Possible, p.5
Possible, page 5
Ever since co-authoring Getting to Yes, I had been teaching and practicing negotiation as an exercise in influencing the minds of others. What the experience with Chávez underscored for me was the vital importance of influencing myself—my own thoughts and emotions. How could I expect to influence others if I couldn’t influence myself first?
The encounter with President Chávez crystallized my understanding that transforming conflict is an inside-out process. On the path to possible, the work within—the work with ourselves—precedes the work between—the work with others. The first-person work prepares the way for the second-person work.
Facing the challenging conflicts of today, I believe we need to take the balcony one step further than controlling our natural reactions. We also need to use the balcony to expand our perspective. As I reexamine my contentious encounter with President Chávez, I see that the balcony perspective opened up a new possibility in the form of a Christmas truce that helped me turn the situation around. The balcony opens the way to breakthroughs.
So how do we unlock the potential within us? How can we make sure we bring our best to the difficult conflicts we face?
As I came to appreciate during my encounter with President Chávez, we go to the balcony by exercising three natural powers. Each power is an innate human capacity, something we may already know how to do but simply need to develop and strengthen.
The first is the power to pause—to stop and reflect before you act. Instead of reacting, give yourself a moment to calm down so that you can see the situation more clearly. When faced with Chávez’s angry outburst, I pinched the palm of my hand and remembered to breathe in order to pause and quiet my mind.
The second is the power to zoom in—to focus your attention on what you really want. Go deep into your interests and needs. In the heat of the moment with Chávez, zooming in gave me a chance to remember why I was there and what I wanted to achieve.
The third is the power to zoom out—to focus your attention on the big picture. From the balcony, you can see the larger scene unfolding on the stage. With Chávez, I zoomed out to see the exhausted protesters and imagined how families and children in Venezuela might benefit from a peaceful Christmas holiday.
These three powers have a logical sequence. Pausing interrupts our reactive mind so we can zoom in and remember what we want. Zooming out then helps us see how we can get what we want. Once we activate a power, we continue to use it. We repeatedly pause, zoom in, and zoom out as needed. The more we exercise these powers, the more habitual they become.
Eventually, the balcony becomes not just a place to visit occasionally but a home base from which we can continually see the bigger picture and keep our eyes on the prize. The balcony becomes a genuine “superpower” that enables us to unlock the full potential within us to transform conflicts.
The balcony is our first victory on the path to possible—a victory with ourselves.
Chapter 3
Pause
From Reactive to Proactive
Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?
—Lao Tzu
It was a pause that saved the world.
Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov was a senior naval officer on the Soviet submarine B-59 in the North Atlantic in October 1962. It was the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. A US warship tracking the sub dropped depth charges—underwater bombs—to force it to the surface to identify its exact location.
Unbeknownst to the Americans, the submarine was armed with a nuclear torpedo. Because communication might be interrupted during wartime, Moscow had entrusted the top three officers on the sub to decide independently whether to fire the nuclear torpedo if under attack. They did not need to wait for orders from the Kremlin.
As the depth charges exploded, the sub swirled around.
“It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer,” Senior Lieutenant Vadim Orlov, the communications officer, remembered.
The Soviet submariners had no idea that the depth charges were just a warning and believed that they were about to die. Although no one knows exactly what was said in the sub at that moment, Orlov recalled the gist of the argument among the top three commanding officers.
“Arm the nuclear torpedo!” ordered the sub’s captain, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky. “Prepare it for firing!
“Maybe the war has already started up there while we are doing somersaults here,” he screamed. “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all. We will not become the shame of the fleet!”
The political officer, Ivan Semenovich Maslennikov, cursed:
“Yes, let’s do it, damn it!”
Only one other officer on board was needed to authorize the launch: thirty-four-year-old Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, the modest, soft-spoken second captain.
As Savitsky raged, Arkhipov was quiet, then spoke up.
“I say no,” he said firmly. “It takes all three of us to authorize a firing.”
“Don’t be a wimp!” shouted the captain.
“You know our orders. We are forbidden to launch the torpedo unless the hull has been breached. It’s still intact,” replied Arkhipov calmly.
“But the war has already started!” yelled the captain.
“We don’t know that yet,” Arkhipov countered.
Savitsky ultimately cooled down.
