The following is an excerpt from Lisa Earle McLeod’s The Triangle of Truth: The Surprisingly Simple Secret to Resolving Conflicts Large and Small, which was released earlier this month. McLeod describes the Triangle of Truth thus:

Instead of trying to compromise in the middle, or the more common scenario, fight about who’s right and who’s wrong, the Triangle of Truth provides a model for redirecting your energy. It points you towrd a solution at the top of the triangle that honors the truth on both sides.

It is the Buddha’s middle path, the perfectly tuned guitar string, and as Lisa Earle McLeod explains below, a more sane approach to sales.

Hold Space for Other Perspectives Solving the Your Agenda Versus My Agenda Quagmire BY LISA EARLE MCLEOD

“At a certain point it gets to be about me, right?”

He was a seasoned salesperson who had been in the business for years, and when he asked me this question near the end of the seminar I was giving, I knew that he was struggling.

It was a legitimate question. After spending the better part of two days practicing how to get inside the mind of the customer, and being constantly reminded by me, “This isn’t about you, this is about the customer,” the poor fellow was wondering if he was ever going to get to pitch his product.

In his way of thinking, you could either organize your conversation around the customer’s world or you could talk about what you were trying to sell. He certainly saw the benefits of asking the customer questions and learning about their goals, to better frame up his point. But as he succinctly pointed out, “You’re there to sell them something. At a certain point the call is eventually going to have to be about that.”

This was a smart, well-intentioned, nice guy who was trying to do right by his company, his customers, and also his family. However, like many of us, he believed that he had to choose between two agendas. It’s either going to be about me, or it’s going to be about you. We might go back and forth during the conversation, but at the end of the day, I need to accomplish something and I’m going to make sure I get it done.

And that’s the quagmire.

We often think, in fact we’re frequently told, that the most effective way to achieve our objectives is to single-mindedly focus on our goals. A goal orientation itself is not a bad thing. However, problems arise when we become so focused on our own goals that we don’t leave space for anyone else’s. We become so determined to get our way that we often alienate the very people we are trying to convince.

How many times have you seen someone so eager to prove their point that nobody else stands a chance? Sometimes even people who agree with them are turned off when it becomes obvious that all they care about is getting their way.

On the flip side, many of us have also experienced the frustration of being so accommodating to others that our own agenda is completely forgotten, which only breeds anger and resentment over time.

The Triangle of Truth model provides a way for you to assimilate your agenda with the agenda of someone else, without losing sight of either person’s set of objectives. The Triangle model enables you to jettison the either/or thinking that causes us to focus exclusively on ourselves or to forgo our needs in favor of the other guy.

The belief that we have to choose between our agenda and the other guy’s is a common problem. It’s reinforced by our culture and by political parties that stress beating the opponent more than actually solving the problems. By an educational system that expects teachers to pour mountains of information into their students’ heads without providing the time or space for the students to add their own thoughts. And by advertising campaigns that spin out sexy thirty-second pitches, encouraging us to buy something today before we have time to think about whether or not we really want or need it.

Is it any surprise that the well-intended salesman is wondering when it’s going to be about him? Everywhere he turns he hears a one-way pitch from someone else. He might have spent two days in my seminar being taught how to ask questions and listen, but I guarantee you the majority of communication from his company is all about making quota and how great their products are.

The idea that we have to choose between our agenda and someone else’s is reinforced at multiple levels, and it’s also the default setting of our own minds. But people who can rise above this tendency and think bigger than just their own agenda actually have more success accomplishing their goals.

Excerpted from TriangleofTruth by Lisa Earle Mcleod
© 2010 by Lisa Earle Mcleod
A PERIGREE BOOK
Published by the Peguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All rights reserved.

Author Bio

Lisa Earle McLeod is an author, columnist, keynote speaker and business consultant. The founder and principal of McLeod & More, Inc, she specializes in sales and leadership training. Her newest book, The Triangle of Truth, has been cited as the blueprint for “how smart people can get better at everything.” Visit TriangleofTruth.com for a short video intro.

The best part of working at 800-CEO-READ, other than the lovely and intelligent people surrounding me, is the amount of lovely and intelligent books surrounding me. We are all ridiculously fortunate here to be able to pick up random books at random moments throughout the day and see if they speak to us. Most don’t, but the ones that do… oh, the ones that do. It is a marketplace of ideas, except, you know, they’re all free. Imagine Adam Smith and Karl Marx getting together for a beer with Santa Claus… it’s kind of like that.

Today I happened upon Louis Menand’s new book from W.W. Norton, Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. It was just sitting there on a table, not even a business book, not all that attractively designed, but looked like it might have some gems in it—and, boy howdy, did it! I’d like to share the first paragraph of that book with you:

Knowledge is our most important business. The success of almost all our other business depends on it, but its value is not only economic. The pursuit, production, dissemination, application, and preservation of knowledge are the central activities of a civilization. Knowledge is social memory, a connection to the past; and it is social hope, an investment in the future. The ability to create knowledge and put it to use is the adaptive characteristic of humans. It is how we reproduce ourselves as social beings and how we change—how we keep our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds.

I’d just like to highlight that first sentence and a half once more:

“Knowledge is our most important business. The success of almost all our other business depends on it…”

That could be the motto of our company (any company, really).

