Narratives and Habits for Interpersonal Cooperation

Smashing the Cycle of Negative Thinking, Part 2

Source: Herb Mast

In my previous post, I discussed ways to develop your personal agency through truthful narratives and associated habits. Statements such as:

You can always improve your reactions to whatever happens to you.

You can always work within your Circle of Influence, and thereby grow it.

You can always plan your life around your values.

Such open, truthful, and constructive thoughts must replace negative thoughts such as “I’ll never be any good at this,” “I can’t do anything in this role,” or “I will always be trapped like this.” Self-destructive or paralyzing behavior must be replaced by constructive habits.

For Stephen Covey, (re)gaining your personal agency constitutes your Private Victory. Once you are on a sure personal foundation—sure of your values and cheerfully determined to take right action regardless of the fluctuating external conditions of your life—you can, with new confidence, work towards cooperation with others, or Public Victory.

Embrace win-win: cooperators finish first

“Win-win” sounds like the most superficial slogan in the world. Who could be against “win-win”? In fact, this was for me one of Stephen Covey’s most profound ideas. The approach is delightfully straightforward, while also being counter-intuitive and morally demanding.

All of daily life, with each of our relations, colleagues, and acquaintances, is made up of negotiation. The point is, in each of these negotiations, to sincerely and proactively search for solutions that are mutually beneficial and desirable. The key is candid and compassionate dialogue.

Competition is central to all biological life—and among humans, in particular, competition for sex, money, and status. Zero-sum thinking does not come out of nowhere. At the same time, evolutionary psychologists and biologists have long noted that the key to humanity’s success as a species, its conquest of the Earth and organization of remarkably complex societies, has been our astounding creative capacity for generating new forms of cooperation.¹

Individuals and organizations that strike the right balance between competition and cooperation will naturally outperform those who fail at cooperation: cooperators finish first!

I am too much of a realist and a Darwinian to not know that competition is a fact of all life. Still, I am struck at how destructive and paralyzing zero-sum thinking has been in my own life. How often I didn’t trust people (a salesperson for example) because I thought that for one of us to win the other necessarily had to lose. How often I did not attempt something because I felt, in a competitive environment, the struggle for my own success would anyway be at another’s expense. So why try? As Covey said during one demonstration: “Win-lose [thinking] poisons the mind: you don’t trust anything.”

A basic reality underpinning win-win is that the people we exploit or subjugate or rip off don’t go away: they will still be there, angry, resentful, and plotting revenge. After 1945, the Western powers made great efforts to secure West Germany as an ally by restoring a German federal state, providing economic assistance, and welcoming the new Federal Republic into NATO and the European Communities, with their associated security and economic benefits. A purely punitive approach towards Germany was replaced with a win-win approach; this was a revolutionary development, especially in Franco-German relations. Similarly, beyond the current war, any lasting peace between Russia and Ukraine will require a de facto win-win agreement between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, with or without their current governments.

Thus win-lose relationships are not sustainable and win-win is the basis for long-term, productive relationships of mutual trust. I was very struck by Covey’s definition of an effective salesperson, a profession I had long eyed with suspicion:

An effective salesperson first seeks to understand the needs, the concerns, the situation of the customer. The amateur salesman sells products; the professional sells solutions to needs and problems. It’s a totally different approach … he has to have the integrity to say, “My product or service will not meet that need” if it will not.²

You can always express your views and needs, with courage and consideration

Engaging in dialogue with the aim of achieving win-win, mutually-beneficial solutions does not mean being naïve or being a pushover. On the contrary, tremendous strength and sensitivity are required to achieve win-win.

It entails actually expressing your needs, preferences, and what you think and feel, but in a way which is not threatening to others. This is not easy. It requires courage to actually express yourself in this way. Indeed, sharing with people our basic needs and preferences entails some degree of vulnerability, as there is no guarantee you will get exactly what you want. It takes courage to tell people what really matters to you.

Still, failure to express your interests betrays a “lose-win” mentality: you have preemptively surrendered. But besides courage, you also need to express yourself with consideration for the feelings and likely reactions of others. In short: actively express your needs, views, and preferences, but always with courage and consideration. Covey goes so far as to define “emotional maturity” as this capacity to express oneself with courage and consideration.³

The crucial thing in this frankness is to express yourself with genuine care and feeling for the well-being of the people you are speaking with. If you do so, they will inevitably respond. If you don’t yet care about the other person, well, think of their good qualities, get to know them better, and/or bond with them over drinks or some activity you both enjoy.

Source: Week Plan

I’m amazed at how much a little sincerity brings. Nothing convinces like conviction. Conversely, what do we sound like when we say the words, but we don’t really believe them? Everyone can see right through us. You might as well bare your heart.

Case in point: if some professional project really doesn’t seem interesting to you, you don’t necessarily need to feign interest. You can respond constructively, for example by asking why the project is interesting to your interlocutor, sharing what your concerns are, or by suggesting a possible superior alternative. Contributing to right prioritization is a huge benefit you can offer your organization: everyone wants to do projects and activities that are really worthwhile.