When the incident came to light forty years later in 2002, Robert McNamara, who had been the US secretary of defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis, exclaimed:
“If that torpedo had been fired, nuclear war would have started right there.”
“Arkhipov stood out for being cool headed. He was in control,” said his close friend and fellow submariner Ryurik Alexandrovich Ketov.
In that one fateful moment, in the midst of a fierce argument, Arkhipov exercised an innate power available to each of us: to pause with intention and calmly choose the next step.
At a time of toxic polarization in the world, in which we are so quick to react with anger and fear, we can all learn a lesson from Arkhipov—without whom hundreds of millions of us might not be alive today.
CHOOSE TO STOP AND STOP TO CHOOSE
Where you end up depends on where you begin. If we succeed in transforming today’s difficult conflicts, it will be because we began, as Arkhipov did, with a transformative pause.
To pause simply means to stop to choose. It means to reflect before you speak or act. Pausing separates stimulus and response, creating space for us to make an intentional choice. Pausing shifts our state of mind from reactive to proactive, enabling us to act purposefully in service of our interests.
When I first learned of the extraordinary story of Vasili Arkhipov and sub B-59 after it was revealed publicly in 2002, it reminded me of a conversation I had had seven years earlier in New Guinea about human aggression and our ability to control it.
In the fall of 1995, I made a field trip to a place that was famous for its warfare: the Highlands of New Guinea. The people of the Highlands were the last major population group on earth to come into contact with the modern world. Nobody in the West had known they existed until the 1920s, when pilots flying over the island saw, to their utter surprise, signs of habitation in the lush mountain valleys below. When government officials finally reached those mountain communities, they found war—lots of it.
Clan warfare was still going on when I arrived. On my very first day in the Highlands, I happened upon a “fight zone.” In the midst of the brilliantly green countryside, I saw the empty shells of school buildings that had been burned to the ground. Here and there I observed orchards that had been uprooted. My local guide and I were walking down a path when suddenly we encountered a group of young warriors running in the opposite direction. With brilliantly painted bodies and feathered hairdos, they were brandishing their bows and arrows. One young warrior stopped for a moment and asked us:
“Have you seen where the fighting is?”
“No,” answered my guide.
“Can you tell us what the dispute is about?” I asked as the guide translated.
“It’s a fight about a land boundary,” the warrior answered. “They killed one of our clansmen. So we killed one of theirs. Then they killed two of ours.”
“How many men have died?”
“Eight so far.”
A couple of days later, I happened to speak with a humanitarian aid worker.
“What a coincidence to meet you!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been giving a little course on conflict resolution for the local warriors, and I’ve been using one of your books, Getting Past No.”
“Really?” I said.
“And you know what’s the biggest lesson for them? It’s the concept of going to the balcony. It didn’t occur to them that when one of their clan is killed, they don’t have to automatically act out their anger and go find someone of the other clan to kill. They are genuinely surprised to learn they have a choice. They can pause and let their anger cool down while they decide what they really want to do. It’s positively revolutionary!”
The warriors had discovered their agency—their power to choose to stop and stop to choose. Although few of us are clan warriors, I suspect that each of us at times may find ourself trapped in the same reactive mindset. We tend to forget our own agency and power. But just as the warriors did, we can begin to free ourselves with this one simple realization: in every conflict, in every moment, we have a choice. By exercising our choice, we can start to reclaim control of our conflicts, our relationships, and our lives.
It is not easy, of course.
In virtually every dispute I have ever mediated—whether a business dispute, a family feud, or a civil war—the pattern is the same: a reaction followed by a reaction followed by another reaction.
“Why did you attack him?”
“Because he attacked me.”
And on it goes.
We humans are reaction machines. When we feel threatened, as the clan warriors in New Guinea or the Soviet sub captain in the North Atlantic did, the left half of the amygdala, a little gland in the lower part of our brain, is activated. Our brain, in effect, is hijacked and taken over by our reactions. Our heart rate quickens, our blood pressure goes up, our cortisol level increases, and our sympathetic nervous system springs into action. Instantly, our bodies are primed to fight, flight, or freeze, depending on our natural proclivity and past experiences.
As I learned long ago in anthropology class, each of these reactions has an evolutionary purpose to protect us from predators and other dangers. But in the conflict situations in which we find ourselves today, these natural reactions may lead us to act in ways that are contrary to our own best interests.
