Author: Don McMinn

The mother asked, “Where have you been?” Her little girl replied, “On my way home I met a friend who was crying because she had broken her doll.”
“Oh,” said her mother, “then you stopped to help her fix the doll?”
“No,” replied the little girl, “I stopped to help her cry.”

Hurt and pain are inevitable. It’s not a matter of if we’re going to be hurt, but rather when and how we will deal with the pain.

Pain takes many forms. It can be physical (a sprained ankle), social (exclusion from a group), or emotional (embarrassment, disappointment). Some hurts may be perceived as relatively minor—“I was embarrassed at lunch today when I spilled ketchup on my shirt.” Others are major—“My father abandoned me.”

There’s only one antidote for hurt—comfort.

Here are some practical suggestions on how to comfort other people.

Learn to sense when someone is hurting and be willing and available to help her.

We’re often unaware when people are hurting. Sometimes circumstances will give us a clue (physical illness, death of a loved one, divorce or separation, loss of a job), but often it’s not so apparent. So be discerning and learn to recognize when people are in need of comforting

When you do sense that someone is hurting, are you willing to slow down and take the time to minister comfort or do you choose not to “go there”? You must be discerning, willing, and available.

When someone is hurting, if possible, enter her physical world.

While it is possible to comfort someone over the phone or in a letter, it is best done in person and preferably in the hurting person’s space. If your friend is hurting, instead of suggesting, “Susan, it sounds like we need to talk. Can you drop by my office this afternoon?” it’s better to offer, “Susan, it sounds like we need to talk. Can I come by your office this afternoon?”

Enter her mental and emotional world.

Humans live in at least three “worlds” simultaneously: physical, mental and emotional. While it’s easy to determine where someone is physically, it’s more difficult to determine where she is mentally and emotionally. But to comfort effectively it helps to understand what a person is thinking and feeling. Often, just asking directly – “How are you feeling? What are you thinking?” – is sufficient. At other times it takes more effort, particularly if the person is guarded and reticent to share.

Listen.

A good comforter must be a good listener. Let the one who is hurt do most of the talking; if you talk too much you’ll inevitably engage in unproductive responses.

When someone needs comfort, avoid these unproductive responses.

• Advice/instruction – “Let me give you some steps of action to solve the problem.” Or, “Maybe next time that happens you should…”
• Logic/reasoning – “Let me analyze the situation and tell you why it happened.” Or, “I think the reason this happened was because…”
• Pep talk – “You’re a winner! You’ll make it through these tough times!” Or, “I’m sure tomorrow will be a better day.”
• Minimize – “Sure it hurts, but get it in perspective, there’s a lot going on that’s good.” Or, “Aren’t you being overly sensitive?”
• Anger – “That makes me so mad! They shouldn’t get away with that!” Or, “I’m so upset that you keep getting yourself hurt.”
• Martyr’s complex – “I had something similar happen to me.” Or, “After the kind of day I had, let me tell you what hurt really feels like.”
• Personal fear/anxiety – “I’m afraid that what has happened to you is going to affect my life too.”
• Silence/neglect – Not saying anything.
• Fix it – “I can’t believe that salesman talked to you like that. I’m calling the store right now and talking to his boss.” Or, “Sorry you had a flat tire on that lonely road. Tomorrow I’ll get a set of new tires.”
• Spiritualize – “Well, you know that God will work all of this out for your good.”

While some of these responses may be appropriate to share after the hurting person has been comforted, they don’t work as the initial response.

Learn the “vocabulary of comfort.”

Often, we don’t know what to say to someone who is hurting because we’ve never developed an appropriate vocabulary. We don’t need to say a lot, a few choice sentences are sufficient. Here are some suggestions.

• I’m so sorry that you are hurting.
• It saddens me that you’re hurting. I love you and care for you.
• I’m committed to help you through this difficult time.
• It saddens me that you felt _________ (embarrassed, rejected, belittled). I know that must have hurt.
• I know that you’re hurting. I just wanted to come be with you.

