Chapter 8

Rule Yourself ~ Mahātmā Gandhi

New York: January 2002. “This conference reminds me of that Sesame Street song,” Aly said. She sang the first line: “One of these things is not like the others . . .”

“. . . One of these things just doesn’t belong,” I sang back. She had, I felt, hit the nail on the head. For another minute we stayed at our deserted lunch table, eating our oatmeal-raisin cookies. Then we headed back to the main event.

Aly Brandt was head of sales for Forum’s US Northeast region. That week she and I were representing Forum at a conference in New York hosted by our new corporate parent, the publishing and education giant Pearson PLC. In the hotel’s largest ballroom were gathered delegates from all the business units of the Pearson empire: Addison-Wesley, Penguin Books, The Financial Times, Prentice Hall, and many other well-known brands.

At lunchtime on day two, Aly and I strove to engage another delegate in conversation. A sales rep from one of the textbook publishers, he spent most of the meal explaining their technology plays: how they were moving their books to e-platforms and adding assessment capabilities. When he politely asked what we did and we began to talk about our research, clients, and learning programs, he developed a half-confused-half-bored look, as if we were listing the principal exports and imports of an exotic but dull country. Soon he checked his watch and beat a retreat, leaving us to our cookies.

Forum was the lone consulting firm in the Pearson stable—or at least, “consulting firm” is what we still called ourselves. Pearson would have called us a content provider. Six months ago they had bought us mainly for our library of training courses, courses my team and I were now busily working to convert to an e-learning format in order to fulfill a promise on which the sale had hinged. We had been placed in a group called FTK: FT for Financial Times, K for Knowledge. FTK was Pearson’s toe in the waters of corporate education. Forum was the smallest company in the group, and since the sale I had been sensing that we’d been taken over by—not a dark force, because the new owners seemed nice enough—but a force that saw us as a means to profit, period. Once we had been an independent nation. Now, we were a colony.

Many employees adapted just fine to colonization. I was not one of them.

Part of the problem was that I had a new boss who annoyed me. “Leo” (as I’ll call him) had been brought in as head of learning technology around the time of the Pearson takeover. One of his jobs was to oversee my e-learning conversion project, and I resented what I saw as his micromanaging ways. In hindsight, he wasn’t a bad leader at all; on the contrary, he was supportive, rational, and (crucially, though I didn’t grasp it at the time) good at sheltering his team from the whims of the Pearson overlords. But . . . he wanted frequent status reports. He insisted on email rather than voicemail. His manner was corporate-brusque rather than Forum-cheerful. Most annoying of all, he would sometimes tell me, “No, you can’t do that.”

On the first evening of the Pearson conference, Leo sent me an email that set me right off. So, I got on a phone in the hotel lobby (still plenty of public phones in 2002) and left a voicemail for Joe—that same Joe who’d been head of Forum Canada. He had moved to a staff position and was now Leo’s boss.

“I can’t stand working for this guy!” I ranted. “You have to do something!”

Joe, alarmed, left a return voicemail asking me to fly to Boston next day so the three of us could meet and try to work things out. But by then I was no longer enraged, just sulky. I apologized for my outburst and said there was no need to have a meeting.

I didn’t want to work things out. I didn’t want to do anything that might require self-reflection or self-control. I just wanted Leo, and the rest of the colonialists, gone.

Home Rule or Self-Rule?

. . . [I]f we become free, India is free. And in this thought you have a definition of Swaraj. It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands. (Hind Swaraj, Ch. XIV)¹

In the preceding three chapters, we met characters historical and fictional who put ego aside in order to build influence. Princess Sāvitrī, Emperor Gaozu, and Tamakazura increased their power not by seizing it, but by sharing and amplifying it. Whether you call it shrewd alliance-making, good followership, or the soft technique, the underlying strategy is the same: instead of battling your adversaries for a piece of an existing pie, you bake a new and bigger pie and invite them to the table.

Sounds simple. But in order to pull off such a feat, we must first realize that our toughest influence challenge is usually—us.

