Doing the Right Thing and Achieving All Your Goals at the Same Time

By Marianne Powers

A book about people who work in offices and why we fight. 21 perspectives anyone can use to resolve conflicts and create better relationships with people at work.

Doing the Right Thing and Achieving All Your Goals at the Same Time is a book about people and why we fight. Why do we fight? Because we are not being treated the way we want to be treated. What do we want? Different things but, principally, respect for our strengths and compassion for our weaknesses. How do we give that to others and get it for ourselves? That’s what Doing the Right Thing is all about.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marianne Powers
• Release date: Apr 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476261270

Marianne Powers

Marianne Powers is a writer and public speaker in the areas of management, conflict resolution, work relationships, and personal and professional growth and development. She has 30 years experience as an office worker, manager, and consultant in over 50 companies in Maryland, Nevada, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, New Mexico, Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Washington, DC. Visit marianne at: www.mariannepowers.com

Book preview

DOING THE RIGHT THING

AND ACHIEVING ALL YOUR GOALS AT THE SAME TIME

BY MARIANNE POWERS

www.mariannepowers.com

Published by Quillrunner Publishing LLC at Smashwords

Copyright: 2005 by Marianne Powers

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

DOING THE RIGHT THING

AND ACHIEVING ALL YOUR GOALS AT THE SAME TIME

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

KNOWING

People Are What They Are and It's Irrelevant Anyway

We Don't Know What Other People Are Capable of Achieving

People Are Not Accountable for Their Thoughts and Feelings

We Don't Know What Other People are Thinking and Feeling

People Are Accountable for Their Words and Actions

Everyone is Doing the Best They Can

Everyone Has a Good Reason for What They Say and Do

LISTENING

Listen Very Carefully

Welcome Information, Criticism is Information

If You Have a Choice, Don't Choose to be Hurt

Examine Your Motives

Targeting Problems is Good, Targeting People is Evil

If You Want Someone to Do Something for You, You Have to Be Completely on Their Side

When People Don't Understand, Listen Better

SPEAKING

State Your Position Clearly and Ask for What You Want Specifically

Tell Them Even If You Know They Won’t Understand

All You Can Do is Tell Them, You Can’t Make Anyone Do Anything

When People Don’t Meet Your Expectations, Change Your Expectations

Give Them 100 Tries to Get It Right

If They Can’t Get It Right in 100 Tries, There Must Be Something Wrong with the Procedure

Teach Everyone to Do Everything

CONCLUSION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

This book is about people and why we fight. It is also about how we can stop fighting, solve our problems, and achieve all our goals together. I wrote it for the man who helped me find the words (to show him that, at last, I understood), for me so that I wouldn't forget, and for you.

I had a problem with people -- people who didn't understand me, people who fought me and worked against me, people whose actions were incomprehensible to me. When I finally realized what the solution to my problem was, I also realized that I had known it all along. I think it will be the same for you.

The way to solve the problem is by doing the right thing. For many years, I thought I was. I would do the right thing, but people wouldn't take it the way I intended. They would get angry, retaliate against me, and make me suffer, not to mention really confuse me. Doing the right thing was hard and just didn’t seem to work.

What I know now is that doing the right thing is easy, as long as you have really found the right thing, which is also easy, but not obvious. When you do the right thing, it is right for everyone -- no anger, no retaliation, no suffering, no confusion.

Come with me, then, and see if you agree.

KNOWING

We all respond to other people based on what we believe about ourselves and about them. To change what is not working for us, what is making us miserable and getting in the way of our goals, we have to change what we believe. Then everything we do and everything we say changes automatically. The following are a few beliefs that can change the way we interact with other people:

People Are What They Are And It’s Irrelevant Anyway

We Don’t Know What Other People Are Capable of Achieving

People Are Not Accountable for Their Thoughts and Feelings

We Don’t Know What Other People Are Thinking and Feeling

People Are Accountable for Their Words and Actions

Everyone is Doing the Best They Can

Everyone Has a Good Reason for What They Say and Do

PEOPLE ARE WHAT THEY ARE AND IT'S IRRELEVANT ANYWAY

I can’t work with her; she’s crazy. Okay, maybe I wasn’t that blatant. But I have often complained about another person, expecting the listener to understand that it was impossible for me to work with this other person because of what he or she is – stupid, lazy, crazy, whatever. The person listening to me usually agreed. They didn’t want to work with stupid, lazy, or crazy people either. But that was when I believed that I could actually figure out what a person is, and that what a person is matters.

There was a clue that I wasn’t very good at figuring out what a person is. The clue was that it was usually easier to get agreement if the person I was talking to didn’t know the person I was talking about. If the only information they had was what I was telling them, they usually saw it my way. If the person I was talking to did know the person I was talking about, I often got an argument from them. They saw the other person differently than I did.

Another clue was that even people who seemed lazy, stupid, or bad to me had friends, too. Sometimes, the people who liked them were people that I liked. Of course, there was always an explanation for that – the bad person that I didn’t like had fooled the good person I liked – but there was another explanation. They saw the other person differently than I did.

Even if I could get someone who knew the person to agree with me, there always seemed to be someone else who disagreed. Or we all agreed that a person had one attribute, but still disagreed on whether it was important, or on what other qualities or defects they had and how important those were. We were all looking at the same person, but each of us put that person in a different box, depending on what we thought was their dominant quality or defect.

It could be that I was an exceptionally bad judge of people, but I don’t think the problem was my skill at it. I think the problem was in judging people at all. People seem different to other people because they are different in different situations and