Psychologist and New York Times best-selling author Rick Hanson joins Marc for a thought-provoking conversation about fostering radically healthy relationships as leaders. Whether it’s in the workplace or in our personal lives, developing relationships that balance well-being, compassion, and accountability can be a challenge. Marc and Rick share insights on acceptance and discernment, and discuss the significance of being transparent about wants, needs, and expectations. They look at the efficacy and limitations of the famous statement by Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, “the best way to control your sheep or cow (a metaphor for oneself and others) is to give them a wide pasture” and share practical ways to improve your relationships, both inside and outside of work.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and New York Times best-selling author. His seven books have been published in 31 languages and include Making Great Relationships, Neurodharma, Resilient, Hardwiring Happiness, Just One Thing, Buddha’s Brain, and Mother Nurture – with over a million copies in English alone. He’s the founder of the Global Compassion Coalition and the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, as well as the co-host of the Being Well podcast – which has been downloaded over 10 million times. His free newsletters have 250,000 subscribers, and his online programs have scholarships available for those with financial needs. He’s lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard. An expert on positive neuroplasticity, his work has been featured on CBS, NPR, the BBC, and other major media. He began meditating in 1974 and has taught in meditation centers worldwide. He and his wife live in northern California and have two adult children. He loves the wilderness and taking a break from emails.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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[00:00:02] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever shifting, and now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership.

My guest today is my good friend and colleague Rick Hanson, PhD. Rick is a psychologist and a senior fellow at the Greater Good Center at UC Berkeley. He’s also a New York Times bestselling author who’s written Buddha’s Brain and more recently, a book that’s quite wonderful called Making Great Relationships.

Today’s conversation is about how to have radically healthy relationships at work, in leadership, and outside of work. We talk about the challenge of fostering relationships that are both high in well-being and compassion, as well as in performance, meeting expectations, and accountability. We talk about acceptance and discernment and the importance of being clear about wants, needs, and expectations. We discuss the workability as well as the limitations of the statement by Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, who says, “The best way to control your sheep or cow is to give it a wide pasture.” I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

I am very pleased, thrilled, actually, to be welcoming my friend and colleague Rick Hanson, and Rick, I’ve got your book right here Making Great Relationships. I also have my new book here, Finding Clarity, but I don’t know, we might talk a little bit about that, but we have so much to talk about. We were just– Welcome.

[00:01:56] Rick Hanson: Oh, it’s great to be here, Marc. You’re my dear friend. As people know, I respect you immensely and I’m looking forward to a good, vigorous meeting of the minds.

[00:02:07] Marc: [laughs] Vigorous. Vigor is a great word. I was saying that I’ve been reading, I don’t know how many times I’ve read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, countless times and I’m surprised how fresh it seems every time I read it. I’ve been delving into his words about control, this idea of control in which he famously says, “The best way to control your sheep or cow is to give it a wide pasture.”

I think that this is so pertinent to the work that we’re both doing, the work that I’ve been doing in my world of compassionate accountability and your work in making of great relationships. As I was thinking about this conversation, I thought, I want it to be about, how do you create radically healthy relationships?

[00:03:04] Rick: Yes, what a great question.

[00:03:06] Marc: What comes top of mind to you when I ask you that question?

[00:03:10] Rick: Well, as a bit of background, before we started, there was some back and forth, and so you already went way into the deep end of the pool, and so I’m going to join you there and set it up. I think there is maybe, I would say, three levels to it.

At the deepest level that you’re very familiar with, Marc, and you teach and experience, there’s simply ongoing beingness at one with the ground of all in the present, always, to the extent we can go there. You read a passage from Suzuki Roshi that really spoke to that resting in that continual meeting of unconditioned and conditioned, not yet and now, absence and presence in Taoism and Chan and early Zen.

To the extent that people can rest there, to the extent that there can be that sense of spacious awareness infused with a benevolence there, continuously letting go, that’s great. That’s really foundational, and I’m still working on it. One level up is basic well-being and basic goodwill, the combination of the two.

