Dan Erwin

Why Am I Open About My Mother’s Dysfunction?

Or, to put it crassly, why share family shit?

On numerous occasions, I have noted that I grew up in a highly dysfunctional family. Some people would not want to share such information, others might not care. Recently, I have gotten more up-front, commenting that my mother exhibited a highly narcissistic dysfunction driven throughout her life by an abandoned child syndrome. The consequence was that she was mean as hell, leaving me on pins and needles from her interactions.

The highly religious people with whom I grew up would have been aghast at hearing me talk or write this openly. Plenty of therapists would suggest that I should have been very cautious about such personal information. And some other folk might suggest that such personal information should not be a part of ordinary conversation.

But during the years of my semi-retirement, I’ve confirmed my openness. From the time of my college days, I did not intend to be defined by a “mother-conflict.” And so, I want to take this opportunity to lay out the values of this openness. In sum, what I decided years ago is that I had a lot more important things to do than take care of a mother who had all the necessary resources for taking care of herself. And this blog will point out three of the factors supporting my decision.

3 Rules for Not Talking About What You Don’t Want to Talk About

I’ve noticed recently that my main coffee group of about a dozen men and women never talk about politics. Not that there would be an argument. I’m well aware that almost all of us are some kind of Democrat. It goes with the St Paul (Minnesota) character. Of course, it might be that all of us are really tired of politics and hope that once the election is over, whoever wins, we can talk about something other than an election.

Recently I asked one of my colleagues why he didn’t talk about politics. He responded that he was really, really tired of it all and had nothing to learn—so he’d wait for the election.

Not talking about what you don’t want to talk about goes on in business all the time. The senior team member suggests that the latest digital strategy is “deeply flawed.” No one questioned the statement. In typical power-related situations, it’s rare for someone to analyze a statement from the standpoint of definitions. The assumption, instead, must be that the listener understands, or the "rules" don't permit that. Yet, the most obvious reason for misunderstanding is failure to go for a definition.

Empathy: Supportive and Manipulative

The scientists of behavior have a lot to say about empathy and emotional intelligence. But review all that’s written by them about the subjects, they never get to the most fundamental how-to, the basic development processes of empathy and emotional intelligence. I couldn’t take what has surfaced over the years and actually lay out the developmental pragmatics. Until, that is, just the last month.

I’m not beating up on myself. Still, it’s personally frustrating that with all my critical work in the field, and my own expertise with emotional intelligence and the sub-category of empathy, I was completely blind to my own processes. The pragmatics were so habituated and so deeply buried in my past, that someone else had to tell me what the hell I was doing. My experience is a classic case of what’s known in chaos theory as the “butterfly effect,” sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Scientists have discovered that very small differences at the start of a complex process with numerous iterations create significant and unpredictable results. That’s how as a teenager I found the beginnings of empathy uniquely—and unconsciously--as a manipulative tool of self-protection. Affirming my mother, after her seemingly senseless weekly bouts of tears and anger with my father, with her version of the relationship twisting and turning over the years. My unconscious empathic learnings partially protected me so that she wouldn’t turn her uncontrollable rage at me. I decided years later, after her death and long-since distancing myself from her, that she was all about profound narcissistic insecurity, compounded by abandoned child syndrome.

My initial conscious understandings of empathy began early in grad school with work in persuasion and influence, a discipline overlapping empathy to a high degree. There, I learned to define what would become empathy in straight forward fashion: the ability to become aware of, sensitive to the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another. It’s often broken out into three segments: understanding the situation of the other, feeling the same emotion of the other person, and then taking action in support—or to the disadvantage--of the other person. Compassion is a highly useful aspect of empathy, but not the only aspect. Empathy can also be used for self-protection and plenty of other objectives. There is a dark side to empathy, too. I’m quite certain that if you were to add up all my uses of empathy, the good far outweighs the bad. But on numerous occasions in business, I’ve used empathy as both a sales tool as well as for competitive advantage. No client has ever accused me of naivete.

My grad work during the late ‘seventies led me to understand what eventually became empathy as the ability to co-create a state of identification or alignment with another. In those studies, the focus is not just on the other person or just the message or just the sender. The definition implies that what’s inside the receiver is just as important as the source’s intent or the content of the message. So, in one sense all persuasion is self-persuasion. We are not persuaded unless we participate in the process of identification with the other. Empathy works exactly the same way. It just usually focuses on compassion.

But, identification with the other can be used for their good or solely for the empathic persuader’s good. Hannah Arendt, the famous (or infamous) U Chicago philosopher who wrote about the Nazi Eichmann and the Jews, argues cogently that compassion should not be brought into politics. My own business behaviors have been reflective of Arendt’s conclusion on numerous occasions. I needed her conclusion to manage my internal conflicts around manipulation. But that’s a subject for another blog.

Using empathy in business

I’ve used emotional intelligence and empathy for decades, but never really understood why the model sometimes worked so well for me. Of course, I was aware that some of us were rather successful in persuasion, while many others stumbled around. And if they couldn’t manage the process successfully, they usually left a business requiring persuasion. But I never thought to do a complete compare and contrast analysis between successful and unsuccessful empathy/persuaders.

How to Get More Out of Your Creative Thinking

A lot more. . .

