What If Everyone Is Doing Their Best? (TPTC Preview III)

In the hope it might support you in dealing with the uncertainty and complexity of the current events surrounding coronavirus, I have decided to share several parts of my forthcoming book, The Power To Choose, a book about growing more skilful at dealing with complexity and uncertainty. This article is part of that; you can read it without having read any of the other parts, but if you want to read the preview in order: click here to read the first part or click here to find links to all the articles and PDF versions of the preview.

If this book is about, as I wrote in the introduction, living more and more as our Higher Selves – the person we are on our best days, when we are skilful, responsive and graceful as we interact with the world – then one of the most important areas of our lives to explore is how we interact with one another. If this book is about giving our gifts, about thriving in complexity and about separating ourselves from our patterns and evolutionary instincts, then one of the most important places to explore is how we relate to other people. And if there is one place where most of us want to make things better – and not make things worse – it is in our relationships with the people who matter to us. Indeed, much of Parts Two and Three of this book concern how we relate to other people, both inside our minds and outside in the world. There’s a reason for that.

We humans are ultra-social animals. For many millennia, our ability to cooperate and relate to one another has been what kept us alive. From tribes hunting on the plains to the many modern tribes, like the organisation we work in or the sports team we support, we are bound into powerful groups which have an enormous impact on our lives. The number of interactions each of us has with other people in an average week is many, and any of these – whether with someone we live with, or someone we meet once and may never see again – has the potential to affect our day, to affect our work, to affect our world. If you’re anything like me, you will have seen evidence for this often and regularly across your life. You will have seen it in the times you have fumed for hours about an inconsiderate stranger, and in the times when you have been cheered up by a joke told to you by a checkout worker in a shop you only visit once a year. You will have found your days affected by the postman you see every week and the sibling you have known since you were born. The relationships with those around us can influence us in so many ways, including restricting or releasing our Higher Selves. Indeed, one way to think about your Higher Self is in relation to others: were you the person you are proud of, who you want others to see you as? Were you the person you want to see reflected in the eyes of those around you?

It is Our Response to Others That Affects Us

In Chapter One, I shared the idea that we can choose, inside and out, and in particular how the way that we choose to think can affect our experience of life. It is up to each of us, then, to choose to think in ways that allow us to behave more and more in the ways we would want to on our best days. As I took this idea out into the world, it swiftly became apparent that the way I related to others was often causing me anxiety and stress and making me less effective in the world: less skilful at influencing and communicating and more often caught up and unable to act due to worry or frustration. Just as in Chapter One I suggested that it is often resisting what is here in any moment that causes us suffering, in this chapter I will argue that how we choose to respond to others can have an enormous impact on our relationships and our lives.

Details and stories about that follow, but for now it is enough to ask: are there places where your interactions with others are affecting your mood, your life and what is happening for you? And if this changed, would your life be easier, happier or less stressful? Would better relationships with those around you help you get more done in the world? More, would you be behaving more often in alignment with the kind of person that you want to be? Would you spend more of your time as the adult, clear, creative version of you? Would you act more as your Higher Self?

For most people, the answers here are yes. So at this point I will share with you the most useful tool I have found for dissolving the feeling of lack and adversity that can come in our reactions to others. It is the most useful idea I know for shifting into a place of love, calm, strength and possibility in our relationships with other people. It is a question:

What if this person is doing their best?

I am by no means the first person to ask this question – I stole it directly, in fact – but it is the frame which allowed me to develop an idea and a practice fundamental for me in living a life of possibility. After choosing to ask this question many times, the idea has now slipped into my subconscious, staying there as a foundation for the way I live.

This question and others like it have fundamentally changed my relationships and enabled me to live far more as my Higher Self. My Higher Self is loving, caring and patient, yes. But when I am my Higher Self, I also try to stand up for what is right, be direct, and speak the truth even when it is sometimes uncomfortable. Holding these things in balance isn’t easy, and I have struggled with it all my life: how can I be caring and patient whilst also being direct and sharing uncomfortable truths? How can I stand up for myself without slipping straight away into my pettier or more harmful patterns and reactions? It turns out that all of these things are easier when choosing a particular assumption; it turns out that all of it is easier when I assume that the person I am speaking to is doing their best.

When I Can’t Sleep

One of the starkest examples of this assumption in my life comes from perhaps the first time that I truly realised the potential of putting ideas like the ones in this book into practice. I was lying awake, unable to sleep. Time was ticking on. Midnight gone, 1am approaching, then passing. My morning alarm and a day of work were getting closer and closer. My mind wouldn’t stop whirring and, more than that, my chest was full of tension. A sense of breathless tightness, of being trapped, so familiar to me at the time.

It is a feeling I think of as a contraction and it is so often a signal of being out of my Higher Self, being in a place of scarcity. Sometimes when that feeling comes upon us we can’t draw the line of cause and effect. Then we have to really engage our curiosity about ourselves, which I will discuss more in Chapter Three. But this time I knew the origin, and it was a conversation on Twitter. Not with just anyone, but with two people I know and respect in real life. Two people who I’d spent many hours in the company of. I had retweeted an article about the decline in absolute poverty in the world which felt like good news (because it’s gone down a lot!). As part of my interest in trying to see the truth in the world, rather than accept the negative story told by vast swathes of the media, it felt important to share that story. In return, I received a barrage of tweets from one of my friends, expressing how mad it made him, because of the authors of the article: he felt they were only sharing it to follow a pro-free market economics agenda and accused me of wilfully only sharing articles which pursued that same political agenda. I’ve just been back to the tweets now and even years later I can feel some of that same contracted feeling in my chest.

