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

Yusuf added “Teach and communicate” to the level below “Correct” on the pyramid. “It is no help to tell you to get out of the box,” Yusuf continued, “if you don’t even know what the box is. Likewise, any correction at work will be for naught if the people I am trying to correct lack the information they need to perform their jobs.

“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.”

“I become an agent of change,” Yusuf continued, “only to the degree that I begin to live to help things go right rather than simply to correct things that are going wrong. 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

“In every moment, we are choosing to be either like Saladin or like the crusading invaders. In the way we regard our children, our spouses, neighbors, colleagues, and strangers, we choose to see others either as people like ourselves or as objects. They either count like we do or they don’t. In the former case, since we regard them as we regard our

“When we find justification in softness, it’s usually because we’re carrying around a third basic kind of justification box, a box we call the need-to-be-seen-as box.”

We are always seeing others either as objects—as obstacles, for example, or as vehicles or irrelevancies—or we are seeing them as people.

We join them in the limitations they face and hold ourselves to the same requirements.

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

“So notice,” Yusuf said, “the more sure I am that I’m right, the more likely I will actually be mistaken. My need to be right makes it more likely that I will be wrong!