That’s a practice, especially if a person is starting with, as I did, a lack of well-being and mixed motivations with other people, including resentments of different kinds or grievances of different kinds. You cultivate a quality of a certain resting in the combination of the intersection of strength and heart.

You’re resting in a certain calm and all rightness in your body and a sense of healthy entitlement, you matter. While also seeing the best in others, having a fundamental radiation rippling outward of compassion and kindness that’s increasingly unconditional. People move through it. It’s not about them. It’s your orientation to life.

Then on top of that, you negotiate. You negotiate and to be deliberately provocative here, you meet performance expectations, and then you find ways to get people to meet yours, not in the sense of weirdness, but in the sense of exchanges of value and giving people what they want and asking for and getting what you want yourself. Those three levels. I hope that’s okay. That parfait there.

[00:05:30] Marc: Two things that it makes me think of one is a woman colleague recently, in a very heartfelt way said, “How do you want to be? Who do you want to be as a human being? How do you want to show up as a human being?” Then the third piece that you named in some way, I think you were mostly talking about the realm of– in the realm of relationships, like with our families, our partners, but where it really, I think, gets interesting is in the realm of leadership and where we have these particular– then we’re we move into the realm of performance and expectation.

Those performance and expectations are both in the realm of emotional intelligence and well-being. Well-being is important. Emotions, communication, all that, but there’s this other piece in the workplace about results and certain performance, evaluating and aligning around, what does success look like? I just got off a call today in which the CEO of a company was telling me about a difficult conversation he had with someone who reports to him, and then my next call was with that person.

It was staggering the gap in what the CEO thought they had communicated about the lack of performance, and this particular person said, “Everything’s fine. No, we’re totally aligned.” I’m like, “Are you sure?” It gets really interesting in this realm of alignment around what you were just talking about, performance and results, whether it’s in leadership or in all our relationships. Yes, I did mow the lawn, I did wash the dishes. Then you go and you see, “Wait a minute. You only mowed half the lawn, you only washed half the dishes.”

[00:07:28] Rick: Yes, to make bring it in the real– My book, it’s really about these 50 fundamental skills for all relationships, and you apply them depending on the relationship, whether it’s at work, whether it’s with your partner, your kids, your parents, your neighbor, your in laws, the cranky guy at the end of the bar rattling on about COVID or something, whatever.

How do we move through life, given the fact that most of our joys and sorrows come in relationships? How do we be skillful there? How do we be effective and [unintelligible 00:08:00] benevolent, moral there too, while also getting our own needs met. It’s really interesting. For example, I think that, what do we want from people? What do you want, Marc, from people?

I can answer that a little bit in terms of giving and getting, we give and we get from other people, and I think there’s a certain reluctance sometimes to just name that simple fact, we give and we get. Other than the profound duty of a parent to a child or maybe in other situations, there’s a reciprocity of various kinds in that flow that needs to be good for both.

Fundamentally, what I want to receive, I would describe it as a fundamental dowing of me.

If you think of the structure of Martin Buber I and thou, there can be I and thou, I and it or it and it. We don’t want to be it by others. We want to feel that they see us for who we are. They see the goodness in us, they see the being behind our eyes. They bring respect in a fundamental stance of non-harming and good wishes. You bring that to me. I try to bring it to you.

We also often want quite specific things that are fairly concrete. We want people to show up on time. You want me to come into this recording with appropriate earbuds and a decent mic, normal, no big deal. In a long marriage, I celebrated my 41st anniversary yesterday with my wife, wedding anniversary, and we want stuff from each other and it goes well when basically we give them most of what they want and they give us most of what we want, and so let’s just be explicit about that, and most conflicts are about some breakdown in that flow of wanting.

Now, you summarize that as alignment, which for me is more about agreement about the vision, which is great, and then there’s the actual delivery, both of them together. For me, it boils down to these two fundamental things, in a frame of giving and getting. Giving and getting a certain humanizing, a certain humanity, a certain– call it a wholeheartedness, a large-heartedness, receiving and giving.