I suggested I was sharing it because it was good news but was accused by the second friend, arriving ten or eleven tweets into the exchange, of ignoring the point. Even now, years later, as I read back the exchange, I can’t help but read my messages as balanced and theirs as aggressive and angry and mean. Part of that, of course, is that I remember the impact this exchange had for me. I felt tiny, my views mocked, accused of things which weren’t true and unable to express what I wanted to. The medium of Twitter doesn’t help at times like this: the limit of 140 characters (as it was then) allows for headlines, but never for sophisticated or nuanced conversations. Not only that, but looking back I can see how I was struggling with new ideas: I had just seen, as I’ll talk about in Chapter Six, the incredible power of free market economics to transform the world and in particular to lift people out of poverty. As someone who had never really expressed any political views in the world in a big way, I had never experienced what it was like to do that and then feel the vitriol of someone who holds different ones.

Looking back, I can see that many stories were at play here: their assumptions about me, mine about them and, indeed, mine about me. After the exchange, I went to bed. But I definitely didn’t sleep.

Hours later, in the middle of the night, still awake, I switched my bedside light on again and saw the book The Art of Possibility, which I discussed in Chapter One, by the side of my bed. I had enjoyed reading it so much and thought, ‘This is a book of practices. There must be something in it to help me right now.’

I opened the book and scanned the headings, my eyes coming to rest on the chapter ‘Giving An A’. As the authors, Ros and Ben Zander, explain, this isn’t just a practice which can be used in a music college (as I described in Chapter One) and it isn’t always about giving yourself an A. When you have a difficult relationship, they suggest, what if you assume that this person deserves an A for their performance in that relationship? If you assume this, how does their behaviour look then? This, you can see, is a very similar question to the one at the core of this chapter: what if this person is doing their best?

In one of the most touching moments in The Art of Possibility, Ros Zander tells the story of how using this practice to think differently about her deceased father allowed her to understand his behaviour in a way she had never been able to understand when he was alive and which then allowed her to see new things which added up with her new story. If he was a grade A father, why, then, would he have done these things?

‘Well,’ I thought, looking at the book. ‘If these people are Grade A friends, why then would they be sending me these tweets?’ And the answer came back: a great friend would want their friends to understand the world. And, for me, a great friend would want the world to be a better place, to put in place the systems and policies which would improve it. At least, that’s a requirement I would have for someone who was going to be my Grade A friend. A Grade A friend would call their friends out if their friend was being misled or was behaving badly. A Grade A friend would want to help me understand more deeply.

And from this place, imagining these Grade A motivations for my friends, the feeling of contraction dissipated. Not completely, but these possible qualities in my friends were qualities I could get behind. I could see how they might be doing their best. Before the practice, I had assumed – and it was an assumption, no matter how well I may think I know these people – fury from them and judgment of me. I was telling myself a story that they thought I was stupid, naïve and foolish. I had assumed they were laughing at me together. And those things hurt.

Choosing to see them as Grade A friends made the whole thing look different. With the assumption that they were doing their best for me and themselves and the world, I could choose to look at these friends as people who wanted to challenge me and share their wisdom. I could see them as people, who were – perhaps – as they said, joking with me, playing with me. I could see them as people who want the world to be a better place for everyone rather than people hell-bent on making me feel awful, on picking on me, on bullying me into taking their viewpoint.

And, with that second set of assumptions, the sense of being trapped dissipated. The contraction opened. And, remarkably, I drifted off to sleep.

You can see how this different assumption, these different thoughts, made a positive difference for me. But you might also be wondering, what is the truth here? Well, sitting down years later, my best guess – and it can only be a guess – is that the ‘Grade A’ assumption wasn’t quite right, but that the truth lay somewhere much closer to that than to my initial assumption. These people, after all, are good people who I have spent many hours with. Overall, in the cold light of day, they like me. They do care about the world, about keeping me honest, about all those things in the ‘Grade A friend’ definition. And they weren’t particularly kind or skilful in how they acted.

By looking for a second story that could be behind their behaviour – giving them an A – I was able to make what I believe was a clearer and more truthful assessment of what was happening in the world. Before giving them an A, I was anxious and stressed and scared. Then, I changed my response to them by essentially asking What if they are doing their best? and my situation changed for the better. I could sleep and I didn’t believe the most hurtful things that I had been thinking previously, about me or about my friends. Without that shift this situation might have become resentment carried with me from that interaction into the next time I saw these people, as it has for me on many other occasions. Instead, it could dissipate. And in the end, I know that as my Higher Self, as the person I deep down want to be, the person I am when I am my best, I am able to have difficult conversations about things like politics. If one of these stories makes me feel judged and judge others, and it hampers my ability to make a clear and truthful assessment of what is happening, and it stops me having conversations I want to have, then that is not a story taking me towards my Higher Self. Better, by far, to choose something different.

My Life is Better When I Assume That People Are Doing Their Best

‘Giving an A’ could almost have been the title of this chapter, as it is an incredibly helpful way to unpack this chapter’s central idea. So, too, could one of the favourite maxims of writer and podcaster Tim Ferriss. ‘Never put down to malice what you can put down to incompetence or busyness,’ Ferriss often shares. This, too, is a wonderful way to check your assumptions and to give yourself a better chance of living in a space of possibility (instead of pent up judgment and fury and contraction).

Ferriss’s way of speaking about this often brings to my mind my experience with a colleague years ago. She would never reply in a timely fashion to my emails. It used to infuriate me. She clearly didn’t give the slightest damn about how hard my life was made by having to constantly chase her for things while she did whatever else it was she did. I had been feeling this tension and frustration over months of working with her, when a co-worker happened to observe that the colleague in question had thousands of unread emails in her inbox. Whether that was down to busyness or incompetence at managing her emails, it doesn’t matter. What was clear was that it was far more likely down to incompetence or busyness than that she didn’t care about or value my work specifically. It seems interesting that just like with my friends on Twitter, my instant reaction was to assume something deliberately malicious on the part of others. Assuming either incompetence or busyness or both was certainly preferable to the alternative story I had created: that she was making my life harder because she thought my work was so worthless or pointless that it wasn’t even worth replying to me. It’s much easier, after all, to be around, believe in or even like someone who is incompetent than it is someone who you believe actively dislikes you. Before long, I began to notice other ways in which this colleague was disorganised, and the incompetence angle seemed increasingly likely.[1] That enabled me to be more patient, develop better ways of working with her and even to give her support.

