The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success

277 Pages·2017·1.53 MB·English

by  Christopher L. Kukk

Dedication
To Elly, Cade, Quinn, and Cole . . .
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You are my equation for love: E = QC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: Compassionate People Finish on Top—Together
PART ONE SURVIVAL OF THE KINDEST
1. The Connection Between Compassion and Success
2. LUCA: The Four-Step Program for Cultivating Compassion
PART TWO THE FOUR STEPS FOR CULTIVATING COMPASSION
3. Listen to Learn
Skill 1: Less Is More: Focusing Your Attention
Skill 2: Open the Closed and Close the Opened: Asking Great
Questions
Skill 3: Mind the Gaps: Appreciating Silence
4. Understand to Know
Skill 1: Flight, Fight, or Freeze: Recognizing Mindset
Skill 2: Three Monkeys and a Bonobo: Developing Emotional
Intelligence
Skill 3: Only Connect: Turning Facts into Concepts and
Relationships into Networks
5. Connect to Capabilities
Skill 1: Take No One for Granted: Tapping into the Human
Potential Hidden in Plain Sight
Skill 2: The Web of Connections: Expanding Your Reach
Skill 3: Walk This Way: Shifting Your Perspective
6. Act to Solve
Skill 1: The Courage to Try: Overcoming Fear
Skill 2: Testing Your Mettle: Strengthening Responsibility and
Resilience
Skill 3: Just Sit There: The Power of Nondoing
PART THREE THE RIPPLE EFFECT
7. Conquest of the Common Virtue
Conclusion: The Modern Spartacus
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
Compassionate People Finish on Top—
Together
Compassion is the chief law of human existence.
–FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
My wife, Elly, and I were on an elevated train traveling home after spending the
day in Boston, when a loud blast fractured the silence of the car. I didn’t need to
see the pellets embedded in the window above Elly’s head to recognize the
source of the sound immediately: a shotgun. I guessed that someone had fired
from one of the rooftops parallel to the tracks. As Elly and I dropped to crouch
on the floor, the train car slammed to a stop. Now we were trapped like fish in a
bowl.
Across from us, we watched in disbelief and horror as a woman holding a
baby slowly rose from the floor and stood directly in front of a window. Several
people yelled at her to get down, but she didn’t move and didn’t seem to register
anyone’s instruction. She was clearly in shock.
Then Elly did something I will never forget. She calmly stood up, looked the
woman in the eye, and said, “Everything is going to be all right.” She hugged the
mom and her baby and slowly guided them all to the floor of the train car.
Almost simultaneously, the train began to move again. Elly’s was one of the
most brave and compassionate acts that I have ever personally witnessed.
Most of us will never need to risk our lives to show our compassion for
another, but whether you practice compassion in a boardroom, a classroom, or
your very own living room, you have the power to save and change lives. And
you have the power to dramatically improve the quality of your own life.
What is compassion? Compassion is a holistic understanding of a problem or the
suffering of another with a commitment to act to solve the problem or alleviate
the suffering. Understanding a problem or the suffering of another can happen
instantaneously, as it did in Elly’s case, or it can develop over time. But the most
important thing to know about compassion is that it involves a commitment to
act. This is what distinguishes compassion from empathy. Empathy is
understanding what another person is experiencing, but for compassion
understanding isn’t enough. Compassion means actually doing something to
help.
Being compassionate is not about trying to be a saint or being so kind that
you become a doormat for other people. Being compassionate is not a sign of
weakness. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. It takes strength to remain caring and
rational when the easiest thing to do is to stop caring or give in to anger. And it
takes bravery to act, when it is much easier to do nothing.
Given the definition of compassion, you might think it is more emotionally
and physically taxing than empathy, but that’s not the case. Tania Singer,
director of neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and
Brain Sciences, has found that compassion and empathy “are two different
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phenomena associated with different brain activity patterns.” When we think
compassionately, we use the same neural pathways as love, but when we think
empathetically we use the brain regions associated with pain. The constant use
of the brain’s pain neural pathways leads to feelings of burnout; empathy is not
sustainable. Because compassion is connected to feelings of love, we are
nourished and the brain is primed for achievement. Research focused on a
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dopamine-processing gene known as DRD4, for instance, has shown that the
more compassionate a classroom environment becomes, the greater the level of
learning that occurs.
Compassion is commonly accepted as a quality of a “good” person, but only
recently have we begun to make the connection between compassion and
success. I started to make the connection when I was a counterintelligence agent
for the military. During my service, I noticed that the best agents were the ones
who made time to help other agents. Because they assisted fellow agents, they
had a large network of colleagues who would in turn help them and “have their
back” even in the most difficult situations. By helping others, these
compassionate agents built trust with the members of their team, and that helped
them to make better tactical decisions. Over time, compassion has become the
focus of my professional and personal life, and scientific research has confirmed
what I had anecdotally realized: compassion is the foundation for success.
Success is defined as the accomplishment of an aim or purpose, and being
successful means different things to different people. Whether you are trying to
get a promotion, reach a financial milestone, complete a degree, or help a child
learn to read, compassion will help you to accomplish your goal more efficiently
and effectively, and it will make the achievement more enduring, fulfilling, and
rewarding. Compassion is win-win. It will help you to be successful, and it will