Then, frankly, [laughs], they’re not delivering the goods really, and a lot of problems are solved. I’ve been a couple’s counselor in various ways for over 30 years, and a lot of problems are solved to quote two chapter titles in my book, Admit Fault and Move On. The other one is Give them what they want and the third title is Clean Up Your Own Side of the Street, which all sets you up for tough conversations when you’ve got to ask them for certain things.

[00:10:44] Marc: I love that we’re both thinking about unpacking, writing about very similar things. There’s a section in Finding Clarity called the four most important words. How are we doing?

[00:10:55] Rick: Beautiful.

[00:10:56] Marc: It’s interesting, I have to say, even in my own marriage, or even in my own business where I’m managing people, how difficult it can be to just to ask those, how are we doing? That it means being vulnerable in a way and being able to ask it– It means that there needs to be a certain amount of trust and connection even to really ask, to open up with that question.

I think especially in a marriage and especially in a working relationship where it’s someone who’s doing a– where you’re working together in a significant way where the stakes are high. Especially when you know that you’re struggling with something or you can see that this other person is struggling with something that, yes, there’s some gap in giving or receiving, and to be able to skillfully talk about that stuff.

[00:11:58] Rick: Oh, really. Right. It’s really funny, I find so often that we could actually, usually on our side of the street, give a little more of either or both of those two things I named. A little more warm heartedness, lovingness, supportiveness, just seeing the being and also a little more responsiveness to what they want from us. That would tend to make things better.

I’ve also, frankly, recently been in a situation where I’ve been working my way through the fact that I’m going to use a model that I’ve been really thinking about recently, bear with me up quick. If you think about a family or you think about friendship or especially you think about an organization, an organization that’s about accomplishing certain things. You could have high accomplishing, low accomplishing, and you could have high well-being, low well-being.

Think about the intersection of those, the fourth quadrant in which there’s a combination of high accomplishing and high well-being. That’s the sweet spot. Very often, the accomplishing promotes the well-being of the team that’s working to accomplish things together. If high accomplishing is at odds with a person’s well-being in a particular role, they should not be in that role for their sake and for the sake of the organization.

Sometimes as a leader, which is the case for me in a certain situation that I’m in now, you’re in a position where fundamentally, there are performance expectations around accomplishing in certain roles. Sometimes people inevitably, who are actually not accomplishing highly, run into the performance expectations of their supervisor, their board, their boss, who’s giving them feedback about not accomplishing highly, which can be challenging for that person.

Then sometimes they shoot the messenger, sometimes they shoot the boss who actually has reasonable high accomplishment expectations and is communicating feedback in a civil way, but they don’t like it. Suddenly, now, you’re shooting the messenger. “I didn’t like how you said that to me,” or, “There’s too much pressure here.” The truth is, on the ground, you’re actually not accomplishing.

I find that in family situations, my marriage, we had to deal with situations where the truth is I was not accomplishing certain things including relationship tasks. I was making the money, I was taking care of the kids, I was doing dishes, I was pulling my weight. I was not Fred Flintstone, but I was not delivering the goods on relationship tasks. I wasn’t accomplishing and my wife had to tell me. I’ll pause right there. What do you think about this whole chunk?

[00:14:47] Marc: Oh, no, I love the– again, it’s this very similar to the model that I’ve been just using slightly different language. I’ve been using the language of compassion for well-being and accountability for results. Where it gets particularly interesting, I think of some lawyers that I was counseling in which there was an attorney who was a rainmaker, brought in a huge amount of money for this firm.

He was highly accomplished, productive, but yelled at people and was– his emotional intelligence, his well-being, his compassion was really lacking. This was a big problem. Then the other box that I find actually more common is where very fine well-being, compassionate people who are just not producing, who are just not. Those maybe are the hardest ones. Actually, the first case, it’s like, “Man, you need to have a difficult conversation. This person needs to change their behavior or they need to go.”