Both the Zanders’ practice and Ferriss’s idea are powerful tools for embedding this idea in your everyday life, but they weren’t what embedded the idea clearly and crisply into my mind. Instead, that happened when I went to see sociologist Brené Brown speak at the British Museum in London in November 2015. Brown is one of the most present and engaging speakers I’ve ever seen and, over the course of an hour or so, she made an audience of several hundred laugh, cry and change their perceptions and perspectives. She was there promoting her book, Rising Strong, an examination of what people who come back from adversity have in common.

‘What’s the question you have been asked the most about this book?’ asked the interviewer at the event.

Brown replied: ‘Well, it’s about “What if everyone is doing their best?” People say. “Do you really mean everyone? Even this jerk I work with?”’ You may be having similar thoughts as you read this chapter.

As Brown said this, we all laughed. The interviewer delved further and Brown relayed the story, which she also tells in Rising Strong, about how people who rise strong from adversity have something in common regarding their attitude to other people. In short, they live through the assumption that everyone is doing their best. In testing this (while internally thinking it was complete nonsense), Brown spoke to her husband Steve. He, it turned out, was among the strange group of people who held that view.[2]

‘Do you really think they are all doing their best? Really? Everyone?’ asked Brené.

Steve said: ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.’

Steve’s words gave me a message loud and clear. This is an assumption I can choose to make; an adventure I can choose to take. And, just like with my friends on Twitter, just like with my colleague who didn’t reply to my emails, if we choose to assume it, our lives are better. We see things more clearly and with more perspective, not distorted by how we wish they would be.

The message of this chapter can feel counterintuitive to our experience of life. Partly this is because many of us have spent years and years assuming the opposite: that people are selfish and that our first thoughts about their intention are correct.

It isn’t easy to change something that has been part of us for a long time and so for many people it isn’t easy to live with the assumption that others are doing their best, to hold onto it in the practicalities of daily life. But this assumption is something that has made my day-to-day life easier and more fulfilling and it has, as Steve said, enabled me to see things more as they are and less as what should or could be. It has enabled me to leave more and more experiences feeling happy and satisfied with the way I have responded, rather than wrapped in ‘I should have said X’ or ‘I wish I hadn’t said Y’, both of which were incredibly common experiences of mine but are now rare.

The Train Guard

It’s important to share that the practice of What if everyone is doing their best? isn’t just something that can be done in retrospect or in advance. It can be powerful in the moment; you can choose it, even in the heat of an exchange with someone else. Several years ago, my wife Emma and I were travelling back to London by train after visiting her family in the West Midlands.[3]

We had paid for Standard Class tickets, and had been assigned seat reservations in Coach D. However, when we got on the train, due to some problem which we didn’t quite understand, Coach D was the designated First Class carriage. We approached the guard on the platform and asked her what to do, and she told us to find some seats in an alternative carriage. Fine with us.

We calmly settled into some empty seats until, three or four stops later, the train arrived at Oxford. Suddenly, the train became very full and an elderly couple approached us with reservations for the seats we were sitting in. Of course, we let them sit down. By way of explaining why we were in their seats, we shared what had happened and the old man suggested going to sit in Coach D, even though it was First Class. ‘It’s their fault,’ he said.

By this point the carriage we were in was full and people were even sitting on the floor in the vestibules between carriages, so we took his advice and found two empty seats in First Class Coach D. We were both a bit anxious about this: we didn’t have a First Class ticket and so weren’t technically allowed to sit there. In the end, our worries came to fruition: the train guard came to check our tickets and explained that we needed to move as we hadn’t paid for First Class. His words were polite, but his manner was abrupt[4].

I could feel my response building in me with a sense of anger and injustice: ‘How can he say that to us? We’re in this situation because the train company messed up the reservations. And his colleague gave us terrible advice! It always gets busy at Oxford and she should have known that.’ It is worth pausing to notice how this reflects what Brené Brown’s husband said: I was judging the guard and his colleague and I was focused on what should be, not what was.

I said something first and then Emma started venting her frustration at the guard. As soon as Emma was in the conversation and I was just watching I could see what was happening: both she and the guard were preparing for an argument, getting ready to fight it out until one of them backed down.

Fred Kofman, an academic and leadership consultant who has held roles at Google and LinkedIn, gives a beautiful demonstration of what is happening in situations like this in a video published by Lean In[5]. In the video – about how to have difficult conversations – Kofman works with a volunteer from the audience. He asks her to hold her hand up in front of her, palm towards him. He then asks, ‘If I push… What do you want to do?’ and pushes his hand against hers, applying pressure towards her. Her response is immediate: to push back, without the need to even think about it. This is an instinctive reaction most of us have when someone pushes us: it’s like closing your eyes if something is dropping into them, or moving your hand to bat away an insect from your face, or being ticklish. It’s a part of being human: if someone pushes us, our instant natural instinctive response is to push back. Not just when someone pushes you physically, but also in relationships and conversations.

Back in Coach D, I caught what was going on. I said, ‘Just a sec, Emma.’ I took a breath and took a different point of view: this man is doing his best. If he’s doing his best then, underneath, he wants to help, because that’s what a train guard who is doing their best wants, that’s what a Grade A train guard does. He may have been frustrated by us or by other things in his day,[6] and as his frustration pushed up against us, we began to push back. Seeing this from the outside – and from the place of What if this person is doing his best? – I explained the situation we were in, the full sequence of events. He said, still irritably, ‘You should have come to me before and explained.’ At this point, I had to pause: he was pushing against me again and my instincts said, clearly and with a physical response in my body, ‘Push back’. That’s normal, that’s human. There were many questions that flew through my mind, some sharp words I could have shared with him, but instead I took another breath and chose – again – the adventure of What if he is doing his best?

‘We’re explaining now,’ I said, maintaining calm. ‘How can you help?’

