Reimagining compassion as power | Tim Dawes | TEDxSeattle

[Music] okay true story eight friends gathered around a backyard dinner party in Washington DC there celebrating a restaurant one of them had just opened it was about 10:00 p.m. there's a fellow there named Michael he had his wife and daughter and he was talking to his wife when he noticed a hand in the barrel of a gun come between them a man of medium build in a clean sweat suit stepped up and pointed the gun at his daughter and then pointed the gun at his wife and looked Michael in the face and said give me your money or I'm gonna start effing shooting and it was an odd coincidence that no one that the party had any money so they started casting around trying to figure out what they were gonna do to dissuade this man and the first thing that they came on was guilt what would your mother think of you didn't work I haven't got anything mother so now it's tense and Michael's looking around and he's saying someone's going to get hurt maybe everybody at which point a woman named Christina stepped up and tried a different tack hey we're all celebrating she said why don't you sit down and share a glass of wine Michael said it was like a switch flipped you could feel it the man took the glass of wine damn that's a good glass of wine Michael offered him the bottle he put his gun in his pocket reached for some cheese he said hey could I have a hug Christina hugged him Mike's wife hugged him how about a group hug they all huddled around him gave him a hug and when they let him go he said I'm sorry and walked out with this glass of wine so what happened there Michael says he knows what happens it was a miracle and you can see why he would think that but I want to propose something different happened I want to propose that was compassion done powerfully and by compassion I don't mean the casual phrases that we throw off I don't mean I feel terrible for you I can't imagine how you feel or I know just how you feel I don't mean that I mean finding and meeting fundamental needs and by fundamental human needs I don't mean a glass of wine a chunk of cheese and a stack of cash I mean those universal things that we feel we've got to have to survive as tribal animals so I mean sure safety and security but also affection connection being seen and heard belonging so we don't know what the gunman needed that night we may never know whatever it was Christina may have stumbled on it by accident or by instinct but he wanted it more than money and it was strong enough to deflect a bullet and maybe save a life and maybe more so the question to us becomes wouldn't it be great if we could marshal that and create those results in critical situations and it wasn't a miracle wouldn't it be great if we were adept at handling human interactions so that we could keep conflict from escalating or so that we could sidestep it all together and in my experience we can and what that takes is reimagining compassion not as kind of simple warmth or kindness but instead a set of concrete practices that you can use when you don't want to get into a test of wills that you can use when you're afraid that force will fail or escalate or backfire pretty simple set of practices so listen for a call for help share empathy and share options how would that look well here's an example that comes from work that I've done in healthcare comes up pretty often how do you cope with a patient or a family member who's really upset this comes from work that I did in a youth mental health clinic in a really really difficult part of town so there's a woman in the lobby and she's a patient's mother and she's screaming and yelling and stomping she's yelling at her kids you better get the hell over here you better sit your butt down you better listen to your mother and she's yelling at the receptionist you better get me in to see my damn doctor they send out a security guard he says ma'am you can't talk that way she ignores them the lobbies electric so put yourself in that situation what are you gonna do if you're like most people you're gonna try to get her to calm down and that's what David tried he was the therapist who had to go out and deal with her he said ma'am I need you to calm down you're right you're right didn't work failed utterly so what we want to get clear on is why it failed and the reason that it failed is that he was dealing at the level of actions not at the level of deep-seated needs that we've been talking about so imagine a bull's-eye that has needs at its center and actions at the periphery here's the problem this woman comes in and you can tell she's got some really deep-seated needs yes so she tries to come up with an action plan that will meet those needs and when she comes up with one she gets attached to it becomes if only if only I can carry out these actions I'll get these needs met and so those actions stand in place of those needs so when David walks up and says you can't do those actions he becomes an enemy that's coming between her and what she needs and two things happen he becomes an enemy someone's standing between her and her needs and she escalates so she won't listen to him and she escalates so what's the alternative the alternative is to go through that process that we talked about listen for a call for help and that means thinking about that dynamic that we talked about before and bypassing actions and going to need so looking at that woman and saying she is not an opponent that I need to stop she is a person with needs that she needs badly and she's afraid she's going to fail and that flips a switch in me and I begin to get more open then I can exchange empathy with her so essentially that means going to this person that I used to see as an opponent and saying what do you need and you can use emotions as a guide so if I'm getting my needs met I'm some kind of happy if I'm not getting my needs met I'm some kind of suffering I'm in pain or I'm angry so David steps up to this woman and says you seem really upset that's the emotion do you need attention that's the knee she didn't thank him right because that's the point she's been trying to get across for 30 minutes but if he can keep that up if he can keep up acknowledging her needs and acknowledging her feelings she'll experience that as empathy a switch will begin to flip in her and she'll begin to open up and what David found out when that happened was that there was a lot of fear behind this woman's anger her eldest son had just been thrown out of his third daycare for aggression essentially for bullying and she didn't see how she was going to get him care and put food on the table so she was near tears now that David understands that he's faced with a whole different problem than he thought he was so now he can begin to share options with her what looked at first like it was a demand for her to get in to see her doctor now shows up is something