[00:15:58] Rick: That’s correct.

[00:15:58] Marc: It’s pretty clear that one. The other one’s I find tends to be harder because we really need to be clear about the expectations about what delivering the goods means using your language or what performance means. To be able to say, “You’re perfectly fine human being, I like you, I love you, I care about you. However, we have a problem and we need to talk about this problem very specifically within the context of this isn’t personal about you, this is about your performance.”

[00:16:31] Rick: It makes me think immediately, Marc, of the difference between managing an organization and being a spouse [laughs] or just simply–

[00:16:40] Marc: They’re different.

[00:16:41] Rick: Yes. Being in a long-term relationship of one kind or another, romantic and or friendship. Friendship as well. If your role is that you are accountable, so you also– let’s say you’re a leader, you’re the manager of a department, you have a team, you’re team lead or you’re the CO of an organization, you’re the executive director of a nonprofit, whatever that happens to be in that context, you are expected to achieve highly in your role.

Just think about it, first of all, to normalize it, if we have a plumber, let’s say there’s a broken pipe in our home. We want to have a plumber who achieves highly with regard to that pipe. If we go into a restaurant, we want to have a restaurant that achieves highly when it comes to putting the tofu burger on the table, it’s normal. You get on an airplane, [laughs] you want a pilot who achieves highly. It’s interesting.

In other words, achieving highly is what we seek elsewhere. Sometimes there’s this weird double standard that, wait a second, I thought we were all supposed to be compassionate and have a well-being economy, which I’m all for as if that’s at odds with, hey, normal expectations of high achievement. If you’re a leader, you too are expected to achieve highly, which often means mobilizing your team to achieve highly.

Which means then it’s your duty to find people who can achieve highly and to manage people so that they do achieve highly. That’s the water you’re in. If you don’t want to be in that water, you shouldn’t be in that ocean, that pool. People need to understand that’s your role. It’s not personal. It’s part of your function.

In that context, yes, if you’ve got someone who’s a total sweetheart, I know people like this. There’s the old line, I think it’s from In Search of Excellence, “You want to get the right people on the bus and in the right seats.” There’s a wonderful person who’s just in the wrong seat because they’re okay in that seat, but they’re not really achieving highly in that seat. What do you do? It gets complicated. Sometimes what you do, I’ve done it in some organizations I’ve been in, you just gradually reduce the size of their seat to what they can really achieve highly in. Then you keep them on the bus.

Sometimes you move them to another seat, sometimes you just find a way to let them go on the bus so they can be in a situation where they can achieve highly. Because if they’re not achieving highly and it’s clear that they’re not, that’s not good for their well-being long-term. You respond then maybe we’ll talk about friendships and family.

[00:19:17] Marc: It’s interesting–

[00:19:18] Rick: Which is a very different framework.

[00:19:19] Marc: By the way, that line about the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus is from Good to Great by Jim Collins.

[00:19:25] Rick: Yes, that’s right. Good to Great. Not In Search of Excellence. Good to Great.

[00:19:29] Marc: In Search of Excellence is also an excellent book. On the two ends of this spectrum that you are talking about in terms of leadership and right people on the bus, on the one hand is the Netflix philosophy. Netflix, if you go on their website, they actually have a great– they have their philosophy about hiring, motivating, grooming people.

One of the things that they say in there, which I’ve always appreciated in a certain way, if someone were to say to you that they’re going to leave, would you fight for this person to stay? If you wouldn’t, why is that person on your team?

[00:20:11] Rick: That’s really hardcore.

[00:20:13] Marc: That’s hardcore, but the other end–

[00:20:15] Rick: I don’t mean hardcore like cruel, mean, Navy seals training hardcore. I just mean, wow, that’s very fundamental. Very penetrating.