It was strange to watch what happened next. I suspect, doing the job of a guard on a train, he isn’t used to people taking that line with him. He was gearing up for the fight which probably ends up with Emma and I either paying for a First Class ticket or standing in the vestibule fuming and complaining on Twitter. Instead, I could see him physically relax, switching out of pushing and into something different. He took our tickets and wrote on them ‘OK to stay in First Class,’ followed by the date and his signature. And there we sat, relaxed, for the rest of the journey.

I hope, from that example, you begin to see what might be possible. There would of course have been other ways to deal with this: we might have been able to batter him down without that assumption, through arguing or complaining. He might have relented. If we had complained furiously enough – to him or someone else – we might have got some money back, or even have got the train guard disciplined by his superiors. But here is why I think this assumption is so powerful. Those other options, maybe all of them, would have left Emma and I contracted in confrontation mode. And they would have left the train guard the same way. The confrontation mode in that case is physical: different chemicals are pumping in our body, different parts of our brains are engaged. That’s why he relaxed physically when I offered him the chance to relent by asking the question, ‘How can you help?’ He was shifting out of some version of the fight/flight/freeze response.[7]

When you think about confrontations or disagreements, or put yourself in my position with the train guard, one question you may ask is: why should it be my responsibility to do this, to take a breath and take responsibility? Why is it me and not the train guard who needs to do this? Well, the world would be a wonderful place if everyone had the nimbleness in every moment to shift a conversation away from unnecessary confrontation and vitriol. But none of us can do this all of the time. As I will share in Chapter Five, when I write about intimate relationships, even when both people are aware of the possibility of making a shift like this it won’t always happen: each and every one of us sometimes gets carried away in our instinctive reactions. So, when you can make the shift, when you have the awareness and nimbleness in the moment to do it, you should try. You should try because, in all the ways I shared at the start of the chapter, our interactions with others colour our days. If you have the skill and grace to handle a conversation with a frazzled train guard well, he is more likely to do the same later for other customers, or when he goes home to his family at the end of the day having had one fewer unpleasant interaction and one more positive resolution. Judgment, resentment and anger can ripple out; or connection, kindness and possibility can ripple out. We can choose. And that’s how we change the world, one interaction at a time.

Away From the Scarcity of ‘I’m Right and They’re Wrong’

If we had argued with the train guard, he might have changed his position. Maybe. Or maybe he would have pushed back furiously as we pushed at him, digging his heels in and stubbornly sticking to the point that we had not paid for a First Class ticket. And he would have been right. But Emma and I were right that the situation was confusing and difficult. And, he was probably right that we should have spoken to him earlier. And, we were probably right that his colleague shouldn’t have given us bad advice. But being right about those things didn’t solve our problems or his. Instead, by stepping back from the confrontation – and the sense of scarcity that comes from ‘I’m right and they’re wrong’ or ‘only one of us can be right here’ – we stepped into possibility. We did that through the assumption of What if he is doing his best? It allowed us to reach a conclusion that both he and we were happy with, and it allowed all of us to leave the situation feeling connected, in touch with each other and in touch with the higher parts of ourselves.

Pursuing an argument to ‘win’ the situation is a game for your ego alone. It’s a game for a lower part of you, an animal part. It’s a game for the child in you who lost and was embarrassed, humiliated and scared, who is still a part of you and wants to win now to heal the wounds of the past. I can tell you that it won’t heal the past. You might feel better for a few minutes, you might get what you want on the outside, but you will still, next time, ‘need’ to win. Instead, there is an opportunity to step into your Higher Self, to step past those difficult times you have lost and do something different, something good for yourself and the other, instead. Win together by assuming that they are doing their best.

Move Into The Dance

The truly remarkable thing about this practice is how often and how fast the behaviour of someone else changes when you change how you are and don’t even tell them what you are doing. That’s what happened with the train guard and I have seen it happen with clients, friends, shop assistants and, as I’ll share in Chapter Five, my wife.

One client who saw the change happen quickly was an entrepreneur a few years into a new business venture. Improving the client’s relationship with his founding business partner – fundamental to the functioning and future success of the business – was part of our work. In one session, as this came up, I shared the idea of What if everyone is doing their best? For the client, it landed best through the practice from The Art of Possibility: ‘What if I gave him an A? What if my business partner is not only doing his best, but what if I assume that he is doing his best to a standard that deserves a Grade A?’

Almost straight away, the client saw how he was not doing this. He found himself reading an email from his business partner with another member of their team and suddenly caught not only himself but also the team member assigning Grade C (at best) motives to the business partner. My client was able to catch this – taking a breath, as I did with the train guard – and read the email again from a different point of view. What happened over the next few weeks was spectacular: the client took a strong commitment to assign only Grade A motives and to listen for and acknowledge those motives carefully in his conversations. This took concentration and commitment, ignoring, often, how things had come across (in person or in writing) in favour of that assumption. The improvement in the relationship was as big as it was swift: over only a matter of days my client observed dozens of interactions that might have gone down the road of conflict, which had previously been a regular occurrence. Instead, these conversations were productive and the relationship between the two partners was strengthened: they were able to trust each other more, be more assertive and even be defensive with each other more, without the relationship suffering and without resentment being carried into other areas of their work and lives. As the quality of their conversations became more productive, both were able to assume more secure and well-defined roles in the organisation. The business results – which relied on both their strengths – soon followed.

This is precisely what happens next in Fred Kofman’s video about difficult conversations. After demonstrating the principle of how we push back when we are pushed, Kofman shares what happens if you do something different: if you can catch yourself pushing back and choose to behave differently, possibilities emerge. Kofman invites us to assume that if someone pushes against us in a conversation, they may be seeing something we don’t; he invites us to give them the benefit of the doubt. To demonstrate this, he moves with the woman’s push, and they begin to move together. Kofman is Argentinian, and they move into a tango. This is what I was able to do in those moments with the train guard, thanks to much practice with the assumption What if this person is doing their best? And this is what my client was able to do with his business partner with a conscious shift of emphasis in emails and meetings. By giving his business partner the benefit of the doubt instead of pushing back against him, they moved into the dance.

Are You Sure?