“Lead yourself first” has become a consultant’s cliché, but it wasn’t a cliché in November 1909, when Mohandas K. Gandhi, a young barrister and political organizer, wrote his treatise Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) while on a sea voyage returning from London, where he had been lobbying for Indian interests (see “The Sage: Mahātmā Gandhi,” here). India at the time was a British colony, and Indian voices for liberation were growing steadily louder and more violent. Gandhi himself had already been imprisoned three times for provoking civil disobedience against anti-Indian racial legislation, causing the British to see him as just another agitator. His London lobbying trip was a failure. But onboard the Kildonan Castle he had an epiphany, and a flood of words describing a new approach poured out onto ship’s stationery. “The writing went on at such a furious pace,” says historian Anthony J. Parel, “that when the right hand got tired, Gandhi continued with the left.”² Of the book’s 275 handwritten pages, Parel reports, only sixteen lines were later scratched out and revised.

Gandhi is best known today for his theory of passive resistance, the idea that inspired suffragettes to chain themselves to fences, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to call for bus boycotts in the segregated US South, and generations of activists to fight for their cause by staging sit-ins and letting police haul them limply off to jail. Hind Swaraj, however, is not primarily about passive resistance (although satyāgraha, literally “truth-firmness,” is the topic of one chapter). It is, rather, about home rule or self-rule. Gandhi plays on those two similar-but-not-quite-the-same meanings of swaraj as he constructs a dialogue between an imaginary “Reader,” a young firebrand who assumes home rule means driving the British out of India and wants advice on how to do it, and an “Editor,” an older and wiser man who wants the Reader to grasp the difficult truth that a British exit, unless accompanied by a transformation in how the Indians see themselves, will result only in the exchange of one tyranny for another and that, conversely, the adoption of true self-rule will make it irrelevant whether the British stay or go.

The Sage: Mahātmā Gandhi

In his introduction to Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, editor Parel lists six reasons why Gandhi wrote his seminal work of political theory: First, out of an urgent need to communicate ideas that had possessed him; second, to clarify the meaning of swaraj and the distinction between its two connotations, home rule and self-rule; third, as a rebuke to the young revolutionaries whose violence, he felt, would only make things worse for their country; fourth, to argue that Western civilization posed a greater threat to India than colonialism, and hence that the adoption of Western customs and practices was no way to oust the British; fifth, to help bring about a reconciliation between India and England; and sixth, “to give Indians a practical philosophy, an updated conception of dharma that would fit them for life in the modern world.”³ To that last point, in India’s ancient past, dharma meant the duties specific to one’s place in society—priest, warrior, merchant, or serf. In expanding the definition to apply (at least in theory) to equal members of a free nation, Gandhi envisioned a new, more humanistic type of social justice. Our eleven other sages would no doubt approve.

“Why do we want to drive away the English?” asks the Editor. The Reader replies, “They take away our money . . . The most important posts are reserved for themselves. We are kept in a state of slavery. They behave insolently towards us, and disregard our feelings.” (I had a similar opinion of Forum’s corporate colonizers.)

The Editor then asks, “If they do not take our money away, become gentle, and give us responsible posts, would you still consider their presence to be harmful?” The Reader replies, “Such a question is a sheer waste of time. When a tiger changes his nature, Englishmen will change theirs.” The Editor presses the point, asking whether it will be satisfactory if India gets self-government like the Canadians have; will that be good enough? Again the Reader rejects the idea, saying, “We may get it when we have arms and ammunition even as they have. But when we have the same powers, we shall hoist our own flag . . . we must have our own splendour, and then will India’s voice ring through the world.”⁴ The Editor replies:

You have well drawn the picture. In effect it means this: that we want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English, and, when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englistan. That is not the Swaraj that I want.⁵

The Reader, seemingly taken aback by this twist in the argument, notes that English institutions (parliament, the education system, and so on) are pretty impressive; after all, they have allowed Britain, a small nation, to maintain independence and achieve great power in the world. So why wouldn’t India want to import those institutions? The Editor advises patience, for he is now going to explain why “what you call Swaraj is not truly Swaraj.”

Over the next several chapters, the Editor delivers a devastating indictment not only of England, but of Western civilization as a whole. In Western societies, he says, rulers and citizens alike are obsessed with wealth and power. Opinions swing like a pendulum, the people following any clever orator who promises them money and a good time. It used to be that a few wise men wrote valuable, edifying books; today, he says, anybody can write drivel and poison thousands of minds (this, a century before social media). Bodily welfare is made the object of life. Fine clothes, fast travel, service at the push of a button, hospitals to cure diseases that never existed before, lawyers to sue anyone who crosses us—these are called the height of civilization. In reality, says the Editor, they are evidence of rot at the core.

