The Anatomy of Peace, Fourth Edition: Resolving the Heart of Conflict

“If we have deep problems,” Avi continued, “it’s because we are failing at the deepest part of the solution. And when we fail at this deepest level, we invite our own failure.”

“As important as behavior is, most problems at home, at work, and in the world are not failures of strategy but failures of being. As we’ve discussed, when our hearts are at war, we can’t see situations clearly, we can’t consider others’ positions seriously enough to solve difficult problems, and we end up provoking hurtful behavior in others.”

“The secret of Saladin’s success in war,” Yusuf continued, “was that his heart was at peace.”

generally speaking, we respond to others’ way of being toward us rather than to their behavior. Which is to say that our children respond more to how we’re regarding them than they do to our particular words or actions. We can treat our children fairly, for example, but if our hearts are warring toward them while we’re doing it, they won’t think th

“Yes, we certainly do,” Yusuf agreed. “The same problem we each have in our families. And the same problem coworkers and countries have with one another. We are all surrounded by other autonomous people who don’t always behave as we’d like.”

Rather than simply correcting, for example, I need to reenergize my teaching, my helping, my listening, my learning. I need to put time and effort into building relationships. In other words, if I don’t work the bottom part of the pyramid, I won’t be successful at the top.

We should never expect anyone to share anything deeper or more honestly with us than we have shared with them.

Do my relationships with people who look like me—in skin color, gender, sexual orientation, age, religious views, or physical ability—seem different in quality than those with people who don’t look like me in any of these ways?

What’s more, this kind of listening will most often lead to a sense of something we can do to help things go right.