It's Not About the Coffee: Lessons on Putting People First from a Life at Starbucks by Behar Howard & Goldstein Janet

Author:Behar, Howard & Goldstein, Janet [Behar, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Portfolio Trade
Published: 2007-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

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To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

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Compassionate emptiness involves listening with compassion but without preconceived notions. Compassionate emptiness asks us to be caring but empty of opinions and advice. As the Western Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein explains it, “Compassion and emptiness are not two different things. Compassion is not a stance, but is the simple responsiveness to circumstances from a place of selflessness. The emptier we are of self, the more responsive we are.”

Just think of compassionate emptiness in terms of husbands and wives or parents and children. A friend of mine told me about Deborah Tannen’s work in this area. She’s a psychologist and expert on communication who applied her thinking to mother-daughter relationships in her book You’re Wearing That?

What she discovered is that mothers express their concern and love for their daughters by trying to improve and “help” them. Mothers seem to have a near-universal drive to correct and comment on their daughters’ looks and clothes, analyzing how the daughter is taking care of herself and presenting herself to the world. In this modern form of mother love, only a mother cares enough to improve you. So why does it hurt or make daughters angry? Well, this mother communication may be compassionate, at least from one point of view, but it’s not empty. And from my experience, fathers do exactly the same thing.

Compassionate emptiness levels the field. We recognize that no one is special. No one has all the answers. No one person is the leader. We are all equally thirsty.

Think about what happens when somebody comes into your office with a problem—whether work or personal. The tendency is to want to solve it. But most of the time, people aren’t asking for help, they’re asking to be heard. And most of the time, you shouldn’t be solving the problem anyway. There’s a way to help people move through their concerns without owning them yourself. That’s compassionate emptiness. It’s full of compassion but empty of solutions. It’s very difficult to do.

Yet if you are able to grasp and harness lessons of compassionate emptiness, they will be your guide to listening and communicating in a new and profound way.

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