Since I co-authored Getting to Yes more than forty years ago, perhaps the greatest lesson I have learned is this: The biggest obstacle to getting what I want is not the difficult person on the other side of the table; it is the person on this side of the table. It is me. When I react without thinking, I become my own worst enemy. I am the one who keeps getting in my own way.
We become our own worst enemies when we attack, hurling insults and blame at the other person or storming out of the room vowing never to return. We are only working against ourselves when we avoid, sitting in cold silence and ignoring an issue that will only get worse. We hurt ourselves when we appease, only to draw further demands. Far from being on the balcony in such situations, we may find ourselves hunkered down in an emotional bunker, armed with grenades we are itching to throw.
“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret,” is a quote I love to repeat, coined by the nineteenth-century American Civil War veteran and writer Ambrose Bierce.
Thirty years of marriage have taught me how easy it is when I am angry and hurt to utter words of blame that I instantly regret. It is humbling to practice negotiation and self-restraint in the world and yet to come home and find myself falling into the trap I warn others against. These moments serve as a mirror, reminding me how easy it is to stumble and get in my own way. No matter what the provocation might be, I am the one responsible for my reactions. Marriage has been my great teacher, prodding me to keep learning and training me for larger-scale conflict work.
In one of my favorite Greek myths, the hero Hercules is walking down the road when a strange-looking beast suddenly rears its head. Hercules reacts instantly by attacking the beast with his great club. The beast looms larger, so Hercules strikes it again. But every time Hercules hits it with his club, the beast grows bigger.
Suddenly, Hercules’ friend Athena, the goddess of wisdom, appears at his side and cries out:
“Stop, Hercules, don’t you know the name of that beast?
“That beast is Strife. And the more you strike it, the larger it will grow! Cease hitting it, and it will grow smaller.”
The timely and important lesson of this myth is that the more we react to conflict, the bigger conflict grows. Conflicts turn destructive because each side reacts in an escalating back-and-forth that all too often ends with everyone losing.
When I first came across this myth of Hercules, I found myself wishing that Athena would be there to whisper in my ear “Stop . . . and choose.” Then I remembered my anthropological studies, and I realized that actually each of us has a personal Athena inside. In scientific terms, Athena is our prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain that inhibits rash, impulsive behavior. Personal agency and free will are our birthright as human beings. That, I believe, is the underlying message of the myth.
Even in the most dire of conflicts, each of us can exercise our power to stop and choose. Instead of being reactive, we can be proactive. Instead of being our own worst enemy, we can become our greatest ally.
START BY STOPPING
It seems paradoxical, but the best way to engage is to disengage—for a moment. Start by stopping. It is counterintuitive, particularly in our world of instant communication, where quick reactions are expected. But most of the conflict situations we face call for the exact opposite. Just when you are tempted to react by attacking, avoiding, or appeasing, pause. Just because the other side may be trying to hook us like a fish, it doesn’t mean we have to bite.
In May 1997, I was serving as a facilitator during a heated negotiation in The Hague between Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s national security advisor, Boris Berezovsky, and the vice president of Chechnya, Vakha Arsanov.
A bloody civil war had broken out years before in the Caucasus republic of Chechnya, an autonomous region of the Russian Federation. Chechen independence fighters were battling the Russian army. The war had claimed the lives of eighty thousand civilians—including more than thirty thousand children. The two sides had agreed to a truce, but it was shaky.
The meeting got off to a rocky start. When the Chechen delegation had taken off in a private plane from their capital of Grozny, they had been forced down by Russian fighter jets. Furious, the Chechen government had ordered all Russian citizens out of the country. After the Russian authorities finally allowed the Chechen delegation to travel through their airspace, the delegates were held up at Amsterdam airport because they refused to use their Russian passports and insisted on presenting their Chechen ones. When that obstacle was finally cleared and the delegates arrived at the historic and elegant Hotel des Indes in The Hague, they were in a highly disgruntled mood. They insisted that the Russians must have been given bigger rooms than they had. Only when given a peek at their counterparts’ rooms did they agree to settle into their accommodations.
