New Year's Resolution: Stop Annoying Other People

MORE ON NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

New Book about Emotional Intelligence and Coaching ... "What Got You Here Won't Get You There," by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter, soon to be released, and excerpted on businessweek.com. It's about leadership, but it's also about emotional intelligence and coaching.

One of Goldsmith's tips has to do with New Year's resolutions. Most of us make them. I don't, actually, because I'm a coach, and it's an ongoing thing with me that I model to clients. My "new year" doesn't start Jan. 1. It starts whenever I want it to; many times during a given year, in fact. New Year's day is as artificial as fake snow; it isn't even an astronomical event. So create your own any time you want to change.

Goldsmith believes in striving to be better human beings, we rarely resolve to do better in our interpersonal relationships.

Coaching clients are generally highly evolved and motivated, so I find most of my clients understand that the change has to be them, not the outer world. Goldsmith believes one thing crucial to good leadership is changing one or two interpersonal habits that annoy other people. Personal habits of your own, that is.

Fits with my definition of leadership which for someone as philosophical as I am, is eminently pragmatic: "A LEADER IS SOMEONE OTHER PEOPLE WANT TO FOLLOW." Want to follow. It's a feeling word. If you're brilliant, dedicated, highly-trained, highly credentialed, and know something I want to learn, but every time I get around you, you demean me ... I'll go "follow" someone else, thank you kindly.

In his book, Goldsmith outlines 20 habits that rub people the wrong way and tells how to break them.

Here are two:

ANNOYING HABIT NO. 1: CLINGING TO THE PAST

That's why I'm a coach. People have always loved to tell me their problems. After many years of this, in the workplace, I had an "ah hah" moment one day. Someone had come to me yet again to explain another person's behavior, and I blurted out, "I can tell you why, I can tell you all about their issues (I have an advanced degree in clinical psychology, plus am keen about figuring other people out), but you're still going to have to deal with them.

I can tell you why Fred 'bites people's heads off', he gives off clues about his childhood and the nature of his parents and of his brain and nervous system like a honeycomb oozes honey, but YOU are still going to have to deal with him trying to bite your head off. In fact it is a mistake for you to "understand" it if it means just sitting there and tolerating it. (Take my "How to Handle Difficult People" course and learn more about this.)

The same goes for your own "bad habits."

Emotional Intelligence is keen on this as well. I don't care why you're angry and throwing a tantrum. Just don't throw it at me. It may be a reason, but it should not be an excuse. Goldsmith's example is listening to someone nadder on about their father and mother and finally tossing a quarter at the man (a coaching client, I presume) and saying, "Call someone who cares."

One of the examples I give is about the young woman who popped into my office one day and said, "I'm going to be a real bear today. I'm PMSing."

"Not to me, you're not," I said.

PMS is no excuse for bad behavior any more than your past is an excuse for bad behavior.

Emotional intelligence shows you what else to do with your anger, joy, fear, etc. It's a choice, you know.

The point, says Goldsmith, according to this book review, is if you want to change the future, understanding won't get you there.

Not an original thought, of course. It's Einstein rephrased: You can't solve the problem on the same plane where it was created. (Albert Einstein)

ANNOYING HABIT NO. 2: REFUSING TO EXPRESS REGRET

Goldsmith frames it as losing face, essentially. Many people are highly invested in never being wrong it's true, and here we have a reframing of "would you rather be right than in relationship".

"It feels humiliating to seek forgiveness," Goldsmith says, "because we think it suggests subservience. We believe that apologizing forces us to cede power when, in reality, it's a great control tactic."

Goldsmith feels that "apologizing turns adversaries into allies, even servants. It is one of the most powerful and resonant gestures in the human arsenal--almost as powerful as a declaration of love."

In emotional intelligence, we look further than that. Being adamantly and relentlessly self-forgiving is a component of emotional intelligence. It frees you and it can keep you alive, I mean physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. We forgive not from altruism, but for our own health ... so we don't continue feasting on the skeleton, as the theologian put. Anger and resentment are delicious, but the skeleton at the feast is you.

Goldsmith reframes forgiving, apologizing, as forcing everyone to let go of the past.

Would that it were so. But to do this, YOU must be willing to accept the apology and move forward. The apology doesn't do it (can someone apologize for an affair? for running over your dog in the driveway?) ; YOU do.

It's hard to swallow your bile, and Goldsmith gives a great example: a young woman in a Fortune 100 company who was smart and had been brought in to bring about change. Everyone loved her except one of her peers, who viewed her as "arrogant" and "felt she didn't respect the company's history and traditions."

Goldsmith suggested that she apologize to this man, and scripted the apology for her to say, including that she had been disrespectful of the company's history and traditions.

Goldsmith believes there's magic in this process.

I picture this particular one as a scenario between a young adult and their middle-aged parent. From time-to-time I have a client who INSISTS that they cannot move on in their life until their parent APOLOGIES to them for not being there/favoring their sibling/leaving their mother/not sending them to college/'making them' be a lawyer instead of a pianist/never remembering their birthday/making them eat spinach.

What bothers me about this scenario is that the parent could equally demand an apology for keeping them all night/having ADHD/getting pregnant outside of wedlock/flunking out of the college they'd already paid $40,000 for/marrying someone from another religion or culture and messing up family get-togethers/inconveniencing their life with ashthma ... Except that in this society, we expect parents to parent, that is to "serve."

I had a client once who believed she was fat, at the age of 40, because of something her father did. But you see, her father is not there now shoveling mashed potatoes into her face. That's victimology. I'm going to write a book about this apology from the parent.

Goldsmith says apologies are a catalyst ... "how individuals change, teams improve, and companies become world-beaters. "

If you want to become even more successful in 2007, start by letting go of the past and learning to say: "I'm sorry."

Aren't those great? I bet there are more great habits to bust in that book. I'll be waiting for it come out.

Read the book excerpt on businessweek.com, HERE.