When speaking words of comfort, it’s also important that our tone of voice complement what is being said. Our speech should be warm, sincere and gentle.

Use appropriate non-verbal gestures.

A warm embrace or gentle touch can express comfort. Tears shed for someone else can convey love beyond words.

Jess Moody says this about comfort, “Have you ever taken a real trip down inside the broken heart of a friend? To feel the sob of the soul – the raw, red crucible of emotional agony? To have this become almost as much yours as that of your soul-crushed neighbor? Then, to sit down with him – and silently weep? This is the beginning of compassion.”

We continually come in contact with people who are hurting. Let’s minister grace and healing to them through the simple but effective gift of comfort.

The Pygmalion Effect has its origins in Greek mythology. Pygmalion was a prince of Cyprus and a sculptor who created and fell in love with an ivory statue of his ideal woman. He pleaded with Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, to give life to his creation, and she obliged. Pygmalion married the woman and they had a perfect life together. He had expected the statue to be perfect in every way, and she fulfilled all his expectations.

English playwright George Bernard Shaw used this theme in his popular play Pygmalion. Lerner and Loewe adopted Shaw’s play to create the musical My Fair Lady. In these dramas, a genteel professor transforms a low-class Cockney woman into a lady fit for society primarily by believing in her and expecting the best of her.

The Pygmalion Effect suggests that people will act or behave in the way that others expect them to. One’s expectations of a person can eventually lead that person to behave and achieve in ways that confirm those expectations. It is similar to the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy. The effect can have both positive and negative outcomes—a person expected by his or her superiors to succeed will, but the opposite is also true. The effect is most commonly discussed in terms of education and the workplace, but it can also happen in any one-on-one relationship.

In education

Many studies have been conducted on the Pygmalion Effect in the classroom. Teachers who are given information that certain students are more likely to excel and achieve than other members of the class often find that those students do, in fact, perform better, even if they are not objectively advantaged.

For information on the famous Rosenthal-Jacobson study, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

In business

In an article for Harvard Business Review, Sterling Livingston wrote: Some managers always treat their subordinates in a way that leads to superior performance. But most managers, unintentionally treat their subordinates in a way that leads to lower performance than they are capable of achieving. The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them. If managers’ expectations are high, productivity is likely to be excellent. If their expectations are low, productivity is likely to be poor. It is as though there is a law that caused subordinates’ performance to rise or fall to meet managers’ expectations.

For the entire article go to https://hbr.org/2003/01/pygmalion-in-management

In relationships

Zig Ziglar tells the story of a famous major league baseball player who was speaking to inmates in a prison. One of the inmates asked him, “How did you become a professional ball player?” The pro athlete said, “When I was a child my father would play softball with me in the backyard. Often, when I would throw or catch a ball or swing the bat he would say, ‘You are so good at baseball. Someday you’re going to be a professional baseball player.’ And here I am, a professional baseball player.” The inmate who had asked the question said, “When I was a child, my father told me that I was good for nothing and someday I would end up in prison. And here I am.”

[reminder]What are your thoughts about this essay?[/reminder]

Summary
What? – Often, people will live up to or down to our expectations of them.
So what? – As a parent, friend, or manager, do you have high or low expectations of others?
Now what? – Have high expectations of others.

Leaders – Carefully consider how you relate to your team members. Do you use the Pygmalion effect to your and their advantage?

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare. If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time. Lencioni

Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, often asks her students: “Try to picture Thomas Edison as vividly as you can. Think about where he is and what he’s doing. Is he alone?”

Most students picture Edison as an eccentric scientist tinkering around his laboratory all by himself. Interestingly, Dweck writes, “Edison was not a loner. For the invention of the light bulb, he had thirty assistants, including well-trained scientists, often working around the clock in a corporate-funded state-of-the-art laboratory.”

Most significant achievements are accomplished through teams of people. Someone is leading the team, but it is the collective effort that achieves.