We were meeting in the Peace Palace, which housed the International Court of Justice, where the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal was taking place at the same time. The Chechen delegates showed up late, accompanied by their bodyguards. They refused to shake hands with their Russian counterparts. The atmosphere was tense.
In the very first session, the Chechen vice president, Arsanov, launched an hourlong blistering attack on Russia for its oppression of the Chechen people. He began with a history lesson from two centuries earlier, when Russia had first invaded and conquered Chechnya. Speaking with barely repressed fury, he described each atrocity inflicted on the Chechen people until the present time. He ended his talk by pointing his finger dramatically at the Russian delegates across the table and shouting:
“You should stay right here in this room because you yourselves will soon be on trial for war crimes!”
As the Russians absorbed the full force of his attacks, Arsanov looked around the table, pointed at me, and declared:
“You Americans, your President Clinton is Boris Yeltsin’s friend, supporting him in these crimes in Chechnya. You are all complicit. And not only are you supporting the Russian colonial oppression of Chechnya, but you are also oppressing the people of Puerto Rico! What do you have to say about that?”
All eyes in the room turned toward me. I was taken by surprise, put suddenly on the spot.
The room was hot and stuffy. As the Chechen vice president pointed accusingly at me, I felt my cheeks flush and my blood pressure go up. It had been a very long day, and I was tired. The stakes were very high, and the meeting seemed to be going nowhere, with dim prospects for success. My mind was whirling: “What do I know about Puerto Rico?”
I went blank for a moment. I was just about to answer and mumble something about Puerto Rico when I suddenly caught myself and realized that the Chechen leader was baiting me.
Thankfully, the sequential translation offered me an extra moment to pause and take several deep breaths. I noticed tightness in my chest and heaviness in my gut. As I took in some air and observed these feelings, their intensity began to subside. In the haze of all the angry words uttered that day, I tried to remember my objective—what was I trying to achieve?
Then, thanks to the short pause, a possible transformative response came to me. I looked straight at the Chechen leader and replied:
“Thank you, Mr. Vice President. I have listened with great sympathy to your account of the extremely painful history of your people. Who could not be moved? And I take your forthright criticism of my country as a sign that we are among friends and can speak frankly with one another. So let me say that we are not here to discuss the problem of Puerto Rico, however important that is, but to figure out how to stop the terrible suffering that has gone on for far too long for the people of Chechnya. Let us focus on that right now.”
The encounter with President Chávez crystallized my understanding that transforming conflict is an inside-out process. On the path to possible, the work within—the work with ourselves—precedes the work between—the work with others. The first-person work prepares the way for the second-person work.
Facing the challenging conflicts of today, I believe we need to take the balcony one step further than controlling our natural reactions. We also need to use the balcony to expand our perspective. As I reexamine my contentious encounter with President Chávez, I see that the balcony perspective opened up a new possibility in the form of a Christmas truce that helped me turn the situation around. The balcony opens the way to breakthroughs.
So how do we unlock the potential within us? How can we make sure we bring our best to the difficult conflicts we face?
As I came to appreciate during my encounter with President Chávez, we go to the balcony by exercising three natural powers. Each power is an innate human capacity, something we may already know how to do but simply need to develop and strengthen.
The first is the power to pause—to stop and reflect before you act. Instead of reacting, give yourself a moment to calm down so that you can see the situation more clearly. When faced with Chávez’s angry outburst, I pinched the palm of my hand and remembered to breathe in order to pause and quiet my mind.
The second is the power to zoom in—to focus your attention on what you really want. Go deep into your interests and needs. In the heat of the moment with Chávez, zooming in gave me a chance to remember why I was there and what I wanted to achieve.
The third is the power to zoom out—to focus your attention on the big picture. From the balcony, you can see the larger scene unfolding on the stage. With Chávez, I zoomed out to see the exhausted protesters and imagined how families and children in Venezuela might benefit from a peaceful Christmas holiday.
These three powers have a logical sequence. Pausing interrupts our reactive mind so we can zoom in and remember what we want. Zooming out then helps us see how we can get what we want. Once we activate a power, we continue to use it. We repeatedly pause, zoom in, and zoom out as needed. The more we exercise these powers, the more habitual they become.
Eventually, the balcony becomes not just a place to visit occasionally but a home base from which we can continually see the bigger picture and keep our eyes on the prize. The balcony becomes a genuine “superpower” that enables us to unlock the full potential within us to transform conflicts.