The Reader seems convinced. But then he wonders: If this type of civilization is so rotten, and the British are so weakened by it, why have they been able to take and retain India? It’s the question the Editor (aka Gandhi) has been waiting for, and he answers thus:

“The English have not taken India; we have given it to them.”⁶

Quiet Influence Practice 8: Managing your own emotions and behavior

It’s always easy to place blame on others: on our boss, colleagues, subordinates, anybody who seems to be doing us wrong. And when a teacher makes it clear—as Gandhi does for his “Reader”—that we are the ones to whom a lesson is directed, the lesson can be hard to absorb.

Coach and consultant Marian Thier tells this anecdote from her time in the 1980s and ’90s teaching Forum’s Leadership Now program at General Motors:

We attended a session W. Edwards Deming [TQM guru and architect of Japan’s postwar economic turnaround] was giving for GM executives. Roger Smith was CEO, and he was onstage talking about quality; it was the time of the Chrysler K cars, which were just crap. Then Dr. Deming came onstage—he was about 80 years old, all bent over—and Smith introduced him and began to walk off.

Deming followed him and asked, “Where are you going?” Smith said, “I have another meeting. I’m leaving these people in your good hands.”

Deming continued to follow the CEO and said, “If you leave, I’m leaving too. If you don’t care enough to hear what I have to say, you’re wasting your money.”

You could have heard a pin drop. Someone came running out with a chair, and Smith sat there at the side of the podium, poker faced. This was when Michael Moore was making Roger and Me, and it was shocking to GM. Here were people from outside saying, “You have to change.”

Marian reports that during Forum’s time there, some GM employees were equally resistant and clueless. At the big graduation ceremony at the end of the program, each team was required to do something—anything they wanted—to portray what they had learned and would take forward. One team invited everyone to the proving grounds where new designs were tested. They had purchased a new-to-market, small Japanese car. During the night they had brought in heavy equipment and dug a hole. In front of their classmates, they proceeded to bury the car.

“We were dumbfounded,” says Marian. “Their message was, ‘We’re going to bury the Japanese, because the world wants our cars, not theirs.’ They had completely missed the point.”

And no wonder. The message “Beat the Japanese” was being blasted at those employees hundreds of times a day, not just from the mouth of the CEO but during meetings and on posters and in every official communique. Whispers of “Actually, we ought to take a look at ourselves” had no chance of being heard through the noise. What if the team that buried the car had, for their graduation skit, sat in a circle and given a demonstration of collaborative dialogue? The audience, primed to applaud chest-thumping theatricals, would have yawned.

Today we’re in the same predicament, only worse. When we all have a device in our pocket that summons us minute by minute into a flood of stimuli designed intentionally to inflame cravings of every kind, how do we focus? When the pace of business seems to increase daily, the result of demands from our boss, our customers, and the fifteen managers of our fifteen projects, how do we ground ourselves? When the world is a ceaseless din, where do we find quiet? (See “Influence in Brief: Influencing Yourself.”)

Influence in Brief: Influencing Yourself

When an individual I’m coaching says, “I can’t do these things because my boss won’t let me,” I retort with, “Tell me how your boss has responded that makes you think that. What is the evidence?” Is it fair to lay the blame at somebody else’s feet?

–Marian Thier

I really believe people respond in kind to what they see and encounter. If I’m pleasant to work with, if I’m willing to take a step back and say, “Let’s reflect on this,” others will go along. People sometimes come into my office and sit down and say, “I just need to be in here where it’s calm.”

–Tracy Hulett

The concept of turiya [fourth-level consciousness] means you have different states as an individual: dreamer, sleeper, waker. But there is one entity that is persisting through each of these states, and that is you—your consciousness. There is more to you than your job, or your thoughts, or where you are today. How can you bring that awareness, your consciousness, your higher self to everything you do?

–Shibani Belwalkar

Eighty percent of influence is managing your own reactions to other people. You have to influence yourself. If you can hang in while the storms rage, that is a form of influence. They’ll say, “That person has an even keel. The wind blows harder, but they keep going. I want to be like that.”

–Court Chilton

It’s the attachment to the thought that causes pain. The thought is just the thought.