[00:20:23] Marc: It definitely leans on the accountability side and it makes me a little nervous. I get a little bit like, what about the compassionate piece? On the other end of the spectrum, something that Simon Sinek has written about in some of his writing is that, once you hire a person, they’re yours for life. I don’t agree with this philosophy.

Oh, it tickles my compassionate part. Oh, yes. You’ve hired this person, you’re committed, you have to somehow find a role, I don’t agree with that. I actually think somewhere in the middle of these two. I’m more over on the, boy, if the person would leave side, I’m not fighting for them, it tells me that I’m not as aligned enough. I haven’t clearly stated what I’m wanting, what I’m expecting. We haven’t gotten to this clear sense of accountability and alignment. There’s work to do there.

[00:21:18] Rick: This is very deep and it also runs right into current major cutting edge, 21st century, human tribe policy decisions, but how do we live sustainably, and harmoniously, and well in the single planet, 8 billion of us and growing share together. What strikes me about this sometimes, Marc, is that there’s a out of realityness, frankly, for example, what Simon Sinek said, that doesn’t square with our direct personal experience.

I speak as someone who has a profound personal commitment to compassion, and kindness, and justice in my personal dealings at all levels. I’ve helped to found these are the Global Compassion Coalition, which are also a distinguished founding supporter that’s really about systemic change, and reestablishing the foundations of compassion and justice that were the basis for hunter-gatherer life for 97% of the time that human beings have walked this earth. That’s contextual for me.

Inside that, let’s look at it. You’re thinking about going to a restaurant, do you want to go to a restaurant in which the server who’s dealing with you is not accomplishing highly in the reasonable standards that are appropriate to that server? In other words, they’re attentive, they don’t spill the soup on your lap. They’re willing to interact with you. If for some reason the soup was cold when it came out of the kitchen, they’re friendly, they’re not mean.

That’s what we want. We have a dentist office, we want a dentist office and a hygienist, and the dentist themselves who are all accomplishing highly in the terms there of what their roles are. We would seek that in them, so then it’s ridiculous to think somehow that a different standard should apply to us in which we would be keeping someone in our own enterprise, whatever it might be, who would not be the person that we would want to encounter if we were going into that enterprise ourselves as a customer or client, a patient and so on.

Makes no sense. Now, that said, I think we ought to have a universal basic income worldwide. I think we need massive redistribution and reparations, including for the theft of trillions, best estimates trillions of dollars of property, and labor, and good stolen from people who’ve been enslaved over centuries.

Also, the people in the countries that were subject to colonial rule, mainly in the southern hemisphere extracted in– wealth extracted into the north. I’m, bam, all for that. I’m just trying to be real here. [laughs] I’ll pause there and then maybe we’ll get into family and friends.

[00:24:10] Marc: I appreciate what you were just saying about on a societal level, on how we take care of each other level. There’s the profound need for greater sense of whether it’s guaranteed income, reparations, that there’s a need for baseline compassion around humanity, and how different that is than– it’s funny that, it’s the contrast about I want a plumber who’s highly skilled and I want to you use, whether it’s surgeon, airline, pilot, waiter, all of those, and the people who work within our organizations, that there needs to be a clear, and compassionate way of expressing discernment, of expressing the gaps between what the job is. Again, where it really gets the descriptions that I was naming of, the people on our team who might be quite good, they’re a good plumber, but they’re terrible at communicating, or they come late, or they various more of the emotional skills. It’s super interesting territory.

[00:25:20] Rick: If I could add one little thing, I’m just realizing, speaking of people who are leading in different ways, teams are scaling up to whole organizations. There are ways in which, and I think again, we need an economy in America that is wildly divergent from every other developed democracy in the world. Every other one. Tanging from Canada to Japan, Finland, Norway, Australia, they all have things like paid parental leave, living minimum wage, a genuine social safety net, all kinds of things like that.