The balcony is our first victory on the path to possible—a victory with ourselves.
Chapter 3
Pause
From Reactive to Proactive
Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?
—Lao Tzu
It was a pause that saved the world.
Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov was a senior naval officer on the Soviet submarine B-59 in the North Atlantic in October 1962. It was the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. A US warship tracking the sub dropped depth charges—underwater bombs—to force it to the surface to identify its exact location.
Unbeknownst to the Americans, the submarine was armed with a nuclear torpedo. Because communication might be interrupted during wartime, Moscow had entrusted the top three officers on the sub to decide independently whether to fire the nuclear torpedo if under attack. They did not need to wait for orders from the Kremlin.
As the depth charges exploded, the sub swirled around.
“It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer,” Senior Lieutenant Vadim Orlov, the communications officer, remembered.
The Soviet submariners had no idea that the depth charges were just a warning and believed that they were about to die. Although no one knows exactly what was said in the sub at that moment, Orlov recalled the gist of the argument among the top three commanding officers.
“Arm the nuclear torpedo!” ordered the sub’s captain, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky. “Prepare it for firing!
“Maybe the war has already started up there while we are doing somersaults here,” he screamed. “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all. We will not become the shame of the fleet!”
The political officer, Ivan Semenovich Maslennikov, cursed:
“Yes, let’s do it, damn it!”
Only one other officer on board was needed to authorize the launch: thirty-four-year-old Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, the modest, soft-spoken second captain.
As Savitsky raged, Arkhipov was quiet, then spoke up.
“I say no,” he said firmly. “It takes all three of us to authorize a firing.”
“Don’t be a wimp!” shouted the captain.
“You know our orders. We are forbidden to launch the torpedo unless the hull has been breached. It’s still intact,” replied Arkhipov calmly.
“But the war has already started!” yelled the captain.
“We don’t know that yet,” Arkhipov countered.
Savitsky ultimately cooled down.
When the incident came to light forty years later in 2002, Robert McNamara, who had been the US secretary of defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis, exclaimed:
“If that torpedo had been fired, nuclear war would have started right there.”
“Arkhipov stood out for being cool headed. He was in control,” said his close friend and fellow submariner Ryurik Alexandrovich Ketov.
In that one fateful moment, in the midst of a fierce argument, Arkhipov exercised an innate power available to each of us: to pause with intention and calmly choose the next step.
At a time of toxic polarization in the world, in which we are so quick to react with anger and fear, we can all learn a lesson from Arkhipov—without whom hundreds of millions of us might not be alive today.
CHOOSE TO STOP AND STOP TO CHOOSE
Where you end up depends on where you begin. If we succeed in transforming today’s difficult conflicts, it will be because we began, as Arkhipov did, with a transformative pause.
To pause simply means to stop to choose. It means to reflect before you speak or act. Pausing separates stimulus and response, creating space for us to make an intentional choice. Pausing shifts our state of mind from reactive to proactive, enabling us to act purposefully in service of our interests.
When I first learned of the extraordinary story of Vasili Arkhipov and sub B-59 after it was revealed publicly in 2002, it reminded me of a conversation I had had seven years earlier in New Guinea about human aggression and our ability to control it.
In the fall of 1995, I made a field trip to a place that was famous for its warfare: the Highlands of New Guinea. The people of the Highlands were the last major population group on earth to come into contact with the modern world. Nobody in the West had known they existed until the 1920s, when pilots flying over the island saw, to their utter surprise, signs of habitation in the lush mountain valleys below. When government officials finally reached those mountain communities, they found war—lots of it.
Clan warfare was still going on when I arrived. On my very first day in the Highlands, I happened upon a “fight zone.” In the midst of the brilliantly green countryside, I saw the empty shells of school buildings that had been burned to the ground. Here and there I observed orchards that had been uprooted. My local guide and I were walking down a path when suddenly we encountered a group of young warriors running in the opposite direction. With brilliantly painted bodies and feathered hairdos, they were brandishing their bows and arrows. One young warrior stopped for a moment and asked us:
“Have you seen where the fighting is?”
“No,” answered my guide.
“Can you tell us what the dispute is about?” I asked as the guide translated.