The process of shifting our perspectives isn’t always easy. The idea of What if they are doing their best? – and, underlying that, the assertion that people’s motivations may be different to what we initially assume – can be hard to hold onto. Our behaviour and our thoughts can be very settled, very stationary, very final, built up over many years of a certain way of seeing someone or something. The way through these most settled and stationary assumptions, I offer to you, lies in the seed of doubt, in the possibility that the certainty we feel may be what is holding us back. We’ll come back to the idea of a seed of doubt later in the book, in particular in Part Three.

The following piece of writing, by my father, Pete Armstrong, was instrumental in giving me the gift of less certainty. The question that exposes this lack of certainty, sows the seed of doubt and opens up possibility is the title of the piece: Are You Sure? It speaks to those times when we are sure our assumption is correct, stationary and final, and to the necessity of the seed of doubt.

Are You Sure? by Pete Armstrong (unpublished)

If you are a car driver you may have experienced certain behaviours from other drivers, and learned to label them.[8]

For example you may be driving along a rural A road and come up behind a steady stream of traffic. The road is single carriage-way and winding. Overtaking is not a safe option, and you settle back to be part of a convoy until the nature of the road changes.

However the driver who comes up behind you does not, apparently, see the situation in the same way. He is hanging on your tail and edging out into the road looking for a chance to shoot past you. You may well feel uncomfortably tense at his behaviour and notice other feelings and responses starting to rise in you.

You may well therefore feel relief when, at an opportune moment, he accelerates past you and pulls into the gap ahead. Because you are a careful driver, the gap ahead of you is quite large. However, the same is not true of all the cars ahead, and as you watch the driver make his hurried way up through the convoy, you see lots of sudden red brake lights as the car pulls into narrow gaps to avoid oncoming traffic.

If all the drivers were connected by radio, no doubt the airwaves would be full of complaints and invective: ‘stupid risk-taking’, ‘dangerous driving,’ ‘all BMW drivers are the same,’ ‘where are the police when you need them?’ ‘he’s going to die soon in a head-on, and he’ll deserve it.’

Perhaps most of the time, the driver in question would respond in similar vein: ‘get out of my way, losers,’ ‘it’s a free country, I’ll do what I like,’ ‘if you all drove like me, life would be more exciting,’ ‘all you little people, get back to your hovels and stop cluttering up the roads.’

But can you be certain what the response would be? Perhaps, just occasionally, you might hear the driver say something like, ‘I’m very sorry, but can you let me through? I’ve just heard my mother is dying in hospital, and I must get to her.’

In situations where critical judgement seems called for, you may like to ask yourself: am I sure?

Maybe, in the absence of radios, giving someone the benefit of the doubt is the correct choice.

It is hard for me not to think that my dad’s normal, careful driving might have given way to weaving in and out of traffic in the moment he found out his mother was dying. It’s hard not to imagine that mine would, too. And that for either of us, or someone else, it would be understandable even if not advisable.

What if this person is doing their best? allows us a way to shift in the moments when the sense of ‘uncomfortable tension’ rises. It’s the same if someone pushes in front of us in the queue at the supermarket or bashes us out of the way as they race for the train or down the street. Tension rises, and as this happens our quality of thinking falls. We are swept into the pushing match, sometimes with someone who by that point is out of sight, but who we hold onto through our tense and contracted reaction. Then, locked in an imaginary pushing match, our decision-making ability and our thinking gets worse. In a station or on the street perhaps this doesn’t matter so much. In a car, hurtling along the motorway at 70mph, having our thinking clouded is mighty risky. And what about when you are having a meeting with a colleague or a manager when your thinking is still polluted by the dangerous driver? Or what about when it’s your wife or husband or boyfriend or girlfriend whose behaviour has you locked in a sense of uncomfortable tension? If there was a shortcut out of that, to clearer and more effective thinking, wouldn’t you rather take it?

That shortcut is in the seed of doubt: are you sure? And it is in the question, What if this person is doing their best?

We all have these contractions, these animal or child-like behaviours. We all have these moments when someone pushes against us and we push back. But, am I sure? What if I had been through what they have? Or, what would I have to go through to be where they are? For you, it might have taken more than they have been through to do something like weave dangerously through traffic, or it might have taken less. It may be a story the same as theirs, or it may be different. But are you sure they don’t have a good reason?

If this was the best they could do in their situation, what might they have been through for that to be true? And if you shift to this perspective, what changes for you?

The Question of Values

In the final parts of this chapter, it’s important to address the question of ‘What does it mean to do our best?’ And the question, beyond that, of values, of what matters. This is important because we have to ask ourselves: if everyone is doing their best, where do we draw the line of what behaviour is acceptable and what isn’t?

The answer to these questions lies in the Deeper Self: the sometimes-unconscious parts of us, the patterns and instincts that can guide our behaviours without our even noticing. Contained here, if we look closely enough, are deep and core values, which can govern our behaviour and our attitudes to others and ourselves. Each of us holds different things as deeply important, and when we are at our best we honour these things in our behaviour: honouring these values is, in some ways, the definition of the Higher Self. In order to honour them, we need to know what they are, and discovering this isn’t always easy.

Our values can be covered and confused and numbed in our daily life. They are covered by our ego as it works to keep our sense of self safe from perceived harm. They are confused by ideas we learned explicitly and implicitly from our upbringing, which taught us how to stay safe and how to be loved. They are numbed by the habits we fall into and the grind of the day-to-day.

Sometimes, they are obscured by ideologies: from stories, from politics, from books, from philosophers, from friends. These ideologies give us a new set of beliefs and rules to live by. The experience of an ideology can be something like ‘If I follow these rules, then I am a good person.’ It could be the socialist ideology, the free marketeer ideology, the environmentalist ideology, the nationalist ideology or many more. Most of us fall foul of the powerful seduction of ideology sometimes, and no wonder: how wonderful to have an easy way to know what to think, what to believe, what to assume. I’ll share more about political ideologies and my journey navigating them in Part Three.