As a young church minister in the congregational tradition, I had to write two new, creative sermons for nearly every week in the 1960s. My Boulder church included Colorado University faculty, students, as well as engineers from the local technology firms, all of whom brought high expectations with them to Sunday classes and worship.

Thankfully, I learned just a couple years after seminary graduation (1962) that if I went to sleep on Thursday or Friday with a sermon or a creative idea half-finished, or needed some new ideas or anecdotes, I’d have everything I needed when I woke up the next morning. Or if I was just playing around with some creative ideas during the day, there was a high chance that the idea would be complete--or at least zinging some new pointers my way--when I woke up the next morning. At first,

The Unique Gifts of Reading

Back in 2020 I wrote that 'I've always wanted to say something very direct when an acquaintance or a client asked why I read so much, but I was always a bit too cautious to verbalize my real beliefs out loud.

But if a prominent, knowledgeable person  supports my beliefs publicly, I'll happily repeat them. I followed up then with a quote from General Mattis verbalizing my actual beliefs in the context of the military: If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate and you will be incompetent because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain sustain you. Any commander who claims he is "too busy to read" is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way.  
Boy, have I changed my mind since then.

In a recent study, I retrieved tons of personal stories, revealing my profoundly unconscious growth as a result of my reading from as early as the fifth grade, I began learning basic "noticing" and "analytical" skills in the fifth grade by reading kid detective stories like Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and Sherlock Holmes. Some of these stories are really just "kid stuff," but phenomenally useful to this fifth-grade kid. 

I learned to question the elementary ethics that had been pounded into my head by my mother and in Sunday School by reading the works of Mark Twain. His Huck Finn was a show-stopper in my life, causing me to rethink, helping to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. Robinson Crusoe taught me that I could sometimes learn without help from others. And the Hardy Boys and Sherlock Holmes taught me the opposite--the value of associates in learning. And some of those books were not even "great literature."

How to Understand Artificial Intelligence Two Completely Different Ways

One of the basic characteristics of truly intelligent people is that they take advantage of new situations, have a natural curiosity and a thirst for knowledge. They are eager to learn about different areas of life, including people, culture, animals, history and the world. Intelligent people recognise that others have information and insight that they can share which will help them grow, expand their wisdom, and enhance their intelligence.

How does this play out
Having worked with a great deal of very intelligent people, one of the unique characteristics about this thirst for knowledge is that they look for different ways of understanding. Sometimes this plays out in striking metaphors. Other times in plays out in exciting analogies. And sometimes it's a person from one discipline talking about another discipline and revealing how differently they think about another person's discipline.

Immune to Fraud?

With my extensive educational background in communication, up to and beyond a PhD, a breadth of work experiences in the church and the seminary, a college class for prisoners in a maximum security prison, and years in an international consulting business with leaders from some of the finest companies in the world, I thought I was smart enough to evade the fraudulent tricksters of the internet world. Especially since I’m a specialist in the arts of persuasion and influence.

I was wrong. 

As a supportive Dad, I decided to buy a fine Bose headphone for one of my daughters. So, I went online and found what I thought was the Bose site, noticing that their $350 headphone was on a special, week-end sale for just $200. Now, I’m also no computer or internet innocent. I’ve been computer literate since 1983, the first year of the desktop. And I was educated to the intranet by some 3M clients before the internet and the world wide web came into existence. In 1992, some Pillsbury techies educated me to the web just a few months after it was opened to public use.

But this smart, well-educated guy really got suckered by some Chinese fraudsters who had created a Bose look-a-like website and was making a great offer. I bought! The “Bose” never came. How did that happen? Simple. My emotions got in the way of my well-educated brain. And the “opportunity” was just a spur-of-the moment gift for one of my daughters. Something dads like to do.

Don’t get emotional.

How To Improve Personal Intelligence with Exercise

All kinds of advertising and web stuff out there says that this exercise will do that to your intelligence—or that AI tool will do this for your brain. Tough to identify expertise from fads when they’re being thrown at you from every angle on a regular basis. But here’s the well-researched big stuff that pulls everything together and includes brain stuff for everyone.

Research published just this year reveals the positive impact of aerobic exercising on brain smarts for middle-aged and elderly. It takes just 150 minutes per week when working out at moderate intensity levels. That’s not much of a surprise. We’ve known this was true for younger adult cohorts, but we lacked the sampling of middle-aged and older adults. The growth relationship between the physical and the mental was spelled out years ago—and no one questions that conclusion. But now we know that conclusion applies to both middle-aged and the elderly. Why did it take so long to get the research for the last two groups? It’s easy to get a sample for younger people while they’re in an education program. In contrast, getting a consistent sample from adults not in an education program is more difficult. Adults outside education systems start the research program, drop out for numerous reasons, making it difficult to develop a long term consistent sample. But this time the researchers were successful. Here’s their conclusion.

This randomized clinical trial demonstrates the efficacy (the desired result) of aerobic exercise for cognition in adults age 20–67. The effect of aerobic exercise on executive function was more pronounced as age increased, suggesting that it may mitigate age-related declines. Increased cortical thickness suggests that aerobic exercise contributes to brain health in individuals as young as age 20. (Thomas, Tanzi and Westover: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-17

What was most intriguing to me were the measurable improvements among middle and elderly adults in all three specific areas for which positive impact of aerobic exercising was already known in younger adults: fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence and total cognitive performance.