“It’s a fight about a land boundary,” the warrior answered. “They killed one of our clansmen. So we killed one of theirs. Then they killed two of ours.”
“How many men have died?”
“Eight so far.”
A couple of days later, I happened to speak with a humanitarian aid worker.
“What a coincidence to meet you!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been giving a little course on conflict resolution for the local warriors, and I’ve been using one of your books, Getting Past No.”
“Really?” I said.
“And you know what’s the biggest lesson for them? It’s the concept of going to the balcony. It didn’t occur to them that when one of their clan is killed, they don’t have to automatically act out their anger and go find someone of the other clan to kill. They are genuinely surprised to learn they have a choice. They can pause and let their anger cool down while they decide what they really want to do. It’s positively revolutionary!”
The warriors had discovered their agency—their power to choose to stop and stop to choose. Although few of us are clan warriors, I suspect that each of us at times may find ourself trapped in the same reactive mindset. We tend to forget our own agency and power. But just as the warriors did, we can begin to free ourselves with this one simple realization: in every conflict, in every moment, we have a choice. By exercising our choice, we can start to reclaim control of our conflicts, our relationships, and our lives.
It is not easy, of course.
In virtually every dispute I have ever mediated—whether a business dispute, a family feud, or a civil war—the pattern is the same: a reaction followed by a reaction followed by another reaction.
“Why did you attack him?”
“Because he attacked me.”
And on it goes.
We humans are reaction machines. When we feel threatened, as the clan warriors in New Guinea or the Soviet sub captain in the North Atlantic did, the left half of the amygdala, a little gland in the lower part of our brain, is activated. Our brain, in effect, is hijacked and taken over by our reactions. Our heart rate quickens, our blood pressure goes up, our cortisol level increases, and our sympathetic nervous system springs into action. Instantly, our bodies are primed to fight, flight, or freeze, depending on our natural proclivity and past experiences.
As I learned long ago in anthropology class, each of these reactions has an evolutionary purpose to protect us from predators and other dangers. But in the conflict situations in which we find ourselves today, these natural reactions may lead us to act in ways that are contrary to our own best interests.
Since I co-authored Getting to Yes more than forty years ago, perhaps the greatest lesson I have learned is this: The biggest obstacle to getting what I want is not the difficult person on the other side of the table; it is the person on this side of the table. It is me. When I react without thinking, I become my own worst enemy. I am the one who keeps getting in my own way.
We become our own worst enemies when we attack, hurling insults and blame at the other person or storming out of the room vowing never to return. We are only working against ourselves when we avoid, sitting in cold silence and ignoring an issue that will only get worse. We hurt ourselves when we appease, only to draw further demands. Far from being on the balcony in such situations, we may find ourselves hunkered down in an emotional bunker, armed with grenades we are itching to throw.
“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret,” is a quote I love to repeat, coined by the nineteenth-century American Civil War veteran and writer Ambrose Bierce.
Thirty years of marriage have taught me how easy it is when I am angry and hurt to utter words of blame that I instantly regret. It is humbling to practice negotiation and self-restraint in the world and yet to come home and find myself falling into the trap I warn others against. These moments serve as a mirror, reminding me how easy it is to stumble and get in my own way. No matter what the provocation might be, I am the one responsible for my reactions. Marriage has been my great teacher, prodding me to keep learning and training me for larger-scale conflict work.
In one of my favorite Greek myths, the hero Hercules is walking down the road when a strange-looking beast suddenly rears its head. Hercules reacts instantly by attacking the beast with his great club. The beast looms larger, so Hercules strikes it again. But every time Hercules hits it with his club, the beast grows bigger.
Suddenly, Hercules’ friend Athena, the goddess of wisdom, appears at his side and cries out:
“Stop, Hercules, don’t you know the name of that beast?
“That beast is Strife. And the more you strike it, the larger it will grow! Cease hitting it, and it will grow smaller.”
The timely and important lesson of this myth is that the more we react to conflict, the bigger conflict grows. Conflicts turn destructive because each side reacts in an escalating back-and-forth that all too often ends with everyone losing.
When I first came across this myth of Hercules, I found myself wishing that Athena would be there to whisper in my ear “Stop . . . and choose.” Then I remembered my anthropological studies, and I realized that actually each of us has a personal Athena inside. In scientific terms, Athena is our prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain that inhibits rash, impulsive behavior. Personal agency and free will are our birthright as human beings. That, I believe, is the underlying message of the myth.
