Treating people like dogs
Do you treat the people around you like dogs?
Don’t think Michael Vick. Think of the old lady down the street with 3-4 yapping admirers nipping at her heels.
Marshall Goldsmith, in What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, says that most of us have two contradictory tendencies: 1) We say we hate suck-ups. 2) We tend to reward people who suck-up to us most skillfully. We love the family dog who is always glad to see us and fawns at our feet, and we reward people around us who tell us how much they admire us.
The problem, of course, is that we can’t get good feedback about where we need to change if we listen only to our admirers.
Proverbs 27:6 says: “Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.”
Change or die. Alan Deutschman on what works
In my first post on this topic, I griped (eloquently) about how hard change is. But healthy change is obviously possible. After all, some people, some companies, and even some churches change. What motivates them? Here’s my simplified version of what works, from Deutschman’s Fast Company article:
- Reframing. People already know that smoking kills. They may also think that the damage has already been done, and that life without cigarettes isn’t really living, and besides THIS cigarette won’t kill me. Death may be too much to think about anyway, so they shove it out of mind. And smoking is a way to cope with loneliness, lack of meaning, even depression about poor physical fitness. So the challenge is to reframe the picture by showing how much life can improve when someone quits smoking. Maybe they can play golf again, or walk a mile without chest pain, or sleep better and feel better.
- Thinking big. You’d think that small changes are easier than big ones. Not so. A person who needs to lose weight, for example, could make small dietary changes and experience the pain of sacrifice without losing much weight. Often wholesale changes are easier to stick to. There’s a clean break from yesterday and today is a new day.
- Support. You can lose weight on your own. Theoretically. But if everyone in your house begins to eat healthy to support YOUR new healthy lifestyle, your chances are a lot better.
As I look these over, I see (again) mistakes I made in trying to start small groups. Few people are against them (OHHH those few!) but if they’re as valuable as I think, we need to reframe the picture so everyone can see it. And we’ve tried to start two or three at a time in the past (hoping they’d spread like bird flu), and never got past those two or three. AND we tried pinning them like a third arm onto the existing church program, rather than realigning everything and declaring a new day.
Bottom line: Change invites the heart into action by calling people to live a new and better way, and by providing support along the way. Sounds like just the sort of thing Christians ought to be good at.
Change or die. Or die changing.
In the May 2005 issue of Fast Company, Alan Deutschman published an article, now considered an instant-classic, called Change or Die.* (He has since published a book with the same title). For my next few posts, I hope to hammer some of Deutschman’s wisdom into shapes we can use.
In the article, Deutschman starts by showing evidence that most of us, when faced with the REAL choice between either change or our own PHYSICAL DEATH will NOT choose change. This shouldn’t be surprising. How many people quit smoking once they hear that smoking could kill? How many of us switch to a healthy diet when we know what trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup does? Deutschman takes it further though, quoting a study that shows that even a high-octane wake-up call like a heart-attack or stroke doesn’t make people change long-term.
His article explains why this is, and goes on to examine some things that DO work to help people change. Deutschman’s concern is with applying his lessons to business. Mine is applying them to churches and Christians, both of which theoretically and Biblically need to know how to change. More on that in a future post.
Here’s the thing, though. Any minister who might read this knows the difficulty of standing on the high ridge between change and status quo. On one side are people who have BEEN the church for decades (or at least years) who don’t want change. On the other side are folks who listen to Rob Bell and have been to some crazy church called “The Rock” or “Mosaic” who think that singing tunes from the late 90s is the definition of hide-bound traditionalism. Either side could pull us off the ridge.
And then there are people who just want to shake things up, perhaps due to Cylon-possession or an emotional imbalance that adores chaos. They’ll jump up on the ridge and push us off in any direction they can.
And it seems that the vast majority of churches that we hold up as examples of positive change are ones that began as homogeneous units - i.e., 95% of their original members were in their 20s.
So it SEEMS like the choices are the ones posted in my title. Change. Or die. Or die changing.
*(Thanks to MHCC member Chip Eichelberger for pointing out this article).
