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COMPASSIONATE COMMUNICATION

AND CORPORATE MINDFULNESS

When interacting with colleagues or distant acquaintances, you can privately use the steps we have outlined above to bring Compassionate Communication into every conversation you have. The other person doesn't even need to know that you are “practicing,” for as we have outlined in previous chapters, human brains are designed to resonate to the cognitive and emotional states of each other.

The next time you are called on to participate in a business conference, try the following experiment. Before the meeting, take five minutes to deeply relax, and then use your imagination to fantasize your “ideal” interaction. Visualize the smiling face of each person with whom you will interact (even if he or she is grump) and spend a minute holding a compassionate thought. Then go into your meeting. Greet everyone with a smile, and then—quietly, to yourself—take a slow breath and deeply relax your arms, legs, and face. When you speak, talk slowly and briefly, and allow the other person to respond. But keep coming back to an awareness of your own state of relaxation. I'm willing to bet that after a couple of times, the people you talk with will begin to respond with greater empathy.

ACCEPTANCE

Awareness-based meditations like Compassionate Communication do something different from other forms of therapeutic interventions. They teach you how to accept your underlying faults. The therapeutic importance of acceptance was not recognized until recently, because most people, when addressing a problem, expect to make a change. We go to a doctor because we want to eliminate a symptom, and we consult a counselor to improve the quality of our life. For most people, acceptance is rarely a goal. Change is the goal, along with achievement and success. Acceptance, in fact, is often equated with failure—failure to succeed, failure to improve, and failure to transcend one's old self.

But acceptance is not the same as failure. As we are using it here, it implies an overall trust that things are “good enough.” It also implies tolerance and the ability to respond nonjudgmentally to others or toward ourselves. Thus, when we face a problem, the first step, before changing it, is to watch it. We simply allow the problem to exist for the moment, and in that moment we become more aware of what the problem is. We observe it, we notice it, and we tolerate it as we remain in a calm state of relaxation. Acceptance and mindfulness clearly go hand in hand.

Acceptance is particularly important when dealing with serious emotional problems, and in this sense, acceptance simply means that we lower our expectations. If we don't, perfectionism will take its toll by increasing our sense of failure. If you want to quit smoking but only succeed in reducing a three-pack-a-day habit to one pack, you've made a significant improvement. And improvement is good enough for the brain.

The same is true for love. If our expectations are too high, we'll always end up disappointed. And disappointment will undermine our capacity to think clearly, communicate effectively, and stay emotionally grounded and relaxed.

The solution is found by creating a balance between acceptance and change. This was a big discovery in psychotherapy, and it turns out that acceptance-based therapies provide an excellent solution for dealing with emotional problems.22 By simply observing destructive thoughts and feelings, people feel less anxious about what they feel they can't control, and this actually allows them to have more control over their lives.

When meditation was incorporated into psychotherapy, the results were so successful that they generated a whole new category of treatments, including mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and dialectical behavioral therapy.23 They have been used to treat depression, anxiety, anger, grief, and a variety of stress-related disorders.24 Mindfulness has even been