Anxiety is the state of having your brain, mind and behavior
– and as you get older your values –
be out of alignment with the task in front of you

Consider someone in their early forties or older who has a, b and c skills that have earned them a living. Skills that they do masterfully and nearly automatically and ones they now need to replace with something altogether new.

A few years ago I worked with the controllers of a large international bank that was beginning to outsource many of their functions overseas. Many of these people were CPA’s and MBA’s who hadn’t thought strategically in decades and now had to think that way, because all the auditing and actuarial functions they had been doing could be done less expensively abroad. Their brains, minds and behaviors as auditors were completely out of alignment with thinking strategically.

And then there was the case of a large insurance company whose independently owned franchisees had been selling auto, home, property and casualty coverage (i.e. protection from risk) that had been told to sell (risky and complicated) financial instruments.

In both cases, the push back was enormous. The list of explanations and excuses from the bank and the insurance company was long and extensive. The bank controllers claimed that services coming from India would upset clients and the small insurance office owners claimed that selling financially risky products would turn everything they did for their customers upside down.

Every counter explanation of the need to move forward to the new platforms and new offerings was met with, “Yes, but.” And every “Yes, but” was clearly fueled by anxiety.

The only thing that eliminated that anxiety was listening. When managers were trained on how to listen without an agenda and instead keep asking out of genuine concern “what’s really going on?” the resistant controllers at the bank and mom and pop insurance franchise owners opened up and revealed it.

In the cases of the controllers and insurance office owners, both were embarrassed to admit that they had become so comfortable doing what they did — that was no longer sufficient to be competitive — that they hadn’t learned anything of this scale in decades. The controllers hadn’t thought strategically in many years and the insurance agents had never sold financially risky products. Both groups were scared that they couldn’t learn new things and felt too embarrassed to admit that they felt too stupid to do so.

However, once they both owned up to this, they exhaled and breathed a huge sign of relief and were able to get this humiliating weight off their chest. An interesting thing occurs after people are able to talk from what they’re really scared, ashamed or frightened about and feel not just understood, but — as I write about in my new book, “Just Listen” — “feel felt.” At that moment not only do they physically relax, but it is as if their brain relaxes and as if the three parts of their brain (the “fight or flight” lower reptile, the emotional middle mammalian, the rational upper human brain) relax the way they are bonded/neurologically welded together and can realign with each other in a way more aligned with the present situation. Nearly every break though that most people have had with another person is preceded by their stopping talking over or at each other, beginning to truly listen and hear the other person and then begin talking with each other. It’s only after that point that they realize they had misunderstood (i.e. their brains, minds and behaviors had been misaligned) each other.

After that it was easy to point out to them that they had each learned many new thinks with regard to technology, with regard to new rules and regulations and with regard to new sales approaches and that learning these larger items — which they could do in a step by step fashion — would utilize the skills and abilities to learn that they already had.

The second thing that eliminated their anxiety was their learning to listen more deeply to their clients and customers and find out what was really on their minds, much as their managers had just listened to them. That enabled them to stop being so self-absorbed and do the thing that makes any service or sales person more successful, which is to stop selling and instead listen to what is truly on your client or customer’s mind and help them with that.

***

Catch Mark on October 7, 5 PM PDT on “This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis”

Sign up to see Mark speak live, October 7, 5:30-8:30 PM at the Professional Mentors and Coaches Association in Santa Monica, CA

If the above speaks to you and you were listening and would like to pick up some tips on how to do that better and more effectively, please visit the Just Listen website and sign up for the exclusive FREE RESOURCES..

Also if you’re a working mom and anxious and would like to find out how to become less anxious and even happier, you’ll want to check out my good friend, Cathy Greenberg‘s great new book, What Happy Working Mothers Know. I was pleased to have contributed to the large body of research Cathy used to write this cutting edge book.

A skeptic is someone who once trusted and was let down and disappointed;
A cynic is someone who once trusted and was betrayed and devastated;
A pessimist is a cynic who just got tired of fighting, gave up and withdrew.

Deep inside all skeptics and most cynics is a deep ache to trust again, but to do so without the fear of being let down, disappointed, betrayed or devastated.
Deeper inside pessimists is a willingness to trust again, but it will require tincture of time, the chance to talk (as in vent and then rant and then exhale) their way back into the game, and perhaps a touch of Prozac.