I suspect that in simpler times, it was possible to live out your life through the values of an ideology. In today’s complex world, however, at least for me, the inherent contradictions in each of the ones in which at different times I have found myself made that impossible. These contradictions are more visible in the modern world, exposed through the tools of the communication age and as they run up against the complexities of the challenges of the twenty-first century. Without the availability of these ideologies, we really only have one choice if we want to live a coherent life, one that feels in alignment with the truth as we see it. If we can’t rely on the rules of an ideology in order to know what makes us a good person, we need to reflect on what is deeply important to us. We need to choose how to live our life. This allows us more access to our Higher Selves: once I know what matters deeply to me, I can choose to honour it. It also guides us when we need to understand whether someone has crossed the line of acceptability with their behaviour. And, overall, it makes each of us individually and all of us together more fit for complexity. In the challenges to individuals and societies of the complex modern world, one single ideology or set of beliefs is never going to be sufficient. But if seven billion people do the deep work to understand what matters to them at their core as a human and then act out those things, perhaps we – individually and together – can face the challenges and do what is needed.

There are many ways to do this work to understand the values that are deeply important to you. You can start by simply asking yourself, in a moment when you feel calm and clear, ‘What is central to who I am?’ The answers might come back as concepts, behaviours or in other forms that are specific to you. Or you can consider the things which would make you sad at the end of your life: how would you have been or not been, what would you have done or not done, how would you have lived your life, that would leave you with sadness on your deathbed? Another valuable mine of data is to notice when in life you are frustrated or upset by others: what about their behaviour is upsetting you? Could it be that they are violating one of the things that matters deeply to you?

Defining your values isn’t the end of the journey, but it does open up space so that you can choose. It can guide your behaviour with yourself and with others; it can guide micro and macro decision-making in your life. But, because you are human, sometimes you won’t act in line with those values, no matter how clear you think they are. Sometimes you will slip out of that Higher Self, away from those values, because of the unconscious patterns and instincts contained alongside your values in your Deeper Self.

With all this in mind, we might then define ‘doing our best’ as: wrestling with those patterns and instincts to try to live up to and into our values, the battle each of us fights with the unconscious parts of our Deeper Selves to release our Higher Selves. This definition of ‘doing our best’, and our knowledge of how hard the wrestling match can be, can often be enough to give us compassion for someone who seems to be struggling to live as their Higher Self.

For many of us, perhaps even most of us, we mostly live in ignorance of the patterns and instincts that often govern our behaviour. I certainly did, until the involuntary stop I spoke about in the introduction woke me up and showed me something different. But once we know that this is happening, that our childhood patterns and evolutionary instincts guide our behaviour, this creates further implications for the idea of ‘doing our best’. Once we understand that these unconscious patterns are at play, then there is an imperative to step up, to do the work to understand your deeper self. Only by doing that work – which we will speak more about in Chapter Three – can you make sure that you really are doing your best. When we do the work, we make sure we have the best possible chance of winning that wrestling match with the more base patterns and instincts that are part of our Deeper Self. Then, we are able to live more as our Higher Self, respond more skilfully tomorrow than we did today, just as we responded more skilfully today than we did yesterday. That’s how we build our capacity, as individuals and societies, to respond to complex challenges. That’s how we know we are doing our best.

What if everyone is doing their best? can be a practice in uncovering our values and our Deeper Selves: developing perspective on ourselves through developing perspectives on others; looking at others to understand how they are doing their best can teach us things about how we are doing ours. I have sat in conversation with many, many people and I have heard their answers when I ask what is important to them and why. Those answers are heart-warming and inspiring: there is deep goodness in everyone I have spoken to about these things when we dig into their Deeper Self. Why, then, we might ask, do some people do things which are terrible, twisted or even evil? I believe this happens because some people lose the battle with their instincts and patterns, because their baser instincts and patterns take over, leaving their Higher Self hidden away and impossible to see. Or, sometimes, it happens because the patterns and beliefs and assumptions they hold are so thick, so twisted, so complex that they can no longer touch the heart-warming, inspiring, touching goodness at their core. Each of us have the potential for this: we all remember moments of cruelty and vindictiveness when we have done damage to others. That’s a part of life; that’s a part of being human. And that, again, is the importance of this work: how do we make sure we do that less this year than last year, and less next year than this?

What if everyone is doing their best? can therefore also be an exercise in deep compassion and in understanding of the human condition: through it you may come to understand what other people might have been through in order to do the things that look unpleasant (or even awful or evil) to us as outsiders to their experience of life. And as we continually do this, stretching ourselves to understand what others may have been through in order to do these things, we will sometimes see more clearly the ways that we, too, are victims of the patterns and beliefs and assumptions that we hold.

The scars humans take away from their interactions with each other can create the patterns and instincts of our Deeper Selves, which hold us back or sometimes lead us to act outside of our values and our Higher Selves. So it is particularly important to be sure that we are doing the work to understand our Deeper Selves and be as skilful in any moment we are relating to others. If we are going to call someone’s behaviour into question, to decide a certain behaviour is unacceptable, to stand up for our values against someone else, we need to do what we can to not add to the scars and patterns that they carry, to not make things worse as we do this. To call them out in a way that encourages them to do the work so that they will do better tomorrow than they did today. This takes us to the final part of this chapter: the distinction between guilt and shame.

Guilt and Shame

There could be an idea that assuming that everyone is doing their best is about giving people an easy ride. For some people, this may be a partial outcome, depending on the Higher Self they aspire to be. In my life, I have found that assuming that people are doing their best actually means that I can be more powerful and clear in my condemnation of those who, in my opinion, get it wrong. Further to this, I can be stronger and clearer in the way I conduct myself in arguments or disagreements and my communication at these times is more effective (although, I should add, I certainly don’t always manage to do this).

I suspect that some form of confrontation will continue to exist for all of us, even as we learn to act more and more as our Higher Selves[9]. For example, as we uncover our values and Deeper Selves, we may find that self-care and care for others are at the centre of how we live as our Higher Selves. If this is the case, there will come times when, in order live as our Hight Selves, in order to stand up for other people or for our values, we may come to a boundary that we cannot allow someone to cross. We may find ourselves saying: ‘Look, I know you are doing your best. I know something has led you here and I believe you are trying to act from your innate goodness. But this behaviour is hurting me, it is hurting you and it is hurting others and it has to stop. And if it doesn’t stop, then there are consequences.’