They are much more regulating of growing inequalities of wealth. They’re much more that way. That then enables people to function in their jobs without feeling freaked out that they can’t pay their bills. That’s all true. Second, inside organizations, there are systems that can help people to achieve highly, to accomplish highly. It’s a weird one to realize, and obviously there are implications around this, but if you think about the military like the US military, I don’t know how many people are in uniform, maybe a million plus. Think of the wide range of people who are functioning in an extremely high accomplishing system.

Now, the ends to which those accomplishments are aimed, or morally fraud, I’m a Buddhist, don’t kill, don’t harm, sometimes as Suzuki Roshi himself said, “I believe sometimes the way that to be truly virtuous is to violate all the precepts under certain conditions.” Anyway, I just think there’s a lot we can do as leaders to put people into situations they can succeed at, and create systems around people, causes and conditions that bring out the best in them and shore up some of their weak suits so that [unintelligible 00:27:18], the accomplishing highly is still coming from them, and they can feel really good about what they do.

[00:27:25] Marc: I think you’re getting a little bit into the why, Simon Sinek says, what he does is, I think he’s saying, “We need training systems. We need to create systems where it’s up to us as leaders to create systems and environments where people can succeed.” I appreciate that. Oh, yes, that makes a lot of sense. Saying that I can never let go of someone that maybe, again, it’s the other end of the bookend of the Netflix, why would you keep someone? It’s interesting territory.

[00:28:03] Rick: Totally true. Families now and friends, this is where it’s really different which is interesting, because instead of there being a fundamentally hierarchical relationship in an organization in which there’s a leader who’s accountable themselves for accomplishing highly and all the rest of that in a poker club where you just come together on a Friday night, bridge club, fishing group, political action group, you’re writing letters together is really different. It’s a completely different thing and then friends and family.

Often what happens over time, which is, relates to several of the chapters in the book, you end up resizing the relationship. You start to realize, oh, in terms of accomplishing or performance expectations or giving and getting, you realize that person, including someone I may be married to for 41 years, is never going to give me that. They just don’t do that. It’s like expecting, I don’t know what, a deer to swim or something. Maybe deer can swim. I don’t know. Or a cat to swim. A cat’s never going to want to swim.

What you do is you decide what to do about that. Sometimes what you do is you just say, “Oh, it’s a deal breaker. After you try to– again, multiple chapters in my book is about trying to talk about it, reading a foundation, which you can talk about it, trying to make agreements with each other, but let’s suppose you’ve done all that, and you start to get, I’m just never going to get that from you. If that is an employee of yours in your company, you can’t just resize the relationship and say, “Oh, okay, we’ll just let go of you doing an important 20% of your job. No worries.”

That’s problematic. Again, if you think about how you’d feel yourself if you walked into a restaurant, or a plumbing contractor’s office who had staff who just didn’t have to do the important 20% of their job, you wouldn’t want to use them next time. You wouldn’t want to go to that restaurant next time, so it’s real.

Back to family, friends, and more horizontal situations. A lot of times, what you end up with, is you just go, “I give up.” Not like, “I give up, screw you,” but just, “All right, I’m going to let that one go and I’m not going to ask for– I’m just not going to expect it. I’m going to love you dearly, meanwhile. I’m not going to get on your case anymore. It’s been a real bone of contention between us. I’m just not going to do that.”

Often you maintain harmony, especially in a friendship or with a neighbor. You realize, “I’m just never going to build a fence in which I expect you to pay off it because you won’t. We could joke about football. You’re a cool person and I’m at peace with you.” Resizing relationships is really useful in certain situations. What do you think about all that?

[00:30:54] Marc: Yes, I think it requires a good amount of self-awareness. It’s getting into the territory that we were talking about before we started recording, which is the topic of control. Again, Suzuki Roshi, “The best way to control your sheep or cow is to give it a wide pasture.” I think what you were just naming was a very particular and skillful example of giving your partner a wide pasture by not sticking to insisting that they do some– It’s a form of control, expecting that they’re going to do something that you want, that they’re not going to do and this desire to control them.