Common to all skeptics, cynics and pessimists is a need to be listened to and to feel understood and have their concerns validated even if there are not any good or quick solutions. If you agree, I hope you’ll check out my upcoming book, Just Listen. If you do, you’ll discover the secret to getting through to absolutely anyone. It’s less important what you tell others, than what you enable them to tell you that really matters to them and that you help them with, because you actually care. If you are burned out (i.e cynical/pessimistic) and don’t want to listen, why would anyone want to listen to you?

The silo walls are tall and deep,
but he’s got promises to keep
and miles to go before he sleeps.

On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan spoke to the people of West Berlin at the base of the Brandenburg Gate, near the Berlin wall. In that speech he uttered his famous words: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” This may be remembered as one of his greatest speeches. On Nov. 9-11, 1989, the people of a free Berlin tore down that wall.

It’s now twenty two years later and the world seems to be saying the same thing to President Obama, who clearly gets the message. He in turn appears to be telling America to do the same. But America is resisting. America is pushing back.

But these walls are different walls. They are the thick siloed walls that have kept America insulated and isolated from the rest of world. For more than two hundred years the two oceans and non-threatening countries to the North and South and this apparent barrier to entry allowed America to grow and prosper and surpass all other nations of the world. However what has enabled us to get to this point is now preventing us from progressing further. We are still reeling and have not found are footing from 9/11 which replaced a relative secure barrier to hostile invasion to living under the shadow of intermittent Code Orange Threat levels. Countries that embrace and work together synergistically – even adopting a common currency, the Euro – are passing us by.

There are three ways to break down the silos that separate America from other countries and separate Americans from each other, Democrats and Republicans from each other, men and women from each other, rich and poor from each other, young and old (and all the generations between) from each other.

More accurately, when these ways are engaged in, the walls spontaneously fall.

1. The sky above. An African native who was visiting Manhattan remarked, “They don’t see the sky.” The sky above is a shared, uplifting and ennobling vision that peoples in every silo will gladly work towards. One possibility I’d suggest is the vision of a world that your and my great grandchildren (who I will likely not live to see, but who the children I adore and who in turn will adore their children will) will one day walk into will be full of possibility for success based on merit, free of war, with health, freedom, liberty and justice for all
2. The ground below. That is our shared humanity. When someone reaches out to us or we to them to demonstrate spontaneous acts of kindness and generosity and to be vulnerable (in the open vs. the threatened sense), we not only touch into our shared humanity, we touch our WE that really can overcome and the WE that are the world
3. Communication with instead of at or over each other. It’s rare that people talk with each other. In fact it seems almost that talking to each other is losing out to talking at each other. Perhaps the greatest single example of the power of talking with instead of at each other not only brought down walls, it ended the Cold War. It occurred in 1985 when Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev said he and President Ronald Reagan “stopped demonizing one another.” Reagan was leaving the room after an angry exchange – but stopped and “in one moment switched his focus, his mental state, his emotion from anger to engagement. … He then said calmly, ‘This isn’t working. May I call you Mikhail and will you call me Ron?’ Gorbachev says that was the first step in shifting their relationship.

The challenge that Obama faces however is that these three ways of dealing with each other and life in general appear to be currently highly un-American (Dick Cheney is the poster child for just how absent they are). Regardless of his efforts to entreat us to develop and move towards a shared, ennobling vision, Americans seem locked in a “zero sum” game of “the hell with you, what’s in it for me.”

America is also a country that exalts in emotionality and excitement and stimulation but runs away from experiencing and expressing feelings. And trust me, as much as women claim they are in touch with their feelings more than men, both genders, and for that matter all generations are equally out of touch with their feelings. Americans run from feeling their hurt and fear as hurt and fear and will do anything to keep from feeling them (which by the way makes them all calm down) and in the bargain lose touch with each other’s and their own humanity.

Finally, talking with each other requires perhaps one of the skills most lacking in contemporary American life. And that is the ability to “Just Listen.”

At 3:15 PM PST today, Friday, May 15, 2009 my long time mentor and beloved friend, Edwin Shneidman, pioneer in the study, prevention and intervention of suicide and suicidal behavior died at age 91 as he would have wished, peacefully at home. To appreciate the magnitude of his being able to do that you need to read:  Waiting for the End, Alone and Unafraid and if you want to read the story behind that story, you will want to read the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard interview with Tom Curwen.

Ed was the founder of The American Association of Suicidology and Professor of Thanatology at UCLA. He authored, co-authored or edited nineteen books on the topic.

