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| Equanimity and Prioritizing in Decision-Making: Distinguishing Needs, Wants, and Interests from Preferences, and Tastes (c) 2011-15 by Angus Cunningham Principal, Authentix Coaches |
| Language (and cartoons!) can be a blunt or a delicate tool: it can have violent effects, or else its users (whether emitting or receiving) can consciously seek to make the effects of language as non-violent yet also as vitalizing as possible. Violent effects spring from receiver interpretations that the sender of a message is either demanding unreasonably or insulting -- whether what is demanded or insulted is physical or emotional, and also from articulators ignoring genuinely urgent needs. Language including the word ‘need’ to imply that another must meet it conveys a demand, whereas language requesting help in meeting a need that is genuinely necessary and urgent conveys respect for both one’s own and another's humanity. Language that conflates the meanings of the words 'need', 'want', 'interest', 'preference or taste', and 'like' -- all of which are often thought of as comprising the continuous spectrum of desires -- can instill, evoke or excite a huge array of social confusions, including violence. In the international best seller “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life”, the late clinical psychologist, Director of Education for the Center for Nonviolent Communication, and author Marshall Rosenberg used the word ‘need’ often, which might raise for his readers, as it certainly did for me, the question of what is a need and how is it different from a want, an interest, a preference, or a taste. Our use of these words, whether in articulating or interpreting, seems to me often to be in want of understanding of the value of accuracy to communication for thorough problem-solving. In other words, lack of care for accurate usage of 'need language' will trigger irrational priorities, perhaps dangerously so. I have therefore prepared, for clients of Eye-Zen English coaching, a table of the levels of accuracy I sense is usual among the most commonly used of 'desire words': .. |
The judgments in the table of the level of authenticity people usually exhibit when using these different words are mine alone, and therefore subjective. You might well make different judgments for you have had different experiences. Yet these distinctions themselves derive from a mixture of quite solid etymological fact and an observation that follows logically from well-established human psychology. The fact is that our English-speaking forbears were clear that the word 'want' implied a lack. A lack may become a necessity in the future, or it may already be critical. That clarity allowed them to distinguish a need as a lack assumed already to be critical -- from a want, which although also a necessity, was not as immediate a necessity. I have chosen in the table to respect that ancient clarity among English speakers because it is clearly essential to accurately equitable prioritizing. We would do well as an English-speaking community to become more aware of the trouble we cause if we either neglect or unethically exploit this ancient linguistic distinction. This follows from the reality that we use the two most rarely used of the five words distinguished in the table -- 'preference' and 'like' -- only when we are at least aware that our desire in that moment is not one we have any entitlement to expect others to respect as a high priority. We cannot presume that we have any such entitlement. If, however, we neglect to recognize this reality, we present a very big challenge to connected problem- solving and thus to equitable and accurate prioritizing (in budgets, for example). The distinctions of my table could be taken by some as hard and fast definitions that a team of authoritative dictionary editors would make, and then used to demand that one’s conversational partners comply with them. That could be a mistake for it might lead to an emotionally violent argument. Instead a generous interpretation of another’s initial casual, rather than scrupulous, use of the word ‘need’ empowers one to allow the psychological space of some conversational time in which to clarify -- with the help of these distinctions of urgency, entitlement, and accuracy -- priorities. Repeatedly unscrupulous use of the word 'need' could, of course, become abusive, so repeatedly generous interpretations that are not met with reciprocal generosity are very unwise for they will lead to what is known as a racket. This brings me to three interrelated subjects: interpreting our own and others’ emotions, using our senses of them to establish relative priorities, and the state of being known as equanimity. Researchers in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy have established over the last few generations that our emotions are valuable pointers to our needs. But they have also observed that our life experiences lead us either to over- or under-value our own needs relative to those of others. These errors of valuation can be very serious in problem-solving conversations whenever there is a gross difference between the parties, conscious or unconscious, in two psycho-social factors:
How can unfortunate, even tragic, errors from such factors be averted or mediated? It seems to me that errors from both these factors often, but not always, enter conversations without both parties being aware of this happening. If so, I think they will usually manifest either as conflicts of which the participants become aware through the strong experience of unpleasant emotions, or as outcomes in which there will be less strong residual emotions for both those who feel they have 'lost' and those who feel they have 'won'. If one has a feeling of loss, one will have settled for emotions that are at least tolerable, while if one has emotions that are more pleasant one will have a feeling of having won. Yet I think at least some people know that truly successful problem-solving only occurs when both people feel they have won by their own, and different, senses of what constitutes success (or, in the instance of a responsibly free (emotionally mature) person, well-being). This suggests to me that the reaching of what each party understands as equanimity will be a sensible aim from the point of view of the well-being of anyone likely to be seriously affected by the decisions taken, especially in the case of decisions that are 'big' -- either from one's own point of view or of society's. Some may argue that if one has emotions on the pleasant side of equanimity one will prefer to 'cut loose' and enjoy one's 'win' with the supposition -- attractive to ego -- that our pleasant emotions will empower us to distribute to others the benefits of our superior capacity to get our needs, wants, interests, interests, or preferences met. But, if that should be so, then right before one will be others whose emotions indicate a greater need or want. In short, leaving a problem-solving conversation in a state other than equanimity, whether feeling oneself 'a winner' or as 'a loser', is likely to be presumptive. So the question to be answered before leaving, either as a winner or a loser, is "What am I presuming?", or perhaps, to be linguistically consistent with Eye-Zen English principles, "What presupposition has, unconsciously, been underlying my thinking? (or, in Landmark Forum parlance, "What story have I been telling myself)". Which will, if pursued diligently and accurately, lead one back to search for shared equanimity in the conversation one is proposing to leave. What was it that the Charles Dickens' character "Fagin" sang in the musical "Oliver!"? If you have ever seen a performance of "Oliver!", can you remember the face of the actor who played "Fagin"when, as a refrain to a collective narrative song of the petty thieving of the orphans he was, in effect, parenting, he sang: "I think I'd better think it out again!"? So much for the distinctions to which I suggest my clients refer when setting priorities along a path that my experience tells me leads as close to equanimity for the parties in a purposeful conversation as they are willing to devote to that aim. Leading a life that is, I confess, often far from equanimity, my experience is that their application also leads to an exploration of what I think we are all leaning unconsciously toward when we use the word 'interest'. What do I mean by that? If I myself acknowledge an interest, it implies that my attention has swung toward my recognizing that I have an incipient need, or want, and the question for me is "which of these emotions (N/W) is the more accurate description?" At one end of the spectrum of the possibilities related to my interest, I may think of myself as a stakeholder in the situation I feel -- or sense -- surrounds me. In that case I would know that I won't be able easily to back out of answering this question rather thoroughly. If, on the other hand I think of myself as merely an observer, then my realistically feasible options would fall between the extremes of (a) 'moving on', much as I suppose the 'real speculators' many of us tend to look on with askance in the financial world are constantly doing, or (b) taking the kind of firm, and consciously deliberate, action that begins with an honest and accurate answer to that question. .. |
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