time, what makes the difference? What leads a person to accept or reject a particular change at a particular time?

I’ll leave the answers as an exercise for the reader. I offer the following experiments, from which I’ve learned a great deal about how people decide which changes to accept and which to resist.

Experiment: For one week, notice everything that anyone asks you to do (in whatever form, including demands, suggestions, advice, and so on). Which things do you choose to do? What are your reasons for choosing to do those things? Which do choose not to do? What are your reasons for choosing not to do those things? What patterns do you notice in your answers?

Experiment: Ask a dozen or more people the following questions:

• Think of a time when someone asked you to do something and you chose not to do it. What were your reasons for not doing what the person asked?
• Think of a time when someone asked you to do something and you chose to do it. What were your reasons for doing what the person asked?

What patterns do you notice in people’s answers?

Experiment: Tell me (either privately or by posting a comment below) what you’ve learned from these experiments. (Note that I’ve just made a request of you. What are your reasons for doing or not doing what I’ve asked?)