Brené Brown spoke about this at the talk I attended in November 2015. She described the example of a friend who drinks too much. Most of us can probably relate to this; someone who has been through a tough time, perhaps, or someone struggling with their life in some way, whose ability to control their drinking has slipped. They may embarrass you and upset you, or they may even upset or hurt someone you know, but you mostly forgive them because you know things have been hard and they are doing their best. I have seen people behaving like this, and I have undoubtedly behaved like this myself. But there may come a point where you have to say to your friend, for their good, for your good or for the good of others, ‘No, you have to stop now. This is too far. That is the boundary.' Perhaps to say something like what Brown said to a friend of hers. It might be: ‘I can be here for you, I can look after you, I can try to help you through this. But I can’t have you in my house, drunk like this, when others are here. It is hurting me and it is hurting others.’

Dealing with people who cross our boundaries brings to light a key distinction: the distinction of shame and guilt.

As a simple working definition, guilt is: you did bad, I did bad. Shame is: you are bad, I am bad. This may seem small, but is vital: there is almost no way back from ‘I am bad’. This is how I am. Forever. But from ‘I did bad’, there is the possibility to change.

Brown talks about shame as an epidemic in our societies. Shame is the story which keeps us trapped, keeps us contracted and keeps us away from a sense of possibility for ourselves and others. Shame stops us from reaching or even acknowledging that we have a Higher Self. Instead, we are left with the terribly permanent assumption that ‘I am bad’. From the seeming permanence of shame comes a story that I or you can’t possibly be a good person, ever. To a greater or lesser extent, this is the story that we tell when we blame, punish and hold our boundaries from a place different to ‘I believe you are doing your best’. However, when we use that assumption – even when stopping someone at our boundary with I believe you are doing your best behind what we say – we are not telling them that they are bad, we are telling them that deep down we believe they are good, doing the best they can in the moment. But, this time, we see that they did bad. This gives them the opportunity to change. This gives them ‘next time, things can be different’.

As Brown’s husband, Steve, said, What if everyone is doing their best? almost always enhances our judgment of others, making it clearer and more grounded in reality. This includes in condemning or calling out the behaviour of others, if or when we feel they have crossed a boundary. In the examples from earlier in this chapter, for example, clearer judgment might lead us to conclude that failing to organise your emails is not acceptable in an organisation, especially if it leads, say, to financial costs. We might also decide that some of the ‘jokes’ my friends made to me on Twitter were offensive or cruel or uncalled for. We certainly might decide that speeding through traffic in a dangerous way is beyond the line of what is acceptable whatever the intention and reasoning of the driver.

Importantly, What if everyone is doing their best? shifts us into judging what these people did and not who they were. It helps us be clearer and less tense as we say what might be a difficult thing to someone we may care about, and it allows us to treat people with the honour and understanding that we ourselves would want to be treated.

There are people in the world who need to be stopped, for their good or for the good of others. There will be times in your life where you will have to do that stopping, if you want to act as your Higher Self. It will take courage, but the assumption of this chapter will help you to be brave. As you do these things from the assumption What if this person is doing their best? you will increase the likelihood that you can express clearly and correctly the challenge you are facing and you will increase the likelihood that the person you are speaking to hears you and changes, because you are speaking to their behaviour and not their sense of self.

And through your courage, the courage to believe the best in others, to give them the benefit of the doubt, your relationships will be transformed.

How Do I Do This?

This whole chapter is an exercise in understanding the perspectives of others. And it is a practice: it’s something you have to do repeatedly to give yourself the nimbleness to respond in the moment. Sometimes, if you just remind yourself of this idea – when frustrated with the slow service in a coffee shop, or when someone pushes in front of you in a queue – the situation will shift for you and you will be able to respond more patiently and get the results you want. Or, pausing before you send an email, you may notice, ‘Ah, I’m giving this person a Grade C here. How would I get this same point across to them if they were a Grade A colleague?’

Sometimes, it takes more thought. A long-standing, particularly tangled relationship may take significantly more reflection. If you need to, take some time to write out how it might be possible that someone is doing their best; or get some help from someone else to help you see it, especially if your attitudes to this person have been the same for a long time. Sit down and ask yourself the questions that are in this chapter; this can be done after an event to work through frustration, and it can be done in advance of a conversation you know you will find difficult. Work your curiosity. How could this person – even in this moment where I am left frustrated or upset – be doing their best? Or, when faced with someone who has done something that you think is unacceptable, something which makes you furious or annoyed or even hysterically upset, ask: what would it take for me to behave in this way?

Find the answer. Because you could behave in that way. You know you could, if circumstances were different, or if your day had started a certain way, or if your life had started a certain way. Or, if you really can’t find yourself in that situation, ask what it would take for your husband to behave like that, or your mother, or your son.

So much of our life is circumstance. The place and time we were born, the education we’ve had, the friends we make. We are all so similar to every other human on the planet. So much of where we are came down to essentially the roll of a dice. Almost always, it could be us.

Sometimes, we need to understand the bigger, longer-term picture of how someone may be doing their best. Their upbringing, their education, the things they have been through in their formative years. For the most part, however, it’s easier than that. We can imagine being the irritable train guard, or an obstructive colleague, or a person making a joke which is hurtful to someone else, because we have at times behaved in a similar way ourselves (if we are honest). We can then reflect on what it would take for us to behave in that way again.

We don’t always need to forgive people for the things they have done, although often we may choose to. But by choosing the key assumption of this chapter, we will see things more clearly. With that clarity, we will act more carefully not to make things worse and we will act more effectively to make things better.

To make this shift, you need to work your curiosity muscles on other people. The questions you need are scattered throughout this chapter and outlined in the summary below: What would it take for them to behave like this? How did they get here? If I got here, or my brother got here, or my mother, or my spouse, how would I want them to be helped or spoken to? And at the centre of these questions is, What if this person is doing their best?

