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It is accurately said that it is easy to be an angel when nobody ruffles your feathers. But it seems that feather rufflers will always be around. We're told that 19th Century German statesman Prince Otto von Bismarck once became so incensed at the criticism of a professor (he must have ruffled the prince's feathers), that he challenged him to a duel. Protocol had it that the one challenged was to have the choice of weapons. The professor made his choice...sausages! He sent word to Bismarck, along with a pair of sausages, that one sausage was safe to eat. The other had been poisoned with trichinae, which would cause a slow and lingering death, or at least long invalidism. He informed the prince that he should choose which sausage to eat and said he would eat the other one. Bismarck reasoned that a man might die with some sort of honour on a duelling field, but never by food poisoning. He sent the message back, "His highness has destroyed the sausages and asks that you be his guest at dinner this evening. After due consideration he feels he may have been slightly in error. He believes an agreement can be reached." One of the most important trips a person ever takes is "to meet someone halfway." Bismarck met his adversary halfway and chose to bring something useful from his conflict. When others ruffle our feathers, we always have a choice. We can meet them on the duelling field, where one will clearly win and the other will lose, or we can meet them halfway. Even armed only with words, we can seek to hurt or we can seek a solution.
Steve Goodier's books & Newsletter are
available here: http://LifeSupportSystem.com I do love Steve Goodier's article about compromise; reproduced above. The Win-Win habit however is not about compromise. Compromise is usually where we think it is best to end up when we have disagreement between two parties, but Stephen Covey's habit - Think Win-Win - is not about that. This habit is really an attitude of mind; and it is that attitude which is attached to the idea of finding solutions where both parties actually win. It may sound idealistic, but it can indeed be done in a great many situations. Supposing you have two teams on the TV show 'Ready Steady Cook' and supposing both teams require an orange for their recipe but imaging that Ainsley only has one orange - who gets it? What would a compromise solution be? Well of course, a compromise would involve giving half an orange to each team but their recipes call for an orange - not half an orange. It seems on the face of it that comproise if the best we can do. If however we examine the recipes closely, we may find that one recipe calls for the juice of an orange; whereas the other calls for the zest. So, in this situation, we could really have a win-win solution where both parties get exactly what they want. And so it is with very many real-life situations which at first glance seem to present insurmountable problems. Very often it is possible to come up with a win-win solution. The key to finding a win-win solution is to really listen to what the other party wants. Listening in a way that is not normal or natural for us - it is called Empathic Listening. It is listening with the intention of understanding which amazingly, most of us don't tend to do very well. Books Related to This Subject
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