–Helena Garlicki

It’s time now to talk about mindfulness. In the Overview, I defined mindfulness as “being present in the moment and able to observe our thoughts and emotions without letting them rattle us.” In their book The Mind of the Leader, Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter define it as “paying attention, in the present moment, with a calm, focused, and clear mind.”⁷ The Buddha (see Chapter 9) was the first to talk about mindfulness as a life-path; Dōgen Zenji (see Chapter 11) came up with zazen, “sitting meditation,” as a method to develop mindfulness. Dōgen’s zazen instructions are supremely simple—“just sit”—and present-day gurus’ instructions aren’t much more complex: they’ll tell you to sit for five or ten minutes focusing on your breath, and when your thoughts wander, as they inevitably do, to observe them neutrally, watching them come and go as you bring your attention gently back to the breath. But an online search will turn up many resources that teach meditation techniques.^* Here, instead, I want to explore the deep insight that underlies the techniques: You are not your mind.

Although calmness may be a result of zazen, it is not zazen’s aim. Sitting and telling yourself to “be calm” (like that houseguest who yelled “Jesus, relax!” at my dog) is a recipe for more angst, not less. Zazen’s aim, rather, is to adopt an observer’s perspective on your own mental phenomena. With mindfulness training, Hougaard and Carter say, “You start to observe your thoughts as fleeting events that have no real substance or importance. They’re just like the clouds in the sky: they come and go.”⁸ But mindfulness is more than the realization that thoughts are fleeting; it is also the realization that you can detach from your thoughts and emotions, watching them as you might watch a movie and thereby freeing yourself from their sway. Anyone who suffers from anxiety knows that the best coping technique isn’t to “try to relax” but instead to give the physical sensations—pounding heart, tingling skin—one’s full attention with no attempt to stop them, just as a scientist in a lab observes an experiment without trying to change its results. Such attention doesn’t make unpleasant sensations less unpleasant; what it does is to make “This is unpleasant” just another thought in the great stream of thoughts, just another somersault performed by the monkey-mind. And then, one’s reaction may change from “No!” or “Help!” into “Interesting” or “Wow.”

“But if I am not my mind,” you might ask, “then who or what is doing the observing?”

That’s an excellent question, one which Hindus and Buddhists answer differently. In most Hindu^* schools of thought, the fact that we can witness our own thought processes is taken as evidence that such a witness exists: separate from mind and body and unmoved by either. This unmoved witness is called ātman, a Sanskrit word often translated as “soul” but better translated as “essential self.” And since the essential nature of ātman is to witness—that is, to be conscious—therefore all the little ātmans, although seemingly separate here in the world, are in truth one with Big Ātman, which is universal consciousness (or Brahman). To be enlightened is to become aware of our essential oneness with that ultimate reality.

A Buddhist, in contrast, will say there is no observer, no essential “I” that persists over and above the stream of mental phenomena, for reality is a network of constantly shifting, flowing, interdependent processes, and each so-called person is just a tiny and equally fluid part of that vast matrix. That doesn’t mean you don’t exist; it simply means “you” are not the fixed entity you imagine yourself to be. You are, rather, a flame within the great fire of Being.

Which view, Hindu or Buddhist, do you find more compelling? For me, the Hindus have the edge. Either philosophy, however, will serve the practitioner of mindfulness well. In Chapter 9, we’ll look at what the Buddha himself had to say about it all.

Western Pitfall 8: Believing power is happiness

We’ve seen how a major downfall for power chasers is the fragile and temporary nature of their potency. Duryodhana, the First Emperor of the Qin, Genji—they were influential for a while, but before too long their influence was erased by shadow-echoes: by the Pāndava brothers and their loyal allies, by Chen She and his ragtag army, and by Genji’s gentle ladies, who in Murasaki’s novel shine from behind their bamboo screens more memorably than the “shining” title character. In our own time and universe there was Georgina, who enjoyed the finer things and faked her sales calls and whose fall was as swift as her rise. “The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night,” say the opening lines of the medieval Japanese epic The Tale of the Heike; “the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.”⁹ We would all do well to keep those lines in mind as we scramble up our little ladders of success.

But the deeper flaw in the plans of the power chasers—and perhaps the most treacherous Western pitfall of the twelve—isn’t their failure to grasp power’s impermanence. It’s their belief that power, understood as “me dominating everyone else,” is the key to happiness.