Start small. Experiment. See what happens.

Even for someone like me, who was lucky to have this principle implicitly present in their upbringing, it was only when What if this person is doing their best? had been brought to light for me several times in my adult life that I started to make it a bedrock of who I am. Even then, I still slip up and take wrong turns, and it needs ongoing work and reminders so that I can choose to come back to the path of my Higher Self. As with all change, just seeing the insight isn’t enough, you have to apply it every day.

As time has gone on, I have seen more and more clearly that there is no fulfilment in ‘winning’ in conversations, in shaming or hating people, all of which used to be far more common in my way of being. Those things don’t help me and don’t make me feel good in the longer term, even though my baser instincts try to persuade me otherwise. Life is about more than the short-term rush, or at least it is if you choose the adventure I am inviting you on. Life, instead, is about making the world a better place when you leave than it was when you arrived and living like that every day. ‘Beating’ people, hating and shaming don’t change others in the long term. These things just add to the complex and tangled patterns and stories which get between them and their Higher Self. These patterns and stories are a part of what leads to each and every one of us acting from our baser and more vindictive instincts at times in our lives. As I have said: on the journey to creating a world with all of us living more as our Higher Selves, more able to respond skilfully to the complex challenges the world may present, it is up to each of us to do our best not to add to the tangled patterns and stories of others. To send out ripples of connection, kindness and possibility, and not ripples of judgment, resentment and anger.

In any moment, you can change the relationship you have with someone, the situation you are in. You can probably change the way they feel and you can certainly change the way you feel. This chapter and, indeed, this whole book, is about helping you to make that shift, from tension and contraction to possibility. You can choose when it comes to how you feel about the people around you. In choosing to assume that they are doing their best, you will find their behaviour shifting and you will find yourself moving from scarcity and tension to possibility and to your Higher Self.

Chapter Two Summary

Key idea: Our relationships with others will be improved if we choose to live through the assumption of What if everyone is doing their best? When we choose to assume this, we shift out of judgment and see the world as it is, not as we think it ought to be.

Exercises and Practices:

What if this person is doing their best? Ask yourself this when you find yourself frustrated or angry or upset with someone. Practise it when your interactions leave a bitter taste or you feel like a victim. Notice what changes.
If this person deserves an A for their performance in that relationship, why might that be? For what reasons could you give them an A? What might be leading to their actions and words?
Ask, am I sure? How might I be wrong? If I have a little more doubt and a little less certainty, what can I see about this person that I couldn’t see before?
Do the work to understand your values. Start by simply asking yourself, in a moment when you feel calm and clear, ‘What is central to who I am?’ The answers might come back as concepts, behaviours or anything else that is important to you. Consider the things which would make you sad at the end of your life: how would you have been or not been, what would you have done or not done, that would leave you with sadness? Notice when in life you are frustrated or upset by others: what about their behaviour is upsetting you? Could it be that they are violating one of your values?
If you need to, to practise, take some time to write out the answer to ‘How could this person be doing their best?’, or get some help from someone else to help you see it, especially if your attitudes to the person have been the same for a long time. And then reflect: What happened when you got some answers to the question ‘How could this person be doing their best?’ What difference did it make to your interactions, your conversations and the way you experience life?
Ask, what would it take for me to behave in this way? What would I have to go through to be how they are? If this – what the person has done – was the best they could do in their situation, what might they have been through for that to be true? And what does this change of perspective change for you? If I found myself here, or my brother/mother/partner, how would I want them to be helped?

FOOTNOTES

[1] If you play with this practice, you might find that when you choose a different assumption – that the other person is doing their best, for example – you begin to see evidence to support this assumption, evidence that you didn’t notice before. This is because our brain filters what we notice in the world based on what it believes is important: this is why when we are learning to drive we notice more L plates, and when we are preparing to move house we notice more ‘To Let’ and ‘For Sale’ signs; there aren’t more L plates or signs, it’s simply that our brain shows us more of them. As I discussed in Chapter One, what we see isn’t everything: sometimes changing our assumptions can have a real impact on what we notice.

[2] Brown also recounts this story in Rising Strong and some of what is quoted here is quoted directly from that book.

[3] Even for those readers who aren’t familiar with the vagaries of the UK railway network, I imagine you will be able to draw a parallel here with something you have experienced, perhaps a different customer service experience when ‘the rules’ of a situation or institution seemed unjustly set against you.

[4] On some level the train guard may have already been making an assumption about us at this point: perhaps something like ‘these people are trying their luck because the train is full and they don’t want to stand.’

[5] Fred Kofman's video on Lean In: https://vimeo.com/75893191

[6] If I delve into empathy here, it is also not too hard to imagine that making sure only people with First Class tickets sit in First Class is probably one of the most difficult parts of a train guard’s job, almost always leading to confrontation, and it may be one of the bits he is judged on most harshly by his superiors. He also needs to look after and be fair to the First Class passengers who have paid extra to be in a quieter and more spacious carriage. Not only that, but in the story in question, the guard had probably just worked his way through the whole train, full of frustrated people, hot and crowded, annoyed and frustrated that reservations weren’t where they were supposed to be.

[7] Essentially fight/flight/freeze is the idea that when in danger, our brains tend to respond in one of those three ways: fight the danger, flee from it or freeze and hope not to be noticed. These responses are happen incredibly fast and without the awareness of our rational mind.

[8] It is a story about driving a car but, of course, it is a story about much more than that. For the non-drivers among you, I’m sure you can find the parallels with other parts of your life.

[9] I should add that, as in the story of the Train Guard, ‘confrontation’ from our Higher Selves has a very different flavour to confrontation from our baser instincts.

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In the hope it might support you in dealing with the uncertainty and complexity of current events, I have decided to share several parts of my forthcoming book, The Power To Choose, including this article. PDFs of the preview are available to download here, in case you want to read it all in one go. The rest of the preview is available via the links below:

Robbie SwaleMarch 23, 2020Comment