Dialogue, dessert buffet, book giftival and herewith a book synopsis for tomorrow Wednesday January

Zoe facilitates, the topic is Gratitude, we meet tomorrow, Wednesday January 15, 6:00 PM at 1514 Seventh Street SW, and away we go! Here's a book synopsis to get you started. Arthur

Book: (Arbinger Institute) The Outward Mindset: How to Change Lives and Transform Organizations (2019)

”How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it!”

- G.K. Chesterton

In contrast to people with an inward mindset, who focus primarily on their own needs, objectives, and challenges, “people who consistently work with an outward mindset excel in three ways… They:

1. see the needs, objectives, and challenges of others

2. adjust their efforts to be more helpful to others

3. measure and hold themselves accountable for the impact of their work on others.”

As one of many examples of such people, a Navy SEAL (Captain Rob Newson) described a key difference between those who completed their training successfully and those who opted out. Beside their training area there is a bell which any trainee can ring if the training becomes too much for them. By ringing the bell, the trainee signals resignation. According to Captain Newson, the trainees who went to the bell did so “the moment they stopped thinking about the mission and their teammates and started thinking primarily about themselves. …the moment they start focusing inward and fixating on how cold, wet, and tired they are, it is not a matter of if they will ring out but when.”

Individuals with an inward mindset may be very successful, achieving fame for example as musicians or athletes or even as politicians or heads of large corporations. Meanwhile those same famous individuals may be exerting a deeply toxic effect on those around them.

Mindset, the authors explain, “is more than a belief about oneself. It refers to the way people see and regard the world – how they see circumstances, challenges, opportunities, other people, and themselves. Their behaviors are always a function of how they see their situations, relationships, and possibilities.” Consequently, “as their mindsets change, people begin thinking and acting in ways they hadn’t imagined before.”

A leader with an inward mindset, retiring from a company that is on the brink of failure, gives consultants a list of about five people who should be fired right away for any hope of turning the company around. The consultants are there to teach how to use outward mindset to transform organizations. They would thank the retiring leader for giving them the list, then begin their outward mindset transformation program. As the program took hold, “Invariably, four of the five people [on the list of people who should be fired] would turn out to be our best performers.”

Whereas we have all begun with a concept of the self as an entity separate from others, “such a ‘self’ doesn’t actually exist.” We are largely defined by our connections with others. “What is fundamental is not an isolated self but rather a kind of brute fact that just is – the reality of being in the world with others. Who we are is who we are with others.” As we become more and more aware of this, we become more and more capable of “seeing and valuing the equal humanity in ourselves and others” and more and more inspired and inspiring in our approach to life.

The authors suggest thinking of the inward and outward mindset as two ends of a spectrum, with the inward mindset as zero on a scale of 0 to 10, outward mindset at ten. In the authors’ experience, people tend to rate themselves higher than they rate their colleagues or their organizations, typically placing the organization they work with at less than 5. “Whatever the [initial] scores are, the objective is to move individuals and organizations further to the right on the mindset continuum.”

By seeing others as people, your awareness emphasizes their needs and your impact on them as persons, so that you guide your thoughts, words, and actions accordingly. While a person with an inward mindset may hold themselves accountable when they make a mistake, that same person might instead blame others. An example is given of an elderly Vietnamese woman in a western hospital whose behavioral outbursts included throwing her food, then her urinal, and yelling. At a meeting on how to deal with this, a member of the staff asked “What would it be like to be her?...far from home. She can’t communicate. She can’t understand what is going on….” This enabled a much more comprehensive and effective and empathic approach to the situation – beginning with an outward mindset.

One reason we get stuck with an inward mindset, suggest the authors, is that we “get in our own way.” This concept is illustrated with the case of a young man who had for years blamed his father for his own difficulties in life. After the relatively domineering interactions between father and teenage son, his father had killed himself. Some time later, when he was 21, the son told his story to a 17-year old friend, a young woman. Unlike other friends who’d accepted the young man’s story, the young woman pointed out that his father was dead, so that part was over. In response to “He ruined my life!” she said “No, Chris, he ruined his life. You’re ruining yours.” This was the beginning of a transformation for the young man. “Remember,” the authors write, “the principle to apply is, …the problem is me. I am the place to start.”

As you begin to enhance your own capacity for outward mindset, it is essential to measure the impact of your life and work on others, not just your output. It’s also essential to take the initiative, not wait on someone else, or some other group of people, to do so. “Ironically, the most important move in mindset work is to take the move one is waiting for the other to make.” The authors note that many people think that outward mindset will make them soft, when so many situations call for them to be hard. That’s exactly wrong. An inward mindset person (e.g. the friends of that 21-year old man) may be silent when an outward mindset would have moved them to speak frankly as well as empathically (like the young man’s 17-year old friend). In a Kansas City area, the police department began to reverse the rising crime rate simply by providing a more hospitable environment including a washroom for the men loitering in the area.

In a concluding section the authors suggest how to enhance outward mindset for individuals and organizations, an approach reminiscent of James Clear’s points in his book Atomic Habits – easy small steps, even five minutes a day to get started.

This book is useful for our purposes. I would like to have seen more emphasis on the global potential of an outward mindset – on the fact that nations need to adopt the outward mindset in order to move us toward a healthy global community for the future. Our political culture is stuck in the toxic paradigm of nationalism. It has a pathological focus on “defense” against what other nations might do to us, oblivious to the damage we are doing to them. That has to change. This book can help.