Conversely, when we are insincere, even out of kindness or caution, how quickly our web of (white) lies proliferates and ensnares us. It’s hard to keep our story straight when we have to keep track of and build up lie upon lie. It’s often harder, initially, to simply tell the truth, but then our mind can rest at peace.

If you can find mutually-beneficial agreements with others, through candid and compassionate dialogue, life can take on a whole new color and texture. You and your relations no longer do things simply because you are “expected” to by one another or by social convention. You all do things sincerely, because the chosen activities really are meaningful for all. That can be revolutionary.

You can always listen, the greatest investment you can make

Besides (and typically before) expressing your own viewpoint, the key to win-win is listening to others. Listening really is one of our greatest superpowers as human beings. Given the importance of non-verbal communication, I even tend to think that humans evolved this broader ability to “listen” long before our ability to speak.

Listening forms the core of one of Covey’s most immediately understandable and actionable Habits: “First seek to understand, then to be understood.” Only by listening can you figure out what the other person thinks, what their concerns are, and, crucially, what lies behind the immediate, literal meaning their positions. By mutually exploring one another’s interests and positions, the most synergetic solutions will indeed be found. Only by listening first can you even know what constitutes a positive exchange in the relationship.

If the other person feels their position and needs are genuinely understood, they may really loosen up their negotiating position and become open to new alternatives. Covey says: “see the problem from the other point of view. Really seek to understand and to give expression to the needs and concerns of the other party as well as or better than they can themselves.”⁴ There’s a worthy ambition for the top negotiator: learn to express the other side’s position even better than they can!

So, crucially, you must let people express themselves without judging or reacting negatively to what they say. Simply acknowledge, see what truth there is to it, try to understand, and keep talking together. If you are consistently open to what the other person says, they will begin to reciprocate over time. (Sadly, this kind of listening is sometimes most difficult with the people we spend the most time with: as we hear “the same things” every day, as we’ve “heard it all before,” we become less open.)

Listening will often be the very first step in addressing any issue or relationship. People often simply ignore problems they don’t know how to solve and relationships they don’t how to manage. We sweep things under the rug. But out of sight is not, in fact, out of mind. Eventually, the problems we ignore explode into immediate reality. And, even when they don’t manifest directly, they fester in our subconscious, making us feel guilty for our inaction and anxious about problems to come.

And yet, when we don’t know what to do, the first step is easy: acquire information! Involve other people! Listen! So if a relationship with a parent, sibling, or child is deteriorating or neglected, the first answer will typically be to call or meet up, and simply listen. Listening is one of greatest ways of showing you care.

Likewise for problems in organizations: by raising the problem with others, by requesting the views of others in an open-minded and non-judgmental way, you can tap into your colleagues’ collective intelligence. The greatest leaders are not those who, by their supposed genius and wisdom, know all the answers—no one does—but rather those who can unlock and actualize their people’s collective intelligence and energies.

No deal: you can always walk away

Sometimes, mutually-agreeable solutions cannot be found. In which case, realize that you can always walk away. There is always an opportunity cost to this. Walking away from one contract might not be a big deal, from a job offer might be costly, from a fiancé(e) might be life-defining. Still, know that you do, ultimately, always have the option and can walk away from what would be a dissatisfying agreement for both.

Merely knowledge of your ability to walk away can also reduce both the feeling of being trapped and resentment towards the other party, which in turn may make finding a truly mutually-beneficial agreement easier.

Forget regret: you can always do better next time

We all make mistakes. Our life never follows a perfect path and there’s no point torturing ourselves by fantasizing about how our life-path could have been if we had chosen more wisely in the past. We weren’t wise at the time, that’s the point.

The fruits of our own foolishness taste most bitter. The worst may be when our actions disappoint people who had looked up to us or whom we had inspired. We may regret our actions, but that doesn’t accomplish much of anything. You’re better off apologizing (to yourself or others) and moving forward.

One of the greatest lessons my father taught me was that you can’t learn without making mistakes. Perfectionism is utterly sterile. Not only can you learn from your mistakes, but others—even and especially people you have wronged!—can also draw lessons from your foolishness. Thus we fools may spread wisdom by accident and despite ourselves. A consoling thought.

Sometimes a relationship may be irreparably broken due to our mistaken actions. In any case, one should simply do the right thing going forward. That is the best apology: corrected and right action. And that will, generally, be all that is needed to salvage the relationship, to repair it, or in any case to make the most of it. As our dear friend Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself:

Before ten days are over, you will seem a god to those who presently view you as a wild beast or ape, if only you return to your principles and your reverence for reason. (Meditations, 4.16)

1. On which see the great evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson’s book, The Social Conquest of the Earth.

2. Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (London: Simon & Schuster, 2020), p. 282.

3. Ibid., p. 248

4. Ibid., p. 265.