Even in the most dire of conflicts, each of us can exercise our power to stop and choose. Instead of being reactive, we can be proactive. Instead of being our own worst enemy, we can become our greatest ally.
START BY STOPPING
It seems paradoxical, but the best way to engage is to disengage—for a moment. Start by stopping. It is counterintuitive, particularly in our world of instant communication, where quick reactions are expected. But most of the conflict situations we face call for the exact opposite. Just when you are tempted to react by attacking, avoiding, or appeasing, pause. Just because the other side may be trying to hook us like a fish, it doesn’t mean we have to bite.
In May 1997, I was serving as a facilitator during a heated negotiation in The Hague between Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s national security advisor, Boris Berezovsky, and the vice president of Chechnya, Vakha Arsanov.
A bloody civil war had broken out years before in the Caucasus republic of Chechnya, an autonomous region of the Russian Federation. Chechen independence fighters were battling the Russian army. The war had claimed the lives of eighty thousand civilians—including more than thirty thousand children. The two sides had agreed to a truce, but it was shaky.
The meeting got off to a rocky start. When the Chechen delegation had taken off in a private plane from their capital of Grozny, they had been forced down by Russian fighter jets. Furious, the Chechen government had ordered all Russian citizens out of the country. After the Russian authorities finally allowed the Chechen delegation to travel through their airspace, the delegates were held up at Amsterdam airport because they refused to use their Russian passports and insisted on presenting their Chechen ones. When that obstacle was finally cleared and the delegates arrived at the historic and elegant Hotel des Indes in The Hague, they were in a highly disgruntled mood. They insisted that the Russians must have been given bigger rooms than they had. Only when given a peek at their counterparts’ rooms did they agree to settle into their accommodations.
We were meeting in the Peace Palace, which housed the International Court of Justice, where the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal was taking place at the same time. The Chechen delegates showed up late, accompanied by their bodyguards. They refused to shake hands with their Russian counterparts. The atmosphere was tense.
In the very first session, the Chechen vice president, Arsanov, launched an hourlong blistering attack on Russia for its oppression of the Chechen people. He began with a history lesson from two centuries earlier, when Russia had first invaded and conquered Chechnya. Speaking with barely repressed fury, he described each atrocity inflicted on the Chechen people until the present time. He ended his talk by pointing his finger dramatically at the Russian delegates across the table and shouting:
“You should stay right here in this room because you yourselves will soon be on trial for war crimes!”
As the Russians absorbed the full force of his attacks, Arsanov looked around the table, pointed at me, and declared:
“You Americans, your President Clinton is Boris Yeltsin’s friend, supporting him in these crimes in Chechnya. You are all complicit. And not only are you supporting the Russian colonial oppression of Chechnya, but you are also oppressing the people of Puerto Rico! What do you have to say about that?”
All eyes in the room turned toward me. I was taken by surprise, put suddenly on the spot.
The room was hot and stuffy. As the Chechen vice president pointed accusingly at me, I felt my cheeks flush and my blood pressure go up. It had been a very long day, and I was tired. The stakes were very high, and the meeting seemed to be going nowhere, with dim prospects for success. My mind was whirling: “What do I know about Puerto Rico?”
I went blank for a moment. I was just about to answer and mumble something about Puerto Rico when I suddenly caught myself and realized that the Chechen leader was baiting me.
Thankfully, the sequential translation offered me an extra moment to pause and take several deep breaths. I noticed tightness in my chest and heaviness in my gut. As I took in some air and observed these feelings, their intensity began to subside. In the haze of all the angry words uttered that day, I tried to remember my objective—what was I trying to achieve?
Then, thanks to the short pause, a possible transformative response came to me. I looked straight at the Chechen leader and replied:
“Thank you, Mr. Vice President. I have listened with great sympathy to your account of the extremely painful history of your people. Who could not be moved? And I take your forthright criticism of my country as a sign that we are among friends and can speak frankly with one another. So let me say that we are not here to discuss the problem of Puerto Rico, however important that is, but to figure out how to stop the terrible suffering that has gone on for far too long for the people of Chechnya. Let us focus on that right now.”