Instead, again, you did say, it’s different. If it’s a deal-breaker, it could be something that– no, this is something I profoundly want or need in my life and we’ve got a bigger problem here that we have to deal with or, “Oh, I can let this go. I can love this person without this particular piece.”

[00:32:00] Rick: I revere Suzuki Roshi and you served me immensely in multiple ways, including recommending his book, Not Always So. Just fantastic. On the other hand, I’m very dubious about the overapplying, overextending the metaphor of giving the sheep a big pasture. Because what do you expect from the sheep? What do you expect from them? What’s the accomplishing expectation, is that they eat their grass and they don’t wander off, okay, great.

On the other hand, I also think about influence. The truth is, you’re right, we have extremely limited control. There’s a fair amount we can do to influence others and there’s a lot we can do to influence ourselves. I think about the 80, 20 rule where loosely where you put 20% of your attention on how they could improve and clean up their act and you focus 80% of your attention on yourself, what you can do.

That said, it’s also true that we want things from other people. We don’t want much from the sheep. They don’t have to bring the dinner to our table in a timely way, hot, in the restaurant. I’m thinking of being with a good friend of mine, actually, who’s my rock climbing guide. I get to hang out with him occasionally and put a plug-in for him. His name is Roddy McCalley. He’s incredible. You can find him on the internet. I’ll leave her right there. Take you outdoors and keep you alive. Help you do whatever you want to do.

Anyway, man, we’re together. We’re roped in on a cliff. We’re a thousand feet off the deck. We have performance expectations of each other and we need to influence each other. He needs to influence me, as he did recently to speed up, Rick, or we are going to get rained on and lightning and fried.

I have also need to communicate with him, “Hey, your expectations for me in rate of climbing are just unrealistic, because I’m turning 70 soon and I can only go so fast at 10,000 feet.” We got to communicate. Anyway, I think there’s a place for communicating around, and where people run into trouble is they often suck at exercising influence.

They either come in guns blazing. I can go there, especially, I have a long fuse, but when we get to the end, I can get the condom exasperated. I got to watch that. That’s my deal. That’s on me. Or they’re inert, they’re passive. They may fuss a little bit about it. They sputter, but they’re not effective.

There’s an intermediate place where we are effective and appropriate and kind in how we exercise influence. To imagine that we can stay out of a frame of exercising influence in many important relationships, I think is naïve and ludicrous. I think there are certain relationships that transcend the mutual exercise of influence, but most don’t.

[00:34:55] Marc: Yes. I’m chewing on– the words of Suzuki Roshi I think are meant to help us reset or almost like hit our inner reset button, to start with a blank slate so that we’re not biased and responding, reacting, and enabling us to have a clear and clean heart and state of mind.

There’s another side that he’s not expressing in that particular statement is that, of course, we have to influence, be influenced, make decisions direct–in a relationship. It’s not just about– again, it’s a little bit like that the Simon Sinek, oh, once you hire, you have to keep this person on, like, no.

There needs to be a sense of influence, discernment, difficult conversations, whether it’s with your employee or your spouse about some gaps. There’s some gaps here that we need to talk about. There’s gaps here in that I’m struggling with these. Let’s talk about this with compassion and accountability.

[00:36:13] Rick: Yes. Well, that’s your sweet spot and you’re great at it. Everybody needs to read your book. Anyway, that said, shoot me here, I’ve come up through in Buddhism more of the [unintelligible 00:36:25] early Buddhism style. That said, the little I know, wow, of all the Buddhist traditions, Zen looks like the one with the highest performance expectations in terms of certain behavioral strict standards that are really quite something.

I find that kind of a crackup that let him wander around. I don’t think Suzuki Roshi would’ve been very comfortable with people rolling into the zendo for one of his talks, or a [unintelligible 00:36:56] or something wandering around milling like sheep, big pasture, bumping into the walls. That would’ve not flown. Let’s be clear there.