This belief is the shaky foundation on which rests the whole argument of The 48 Laws of Power, the book by Robert Greene I mentioned in Chapter 5. Quite unlike The Tale of the Heike, Greene’s book opens thus: “The feeling of having no power over people and events is generally unbearable to us—when we feel helpless we feel miserable. No one wants less power; everyone wants more.”¹⁰ If we rush past that statement without thinking about it, we might go on to find the rest of the book—with its panoply of “laws” that promise to help us scale “the heights of power”—horribly compelling. If we stop and reflect, however, the fault in the premise is clear. It may be that when we feel powerless we feel unhappy; it does not follow that happiness comes from the possession of power.

I don’t dispute that powerful feels better than powerless. But Greene and his ilk conflate two different meanings of powerful. In one sense, powerful means that I, an individual apart from other individuals, can force or manipulate those others to do what I want: make them serve my interests, which are necessarily in competition with theirs, and bend to my will, which is naturally opposed to theirs. Western cultures, with their focus on individual rights and freedoms, tend to look at power that way. But in a more Eastern sense, powerful means that I, an integral member of a group that supplies a large part of my identity and my happiness, have the ability to work with that group to accomplish great things. Under this second view, having power means succeeding together. General Motors spent many years digging themselves a hole as they strove to bury their Japanese competitors. Their resurgence began only when their aim shifted from burying their opponents to learning from them and, eventually, to partnering with them.

Note that the second definition of powerful isn’t more “moral” than the first. Greene says those who reject his concept of the world as a palace full of back-stabbing courtiers are really the most deviously immoral courtiers of all. But he misunderstands the critique. It’s not about which view of power is more moral; it’s about which view is more true to what human beings want and need and are. We can leave for another day the question of whether dominating our fellow humans is right or wrong.^* The question for now is whether dominating our fellow humans will make us happier and stronger—or sadder and weaker.

Molly McGinn is an educator and consultant with extensive experience teaching in the Far East. When she was 25, as she relates, she was the first woman allowed to enter a 900-year-old Korean Buddhist monastery for a three-month silent meditation period. She says notions of influence “depend on notions of the self. In the West, I’m me, period. In the East, I am somebody’s mother, wife, sister, boss, team member. I really means we.” Eastern cultures, she adds, know that “influence is not a transactional thing. It’s a karmic thing, a contribution to the collective. Word gets around that you’re cool, or not.”

To which Greene and company will reply: “Yes, and so you must manipulate your image so everyone thinks you’re cool.” But serious students of Eastern philosophy (or of Western philosophy, for that matter) will counter that cynical view with something like this:

“Unless you are genuinely cool—both a valued asset to group endeavors and an even keel in turbulent seas—you won’t be fooling anybody, not even yourself. Like Duryodhana stumbling and splashing his way around the Pāndavas’ hall of trompe l’oeil wonders, you’ll keep trying to play it cool; as cool as a bold baron, a ruthless legalist, or a suave seducer. But also like Duryodhana, the cooler you try to play it, the more you’ll make it blindingly obvious, to everyone, what a shmuck you are.”

Mahātmā Gandhi advises us to stop trying to master other people and, instead, master ourselves. Stop fighting our perceived oppressors and, instead, fight to free ourselves from our oppressive monkey-mind. “If we become free, India is free,” says the Editor in reply to the Reader’s calls for liberation. “And in this thought you have a definition of Swaraj. It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves.”¹¹

Therefore, he goes on to say, swaraj is “in the palm of our hands”—by which I think he means two things. First, all we need do in order to achieve self-rule is to see the incalculable strength we already hold within ourselves and close our hand around it, as if gripping the hilt of a sword that was ever in the scabbard at our side. Second, and equally important, we must sometimes open our hand and release the sword. In his chapter on passive resistance, Gandhi speaks of a truly brave man: “If he is an embodiment of [fearlessness], the sword will drop from his hand that very moment. He does not need its support. One who is free from hatred requires no sword.” Then he tells another story: A man who liked to brag about his courage was out walking, when suddenly he came face to face with a lion. He instinctively raised his stick in self-defense. “The man then saw that he had only prated about fearlessness when there was none in him. That moment he dropped the stick, and found himself free from all fear.”¹²

What if, instead of getting all up in arms about Pearson and Leo, I had dropped my stick and simply set an example of leadership?

To be fair, I did—sometimes. But I also spent too much time, then and later, scheming to drive out the colonialists. It was understandable that I wanted power in the form of home rule; I wish, however, that I had been better at self-rule. I wish I had held more firmly to these words of the Buddha: “Better than victory in battle over a thousand-thousand men is victory over one person: yourself.”

The next quiet influence practice is Doing the daily work with persistence and focus.