A leader’s main job is to assemble, develop, and empower a great team that focuses on a worthy vision. Peter Drucker suggests that good leaders always use plural pronouns when discussing how work will be done: “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I.’ And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I.’ They don’t think ‘I.’ They think ‘we’; they think ‘team.’ They understand their job is to make the team function.”

The effective leader knows that:

• The old “command-and-control” leadership style has been replaced by one that relies on teamwork and consensus building.
• “All of us are smarter than one of us” so collaborative decision making is best.
• Today’s knowledge workers want to be engaged in meaningful work and respected for their contributions so they are given autonomy and support.
• Our world is so complex, no one person has enough knowledge or experience to function well, alone.
• Customers often have more insight into a company’s products and services than its employees do and are usually eager to share their thoughts. Collaborate with those outside your organization.
• Diversity enhances the benefits of collaboration. When compiling your team, pursue diversity in age, giftedness, personality, gender, ethnicity and background. Allow the diversity to express itself. Gary Heil says, “Recruiting a diverse workforce and then encouraging employees to act as a homogeneous group, where the tendency to agree interferes with critical thinking, is not success. It is merely a waste of human talent.”

Margaret Mead, one of our country’s most famous anthropologist, once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

You don’t have to do it alone, and, it’s best not to.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.—Hitchens

A woman checked into the hospital to have a tonsillectomy, and the surgical team erroneously removed a portion of her foot. How could this tragedy happen? In fact, why is it that ninety-eight thousand hospital deaths each year stem from human error? In part it’s because many healthcare professionals are afraid to speak their minds. In this case, no less than seven people wondered why the surgeon was working on the foot, but said nothing. Meaning didn’t flow because people were afraid to speak up [Patterson and Grenny, Crucial Conversations, pg. 22].

Two problems led to this debacle: an intimidating leader and intimidated followers. In a previous post I encouraged leaders to embrace robust dialogue among team members—that would eliminate the first problem. In this essay, let’s think about what we should do if robust dialogue is disallowed and something bad is about to happen if we don’t speak up.

It takes a lot of courage and emotional fortitude to confront that which is unfair, inaccurate, corrupt, foolish, wrong, ignorant, misdirected, inappropriate, and/or evil; but we have a moral imperative to do so.

Sometimes there is a price to pay. Once in my career, I spoke up about a dysfunctional area of the organization and I was summarily dismissed. Previously, a friend had advised me to always have six months of “go-to-hell money” in my savings account. “That way, if your job becomes unbearable,” he said, “you can tell your boss what you think and then walk away.” His advice came in handy that day.

Become skillful at truth-telling. Learn to speak the undiluted truth in a palatable way and at the right time. Don’t be unkind, mean, or crass (some people, armed with the truth, think they have a 007 license to kill) but do speak up.

I’ll end this post with another sad story that illustrates the dangers of intimidating leadership and silent, repressed followers.

Alexander the Great was once drinking with his chief officers at a party, when, in a drunken stupor, he began arguing with his best friend and faithful soldier, Clitus. Alexander impetuously threw a spear at his friend, hit him square in the chest, and killed him. It stunned the entire group. Alexander couldn’t believe what he had just done and immediately went to his private chamber.

Soon, Alexander’s officers approached him one at a time to try to console him. Aristander told him, “It’s just fate.” Callisthenes said, “We needed that.” Anaxarchus surmised, “Good will come from it.” No one had the emotional fortitude to tell Alexander the Great that what he had done was a terrible deed.

A contemporary historian noted, “In this way, they consoled his soul, but corrupted his character.”

[reminder]What are your thoughts about this essay?[/reminder]

Summary

What? – There are times when it is wrong to remain silent.
So what? – Develop the emotional fortitude to speak up when you should.
Now what? – Read Sam Harris’ book Lying. It presents a good case for always being honest. Then, begin to speak up when situations demand it.

Leaders – Do your team members have the freedom to speak up and express dissenting views? Do you seek honest feedback or squelch it?