[00:37:04] Marc: Yes, you’re entering the territory and this beautiful paradox of Zen, which is around the emphasis on forms with the motivation–

[00:37:16] Rick: Of freedom.

[00:37:16] Marc: Yes. In precise forms for a flexible mind.

[00:37:21] Rick: Yes, exactly right. I get that, but I want to rant briefly if I could. Which is, how can I put it? Lately, I’ve been just thinking about the double standard I think in the minds of many people in which they want to, I’ll use this word, consume. They want to receive the benefits of others who are achieving highly at a restaurant as a lover, as a co-parent, a friend, as a colleague at work. While on the other hand, often being very uncomfortable with expectations that they achieve highly themselves or they accomplish highly themselves in a particular way.

I wonder in part if that’s generational, and I don’t want to sound like a cranky old guy, but when I think about my dad grew up in a ranch in North Dakota in 1918, there was just an ethic in that culture that you rolled in and you did a full day’s work. You earned your way. There was just that expectation. They weren’t mean about it. It was just normative but I find people today sometimes who are shocked that they’re in a framework in which there’s a focus on accomplishing highly in their particular role as if that’s somehow an affront or an expression of patriarchy or lacking in compassion or bullying.

It’s weird. It’s really weird. There’s the socialization that almost has to happen that curt of explains to people that just like you want to receive the benefits of others who are accomplishing highly in this role and you don’t have to be in this role if you don’t want to be, but in this role, there’s an expectation of you accomplishing highly yourself.

[00:39:06] Marc: Rick, this is one of the things that I really appreciate about my Zen training in that, a lot of it was having to do what seemed like impossibly difficult things, again and again. This I think you were alluding earlier to the military. The military trains people that there are clear– there’s clear rules and expectations. I recently did a retreat for a group of wildland firefighters.

[00:39:33] Rick: Ah. Great example. Talk about it.

[00:39:36] Marc: I’ve noticed, I’ve military people. It’s not unusual that I have Marines at my dinner table and now I have firefighters at my dinner table. The nice thing is that they would never not clean up. They won’t leave my house without making sure that– whereas I have other groups, I won’t name, other groups–

[00:39:59] Rick: Some of whom we know.

[00:40:00] Marc: Some of whom we know and I’m surprised. I’m hosting an event and they just leave and I’m left. Man, there’s a different-

[00:40:11] Rick: It’s so interesting.

[00:40:12] Marc: -mindset of and I think– [crosstalk]

[00:40:15] Rick: Well, next time I come to your house, I’m never going to leave a dirty dish. I’m going to–

[00:40:19] Marc: No, don’t. Unless, of course, it’s different. It’s very different to say, “Oh, can I help?” Like, “No, I’ve got this.” Than just you’re gone. It’s interesting. You’re pointing to, which is general, I think shows initiative, work ethic, expectations, willing to do difficult things. Is there anything you’d like to offer or do or say before we wrap today?

[00:40:46] Rick: As always, Marc, just at a friend level, it’s great talking with you and I think we covered a lot of great ground. I guess, I would just want to underline a point that I made, but I think I can underline it more, which is alongside my own really quite recent clarifications and reflections about this intersection of high accomplishing and high well-being and all that, that as we conduct ourselves personally, unilaterally, we’re called to unilateral virtue.

We’re called to, as Ajahn Chah, in my tradition, said, to tend to the causes while letting go of the results. Finding a way to be at peace with the results. It doesn’t mean we’re not anguished by sometimes the results. Let’s suppose you’re grappling with a difficult illness, or you’ve got a friend, you do what you can and you care about what happens. Ultimately, can you be at peace with it while doing your part with a whole heart? For me, I just want to emphasize that bit.

[00:41:56] Marc: Yes. Well, may you and everyone around you be at peace, radical well-being, and great accomplishment, highly accomplished as well.

[00:42:06] Rick: As in different ways. Yes. Thank you very much, Marc.

[00:42:11] Marc: Thank you very much, Rick. Really appreciate it.

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