This blog is now at www.drdavidfraser.com. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Thanks

Dr DF

In the West of Scotland yesterday was celebrated a life well-lived and an example to us all – Jimmy Reid (1932 – 2010).  To think of the former Clyde shipbuilder as speaking only to a left-wing audience would be to miss the point.

I was nine at the time of Jimmy Reid’s celebrated Rectorial Address at Glasgow University on Friday 28th April, 1972 and so too young to remember the coverage directly.  I had regarded Jimmy Reid since ‘as one of the good guys’ and a decent man, without really knowing the detail.  Only on his passing and the re-publication of the text of his speech, did I realise how universal his message is; how it speaks to all people and all places and all times, including our own.

To say the speech made the front pages would be an understatement: it was printed in full in the New York Times and described there as “the greatest speech since President Lincoln’s Gettysburg address”.  If you’re not familiar with the content, I commend it to you.

The full text of the speech is at http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_167194_en.pdf. 

The most celebrated theme rejects the inevitably of the ‘rat race’…

 “[The problem] is the widespread and implicit acceptance of the concept and term, ‘the rat race’.  … To the students I address this appeal – reject these attitudes – reject the values and false morality that underline these attitudes.  A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement.  It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit.  This is how it starts, and, before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat pack. The price is too high.  Or as Christ puts it:  ‘What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?’”

Jimmy Reid also believed in the great untapped potential of people…

“To measure social progress purely by material advance is not enough.  Our aim must be the enrichment of the whole quality of life.  It requires a social and cultural, or if you wish, a spiritual transformation of our country.

“To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility.  The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people.  I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow human beings.  This is a personal tragedy.  It’s a social crime.  The flowering of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone’s development…

“The whole object [of education] must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession…

“My conclusion is to reaffirm what I hope and certainly intend to be the spirit permeating this address. It’s an affirmation of faith in humanity.  All that is good in man’s heritage involves recognition of our common humanity, an unashamed acknowledgement that man is good by nature.

These extracts barely convey the whole power of the address.

Commentators say that the speech has endured because ‘of the substance, because he put feeling and spirituality at the heart of it, and he meant it’.  Perhaps that’s key to more than the success of a speech.

Tremendous.  A great inspiration.

Do you have this problem?  You find that certain people just talk about themselves all the time.  You’re happy to listen and attend to them a lot, even much more than half the time when you’re together, but there are occasions when you’d like them to pay attention to you.  What should you do?

I’m often asked about this in the talks I give about my book and the ‘system for people’ it describes.  Clients, colleagues, family and friends ask about it too.  The prompt is usually when I say that one of the biggest things I learned was that to get what we want, we need to help other people get what they want first.

There are lots of way to interrupt the pattern.  Two to highlight are:

Just ask for your turn.  You can say something like: ‘It’s been very interesting hearing about your abc.  Now I’d like to tell you about xyz, because I’d like your help / opinion etc.’  Use ‘because’ to give a reason – a powerful word.

Here’s a more subtle method…

Reward the other person for the behaviour you want them to adopt, even if you haven’t seen them do it yet.  Choose your moment and say something like ‘I really like it when you listen so carefully to what I have to say and give me your opinion about it’, even when they’ve never done that.  You’d think they’d just ignore it or be confused, wouldn’t you, but it’s amazing how they start doing the behaviour you want.  They’re hardly going to say ‘Oh no. I haven’t actually done the thing you’re praising me for.’

It’s a great approach for getting all sorts of things to happen.  Show the other person what’s it going to be like when they do the thing you want them to do.  Then they’ll do more of it.

Having said all that, it’s worth pausing to ask ourselves when and where we go on about our own stuff.  If we notice the behaviour in others, chances are good we do it too.

Whatever the final outcome of all the negotiations, some skill in relating well to other people and some care to do this over time has put David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the position where they seem to have the best chance of forming a stable government, whereas those that have taken less care over their relationships are leaving the stage. There are lessons in that for us all.