that can be solved the whole variety of ways we can call your daycare center and explain to them what's going on we can get a referral to another agency we can call your neighbors and see if we can enlist them and there are other options so there are a whole variety of options and that's important because what we're driving with with this form of compassion is collaboration it's not domination it's not intimidation it's not submission and it's not compromise this isn't yell quieter this is a new set of options that didn't seem to be on the table before we could talk to each other and now model that I've just laid out to you works really well one on one and it works across domain so it works all throughout healthcare but we've also discovered that it works with parents who want cooperation from their kids or mothers who want a better experience of life with her mother or an executive who's got a corporate initiative and is trying to get cooperation from another executive who doesn't know it to them so it transfers across domains but you might ask yourself okay good it works with friends and family it works with colleagues works with customers that's nice what about people who hate you what about your enemies and it's great that it works one on one but we have systemic issues what about systems does it work on the system-wide basis and Connie rice might have been asking herself those kinds of questions a few years ago Connie rice is a civil rights attorney and activist in LA and her lawsuits have brought in better than 10 billion dollars in damages as she's tried to protect and fight for communities like the Watts neighborhood in LA you may be familiar with the Watts neighborhood it's got a tough history that's a place that people described as a cross between a tenement and a dilapidated army barracks in 1965 you might remember the riots ended up in 34 deaths and 40 million dollars in property damage and when you're talking about property damage as a result of riots in your neighborhood you're talking about rocks and bullets and broken glass and fire riots again following Rodney King's arrest in 1991 this time 55 deaths and a billion dollars in damages it's a tough neighborhood in the 80s and 90s there were so many homicides in this neighborhood that parents took to having their kids sleep in the bathtub and the police responded with paramilitary campaigns you may remember cops and riot gear campaigns that went by names such as crash or operation hammer and it was rape as a result of those campaigns and the Rodney King incident Connie rice went to war in her words went to war with the LA Police Department and began to launch lawsuit after lawsuit after law suit and was successful until she stopped and you might wonder why she stopped after 20 years and the reason was she looked at that neighborhood and said this will never be enough these lawsuits will never end you cannot legislate behavior change this community I'm trying to protect is segregating and in her words turning into a killing zone so what do you do she said this problem will be solved with empathy and compassion over the course of 18 months she interviewed nine hundred police officers think of what an act of courage that is to go into the heart of a group that you've been fighting for 20 years and ask what do you need and what she heard was fear beneath her brutality time and time again MS Rice I'm terrified a black man MS Rice you know those black men they come out of prison they have that great Hulk strength I'm afraid they're going to kill me can you teach me how not to be afraid of black men how tough is that to hear from a group of people who've pulled over your neighbors pull them out of their cars thrown them on the ground and search them with no provocation and her response to that was not labeling them but saying to me and my community that sounds like racism to you it doesn't it's a true expression of fear and any solution that we got that we're gonna come up with that's gonna work has got to work for my community and it's got to work for you as well so we need to work together there's a model of courage so they came up with a new model of policing they brought together the community civil rights advocates the police force and they came up with a four pronged model of policing police hanging out in the neighborhoods tutoring kids setting up sports teams and even setting up health screenings and you got to ask yourself come on this is a this is a gang torn neighborhood this is a neighborhood with a paramilitary presence in it and you're gonna form study groups and health screenings how did that work in Nickerson gardens where it was piloted sixty-six percent drop in property crime ninety percent drop in physical crime that means people getting hurt the Watts neighborhood is still torn by struggle between police and the residents but overall seventy percent drop in homicides been very effective held up as a model around the country and that model that we talked about that model of interacting of showing compassion and empathy works system-wide in other areas as well it works when for example you're trying to reduce recidivism among prison inmates and it's been shown to be effective at fighting bullying in school districts where zero-tolerance policies fail so it generalizes what's the take away compassion is power compassion is not what you fall back on when force fails compassion if done deliberately can turn enemies into allies and when that happens you're solving different problems that you started with and you're facing solutions that weren't on the table and weren't in your imagination when you start it compassion espouse so what does that mean to you I don't know what part of the world you're trying to change or what change you may feel being thrust upon you right now but wouldn't it be great to be powerful wouldn't it be great if you could create results like that at critical times and it wasn't a miracle and you can you can win and other people don't have to lose you can create change and you don't have to force people and the process can be healing so how do you start next time your toe to toe with somebody whether that's face to face or whether that's over twitter or over facebook or whatever social media you have next time you're face to face with someone who opposes you who threatens you who annoys you who angers you whose you see as an enemy consider that the four most powerful words that you can use may not be this will not stand it might be what do you need thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 17,548

Rating: 4.959322 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Education, Communication, Community, Compassion, Criminal justice, Empathy, Law, Leadership, Learning, Psychology, Relationships, Social Change, Social Interaction, Social Justice, Society

Id: E_guy-i2BTE

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2017