A Heart at Peace and Success

By Patrick van Duyse,

   In "The Anatomy of Peace" the Arbinger institute implies two ways of being in the world towards a person; either we see him as an object/obstacle/tool, or we see him as an equal person. They described this as having a heart at peace (person) or a heart at war (object) towards someone. In this paper I will give three obvious points and will try to derive from each point why having a heart at peace and seeing others as people is essential to having success.

1.      Success is hard if you can't evaluate a situation clearly.

2.      Success is hard if people don't trust you.

3.      Success is hard if you are promoting what you don’t want.

   I will now dive into the first one of these:

1. Success is hard if you can't evaluate a situation clearly.

"People whose hearts are at war towards each others can't consider others' objections and challenges enough to be able to find a way through them." (The Anatomy of Peace)

   If you are arguing or negotiating with someone and you think of him as a tool or obstacle, will you be able to consider his point of view? Now, have you ever argued with someone who thinks he is wrong? I know that for me I haven’t. So if both of you  think you are right, neither of you are willing to consider the other side’s point of view and both your hearts are at war with each other, it might gets very similar to how The Anatomy of Peace described a similar situation:

"When they spoke, it was a kind of verbal wrestling match, each of them trying to anticipate the other's moves; searching for weaknesses they could then exploit to force the other into submission. With no actual mat into which to press the others flesh, these verbal matches always ended in a draw: each of them clamed hollow victory while living with ongoing defeat." 

   They describe going from a heart at peace to a heart at war as a self-betrayal; you get a feeling that you should do something, and then you betray it by not doing it. Because you didn’t do what you felt you should have done you feel the need to justify yourself. For me, my most common way of justifying myself is by blaming or diminishing my “opponent” into an object or by painting him as “bad” or “not as good as me”. So after I justified myself my view of the world became distorted and wrong. The very way I thought of others became a falsehood.

   If your view of the world is distorted and you can’t consider others’ point of view, can you evaluate a situation clearly? Can you make a good choice, or deal a good negotiation? Will you be successful? I know that for me, the answer to those questions are no.

2. Success is hard if people don’t trust you.

   Stephen M.R. Covey wrote in his book “The Speed of Trust” of 4 necessary cores to having people trust you: Integrity, Intent, Capability, and Experience. I will try to expound on the precept of Intent. The way I interpreted his meaning of intent was that, if people think you have a hidden agenda or motive, they will not trust you. He said something similar to this:

“If people don’t think you care about them, their feelings, their problems, and their difficulties then, they will not like you and they will probably not trust you either.”

   Does this remind you of anything? I know it made me think of hearts at war and hearts at peace. Think about it. Now tell me, could you really, genuinely care about someone, and still have a heart at war towards that person? Would it be genuine? Or would it be just an act? I think that if you really care about someone it means that you think of him as a person.

   If someone was treating me like an object, and didn’t care how his actions affected me, do you think I would trust him? Do you think I would want to interact with him? To put it logically, if you see someone as an object, then you won’t care about that person, and if you don’t care about him then he will generally tend to not trust you and to not like you. Now you might be thinking, why is the fact that others trust me so important to my success?

   Here I will introduce another principle from “The Speed of Trust”; the trust tax. The trust tax is really the cost of mistrust; it is often composed of lost time and lost money. An example that Stephen uses is airports. It is easy to see which airport is more trusting by comparing the security areas in the different airports. Less trust leads to longer security; this is obvious. Now we can say that the trust tax for airports with less trust is of lost time from passengers and lost money from the airport. This is only one example of many found in “The Speed of Trust”. It is easy to see, and it applies to almost all situations.

   I will wrap up this section with a few questions: If your heart is at war with someone will he trust you? Would it be easy for you be successful if people didn’t want to interact with you? What if those who did interact with you just didn’t trust you? I would say the answers to these questions are also a resounding no.

3. Success is hard if you are promoting what you don’t want.

  Now you may be thinking, how is having a heart at war related to promoting things that we don’t want?

Well look at it this way, if I am arguing with someone, and both our hearts are at war, would I be inviting him to agree with me? No. Chances are that I would be doing the opposite; who would want to agree with a guy who doesn’t care what you think. As I wrote earlier during this argument I would probably be being blind to my opponent’s point of view.

   Now if we go from an argument to a negotiation we can see that this would probably also apply in this type of a situation. If the other party sees that I have no consideration for them and that my only goal in this negotiation is to get as much as I can out of the deal, then they will probably not want to cooperate, and I will probably have to fight through every step of the deal. But if instead my heart was at peace towards the other party, they would recognise this and the deal may end up being better for both sides of the deal.

   The same applies to the argument situation again. If I had a heart at peace I would be open to learn and to see how he might be right. It would be hard for my friend to have any hard feelings towards me, and as long as I didn’t take a stance that is completely opposite to his he would probably become open too. In having a heart at war I was provoking him, and most people would fight back in such a situation. This probably helps you understand why we call them hearts at war or hearts at peace, since one invites quarrels the other invites peaceful agreements. I think that two people can have completely different opinions, but as long as they both keep their hearts at peace, and their minds open, the discussion can always stay on friendly terms, and who knows they might learn something new. So to recapitulate: If I have a heart a war towards someone I am inviting him to fight back at me and to hamper my progress. No one wants to agree with a jerk. So one last time, if my heart is at war, will I be successful?

   I have done my best to prove that treating others as people is important if not essential too having success in your personal life as much as in your business life. I would like to conclude by inviting you all to apply this as you see fit and to wish you luck on your trip on the road of life.

   If you would like some more information on having a heart at peace please read “The Anatomy of Peace” and “Leadership and Self-deception” both by the Arbinger Institute. If you want to know more on the importance of trust then I invite you to read “The Speed of Trust” by Stephen M.R. Covey. Thank you.

A fellow student,

Patrick van Duyse.