I had the occasion to visit him – not as often as I should have -over the past several physically painful years of his life. I believe one of his greatest accomplishments is that he managed to meet all the ten “Criteria for a Good Death” that he set forth in an article with that title published in June, 2007 in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior published by The American Association of Suicidology.

1. Natural. There are four modes of death–natural, accident, suicide and homicide (NASH). Any survivor would prefer a loved one’s death to be natural. No Suicide is a good death. 
2. Mature. After age 70. Near the pinnacle of mental functioning but old enough to have experienced and savored life. 
3. Expected. Neither sudden nor unexpected. Survivors-to-be do not like to be surprised. A good death should have about a weeks lead time. 
4. Honorable. Filled with honorifics but not dwelling on past failures. Death begins an ongoing obituary, a memory in the minds of the survivors. The Latin phrase is: De mortuis nil nisi bonum (Of the dead [speak] nothing but good). 
5. Prepared. A living trust, prepaid funeral arrangements. That the decedent had given thought and made arrangements for the necessary legalities surrounding death. 
6. Accepted. ”Willing the obligatory,” that is, accepting the immutables of chance and nature and fate; not raging into the night; acceding to nature’s unnegotiable demands. 
7. Civilized. To have some of your loved ones physically present. That the dying scene be enlivened by fresh flowers, beautiful pictures, and cherished music. 
8. Generative. To pass down the wisdom of the tribe to younger generations; to write; to have shared memories and histories; to act like a beneficent sage. 
9. Rueful. To cherish the emotional state which is a bittersweet admixture of sadness, yearning, nostalgia, regret, appreciation, and thoughtfulness. To avoid depression, surrender, or collapse; to die with some projects left to be done; by example, to teach the paradigm that no life is completely complete. 
10. Peaceable. That the dying scene be filled with amicability and love, that physical pain be controlled as much as competent medical care can provide. Each death an ennobling icon of the human race.

Ever the articulate humorous iconoclast, I think Ed would have eschewed the pomp and circumstance I ellaborated above and prefer that I had just said that he hoped he had simply followed the dictum of his mentor, Henry A. Murray: “A good death is dying so as to be as little a pain in the ass to your family as possible.”

I will be forever grateful to Ed who early in my career had enough confidence in me to entrust some of the most suicidal patients from the UCLA in patient wards when they needed to be discharged, but were still suicidal. He did it with a simple phone call: “Hello Mark, this is Ed. I am sitting with a lovely young woman. She’s in a lot of pain. You can help her. SEE her.”

I also owe Ed a singular skill to help such people when he told me: “Mark, if you listen for hurt, fear and pain, it is always there. And when the other person feels you listening andfeeling them, they will lower their guard, open their minds and hearts to you, allow you to enter and comfort them and if you’re fortunate, will let you walk them out of hell.”

And Ed, regarding being “as little a pain in the ass to your family possible”… I think you actually pulled that off.

Now it’s time to thank you for how many millions of people your life work has helped to face death and to bid farewell to you Ed, using the same words you would use when I would leave your home during recent visits: “Goodbye, dear man.”

Be at peace, I will miss you.

When you can’t say, “Yes,”
because you don’t have anything left to give;

When you can’t ask for help,
because you can’t hear someone give another excuse for why they can’t
and because you wouldn’t know what to ask for anyway;

When you deal with the above by withdrawing
and becoming sullen and irritable with your family;

AND when the cycle repeats itself daily
and every day is Groundhog Day;

YOU are depressed.

If this speaks to you, what do you do? If’s it’s about someone you care about, how have you helped them?

Read More at: Are You Anxious or Depressed?

Depression and Suicide see: “I’m going to kill myself”

Don’t isolate, reach out and share your hurt and what you’re doing about it at: Are You Depressed

Resources for Depression:

NIMH
WebMD
NAMI
Mayo Clinic
Wikipedia

A skeptic is someone who is reluctant to believe; A cynic is someone who refuses to believe.

A skeptic is someone who once believed and was hurt and/or disappointed; A cynic is someone who once believed and was humiliated and/or betrayed.

However deep inside all skeptics and even most cynics is a deep abiding ache to believe again (because not believing leaves us safe but bitter or at least British), but do so without the fear of being hurt, disappointed, humiliated or betrayed.

And Susan Boyle is someone we can believe without any of the worries.

Read my full Huffington Post blog  about Susan Boyle.