I was very struck by Nick Robinson saying that David Cameron and Nick Clegg get on better with each other than either gets on with Gordon Brown. I suspect it’s all going to turn on that. Relationships are that significant. If Gordon Brown had taken more care over these things, the outcome might have been different.

650 copies of my book Relationships Made Easy to go to Westminster?

Events of the last week where Gordon Brown’s comments intended to be private were heard in public (to understate things more than a little) would seem to highlight the dangers of using radio microphones.  But they highlight more than that.  Are private comments ever really private?  A radio mic can make them spectacularly public, but even without a radio mic what we say can be passed around with nearly as damaging, if not so instant, effects.  Were we actually surprised by what we heard last week?

We don’t need a blunder with a radio mic for our comments to find their way back to their subject.   In life, it’s remarkably like we do have a radio mic on all the time and everybody hears everything we say.   How come?  Well, for starters, people gossip, even when they say they’ll be discreet.  Secondly, our critical attitude comes across in our non-verbal communication and, when we talk critically of someone in private, we’re programming ourselves to ‘leak’ our true feelings through our body language and our voice when we are face-to-face with the person or with others close to them.

Here’s a challenge, and it is a challenge (I know I don’t live up to it all the time, with consequences I regret):  Act as if everything you say (or write) is heard by everybody.  It’s funny how life is really like that.  The only way to be sure we keep our relationships good is to assume anything we say will find its way back to the subject of our comments.  Sure, it’s a relief sometimes to sound off about someone ‘in private’, but it can be expensive in the long run, when our comments spread through the ether.

I’m setting out to remember my virtual ‘radio mic’ is on.  Will you remember about yours?

Professor Phil Hanlon, expert in public health at Glasgow University, quoted in an article by Helen Puttick in The Herald newspaper (22 March 2010), says that the ‘best shot’ at an explanation for the chronic ill-health in the Glasgow is ‘a series of factors to do with the social, cultural, political history of the city which manifests itself in chronic stress, relationship issues, attitudinal issues and behavioural issues. These biological, relational, en-vironmental and cultural things are combining in a particularly toxic way for Glasgow.’  Comparisons with other cities (particularly Liverpool and Manchester) unexpectedly showed that levels of deprivation did not alone account for the poor health stats in Glasgow.

Interesting that ‘relationship issues’ are seen by Professor Hanlon as potentially part of the explanation.  We might conclude that working on our skilfulness in relationships could contribute to improving health, in Glasgow, at least.  This might ring true with on-the-ground experience of a city in which talking about something bad that’s happened, like an accident, is commonly employed as a means of establishing common ground with other people.  Focusing on the good things instead might help more than our state of mind.

To read the Herald article go to http://bit.ly/dhT1IN.

Fascinated to catch this week’s castaway, writer Frank Cottrell Boyce on BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs say that filmmaker Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting) was one of those people who, when he said to do something, you did it, because if Danny said do it, you believed you could do it – what a great gift to give another person, and what a fantastic power to cultivate.

Evidently, Frank was spotting an ability in others he possessed himself, judging by what he had to say about the work he’s done and his family.

An opportunity for us all perhaps – help each other bat away our limiting beliefs.

Well here we are starting up this blog which is going to cover my take on, well, the things I reckon I have something useful to say about.  Who knows exactly what that’s going to come to mean, but, for now, I expect to be blogging on the subject of my book – the skills we use to get on with the people we need to get on with, subjects to do with current affairs when I think I have an angle, and really anything else that’s seems worthwhile and useful. 

There might be some stuff about my areas of business which are project management, business performance, engineering, facilitation and entrepreneurship (which I usually sum up as ‘helping people get difficult stuff done’).

I expect also to have something to say about issues for families, including special needs and, in particular, autism.

That’ll do for an introduction.

For more information on me go to www.drdavidfraser.com.

For more on my business go to www.davidfraser.com.

For information supporting my book go to www.relationshipsmadeeasy.info.

See you on the next one.