help solve problems and create opportunities for others. The ripple effect takes
over from there, spreading success throughout the community. I call people who
achieve success by helping others compassionate achievers. It is never lonely at
the top if you are a compassionate achiever.
Throughout my professional life, from my military service to my current
teaching position, I’ve noticed that compassion has been one of the most
underappreciated but consistent characteristics of successful people across a
wide range of occupations. People usually mention grit, courage, strength, and
intelligence when they discuss success—but not compassion. One of the reasons
I wrote this book is to help people recognize the link between compassion and
success and to demonstrate why compassion should be brought into our
discussions of what enables individuals and groups to achieve their goals and
overcome difficulties.
Part of my work over the last several years has been focused on building
compassion on the local, national, and global levels in an effort to find ways to
successfully address problems in areas ranging from education to policing. I’ve
been trying to weave compassion into the activities and discussions involving
every aspect of daily life anywhere I can, primarily through my work as the
founding director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity and Innovation
(CCCI) at Western Connecticut State University.
Launched with seed money from the Dalai Lama, the CCCI states its purpose
as “to create awareness within the university as well as the regional and global
communities about the importance of compassion, creativity, and innovation in
daily and professional life.” The CCCI works with local high schools to address
homelessness; coordinates with the Charter for Compassion International, an
organization founded by bestselling author Karen Armstrong to establish and
sustain cultures of compassion locally and globally; and helps colleges around
the world become universities of compassion. I have been asked to lead
roundtables as well as help employ compassion in organizations ranging from
police and social-service departments to schools and hospitals. I’ve helped
mayors, through the Charter for Compassion International, find ways to become
designated “cities of compassion,” which place compassion at the forefront of
the discussion to generate policies and address problems in their locales. We
know now that compassion builds successful businesses, governments, schools,
and civic communities.
With this book, I hope to inspire you to be a compassionate achiever and
give you the tools to be an agent of compassion in your community. We need
compassionate achievers and compassion in general now more than ever. The
National Center for Education Statistics reports that there has been a 21 percent
increase in bullying since the center began tracking it in 2003. A child is bullied
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every seven minutes, and 160,000 children in the United States miss school
each day for fear of bullying; 1 in 10 kids drop out of school altogether because
of bullying. Clearly, we need more compassion in our classrooms.
Our boardrooms could do with some as well. Some companies consider
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“nice” a four-letter word and are encouraging their employees to practice
“radical candor” or “front-stabbing” and to be as critical as they want. The costs
of such frankness, or what I would consider incivility, are many. In the latest
survey about the state of civility in America, for example, 70 percent of
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Americans believe “that incivility in America has risen to crisis levels” and
“even more alarming is that 81 percent believe uncivil behavior is leading to an
increase in violence.” Incivility causes stress, which in turn creates a multitude
of health problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease,
depression, and other mental and physical illnesses, and the health costs to
individual Americans are not only obvious but also increasing. Stress from work
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alone is estimated to cost American businesses approximately $300 billion each
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year. Extra costs to businesses come from worker turnover due to incivility in
the workplace: over a third of Americans have said that they experienced
incivility at work and 26 percent of them have quit their jobs because of it.
In addition to spreading compassion, I hope to alter the common perception
of how to achieve success. For too long, we’ve heard that it’s a “push or be
pushed” world. It’s dog eat dog out there in the “real” world. Compassion costs
too much. It means having to sacrifice something to help another. It’s a zero-sum
game of resources, whether of time, money, or space; your loss is another’s gain;
you have to give up something to help another. Countless times I’ve heard the
argument that you have to choose between being kind and being successful. The
science shows that such thinking is false and that it is easier, more fulfilling, and
more sustainable to be a compassionate achiever.
Yet our children are learning that you can be either successful or someone
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who helps others, but you can’t be both at the same time. “Almost 80 percent”
of middle-and high-school students, according to a 2014 study by Harvard’s
Graduate School of Education, ranked “high achievement or happiness” over
“caring for others.” The report’s authors highlight a “rhetoric/reality gap”—a
mismatch between what parents and teachers say is important and what children
and students see adults do—as “the root” cause of the student rankings. Our kids
are shifting into a black hole of self-absorption, and our communities are
becoming more violent and less productive, because we are not modeling
compassionate behavior.
It’s time for this to change. This book shows not only that we should “rank”
caring for others at least as important as success, but that when we do, our
success is greater and more sustainable. And our individual success makes our
community stronger.
My hope is that compassion becomes your lodestar and that with the help of
the ideas on the following pages, you never feel lost. No matter who you are or
what the context is, compassion is always an option—the best option.