You may notice something new on the front page of our website (and if you don’t, make sure to scroll down below The Daily Blog). There in the middle of the page you can opt in to receive our new (!) email newsletter, The Keen Thinker. Those of you who have been following us or have been our customers for many years may be familiar with the name, The Keen Thinker. For a couple of years we did offer a paper newsletter by the same name, and when we were exploring the different ways to reconnect with our customers, offering them a quick look at what’s new here at 800-CEO-READ and which current business books are ‘don’t-miss’, we kept coming back to the name. We believe it really represents what we are trying to do with this newsletter: provide you with information to make you a keener business thinker. There are 11,000 business books published each year. There is endless information about business being pumped out onto the Internet each day. After 25 years in the book selling business, 800-CEO-READ can act as a filter for all of that information, while, hopefully, inspiring and entertaining you at the same time.

Want to take this month’s newsletter for a test drive? Click here: The Keen Thinker v.1

If you’d like to receive your monthly edition of The Keen Thinker, please sign up today! We promise that The Keen Thinker will continually offer insider information on new books you should be reading, current trends in business thought and even an opportunity to win some free books. Also? An opportunity to get to know us at 800-CEO-READ a little better, so that we, in turn, can get to know you better.

We received the following post from Frances Cole Jones, author of How to Wow and The Wow Factor. She also wrote a ChangeThis manifesto, The Wow Factor is You, that went live just one week ago. Without further ado, ladies and gentleman, Frances Cole Jones…

I’ll See That and Raise You BY FRANCES COLE JONES

Every New Year’s Eve I make a practice of choosing a slogan that embodies my attitude for the year ahead. A few years ago that slogan was, “Don’t Ask Permission.” The thought behind it was that we shouldn’t wait for people to tell us we’re good enough, creative enough, educated enough, smart enough. We need to decide these things and then demonstrate that they are true—we are the only person whose permission is needed to become our best self.

This past year I chose, “I’ll see that and raise you.” As many of you know, this is a phrase used in poker when you’re willing to take your bet to the next level. Little did I know when I picked it how often I would return to it as a rallying cry, for 2009 has been a year riddled with health issues, bizarre betrayals, and the unexpected deaths of several of my most dearly beloved.

It seems the universe took me at my word.

As I write, I’m thinking many of you had a similar year: a roller coaster ride composed not of breathless anticipation interspersed with high-energy delight but of low-grade dread interspersed with adrenaline-surging fear. And I don’t know how you approached your unexpected, unwanted challenges, but I can tell you my frequent fallback positions were resentment, sadness, anger, shock, distress, confusion, fear…

The hodgepodge of what it means to be human.

I also don’t know what techniques you employed when you found yourself in the grip of these emotions; what I found critical to handling these situations with a modicum of grace was the wholesale indulgence of my resentment, anger, shock, confusion…

Yes, you read that correctly. When I felt them I did more than acknowledge them: I indulged them, wallowed in them, asked them to move in and redecorate.

Why? Because I discovered this was the fastest way to get them to leave.

Here’s what I got the idea:

Jalalud’din Rumi says,

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

I found this true: attempting to keep these feelings at bay only meant they crept up on me at inopportune moments. Choosing to name them, invite them in, allow myself to feel them, meant they moved in, and moved on, far more quickly.

The other critical element was accepting on a visceral level that feelings aren’t facts. Just because I was feeling something didn’t make it so. I needed to look at the data.

Additionally, I came to understand that feelings weren’t green lights. Feeling something also didn’t mean needing to do something. Most of the time, the most effective thing I could do was to breathe in and out, then change my focus.

So while I haven’t yet decided, “Breathe in, breathe out, change focus,” is the slogan for 2010, it’s certainly on the table.

Because I see that and raise you.

I got the record from a flea market in Richmond, Illinois when I was in high school. It sat in my stacks for years, rarely really listened to. I had, after all, heard the speech many times before, in school and on television. It was his “I Have a Dream” speech, the “Let Freedom Ring” speech. I knew it… we all did. It is as integral a piece of American history as the speech that Jack posted earlier today—Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

It was upon coming home from work on Martin Luther King Day, probably around eight years ago, that I decided to give King’s speech another listen. I opened a beer, scoured the record shelf, found the record, dusted it off and threw it on the turntable. I was only half-listening at first, letting the workday fall off my shoulders, but the speech Martin Luther King gave on August 28, 1963 at the March on Washington isn’t something you can half-listen to for long. It was a speech that the people’s representative’s in Washington couldn’t half-listen to, either. It forced them to take notice, demanded action and, along with the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom it was given at, is often credited with helping build momentum to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It is a speech that, it turns out, I hadn’t really heard before… not as I was hearing it then. As the measured, ministerial vibrato in which King spoke started to shake me out of distraction and the words started to sink in, my eyes started to well up (and I’m not one normally prone to tears). It is a speech that breaks your heart before it begins to heal it, and that shone a light on the break in our country in the hope of healing it. Before speaking of the promise of his dream, the part we are all so familiar with, he spoke of the nightmare so many were living through. Before envisioning a day when freedom would ring from every mountainside, he spoke of a nation mired in the “quicksands of racial injustice.” Speaking of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Dr. King said that “It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity,” but quickly noted that, in spite of that, “one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” King had a great grasp not only of American history, but of moral history. He spoke of America’s great promise to the world, and of it’s default on that promise to its own citizens:

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Listening to Dr. King’s voice coming through the crackles of the record that day, and hearing the voices calling back to him from the crowd, I could almost feel, in the room with me, that arc of history he later spoke of when he said “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Dr. King did as much during his lifetime as anyone to bend that arc, even though his assassination cut his work short and his dream is far from realized. We are still working on it, though—societally and individually—and it is powerful when we get it right.

I listen to that record every MLK Day now, and would humbly urge you to listen to any speech of King’s today, or pick up a copy of his 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait.