Principle 9: Upset the Right People

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is try to please everybody.

—Herbert Bayard Swope

MY CLIENT, SIMON, was as nice a guy as you would ever want to meet. He was always concerned about others, often reached out to them, and was sensitive to their feelings. As president of a sizable organization, he did many extra things for the employees. He spent large amounts of money on their personal growth and development, much more than the industry average. I was impressed by his commitment to people and their well-being. Because of his commitment to his employees, I would never have guessed that he would do what he did—an act which revealed his déjà vu nature.

Simon had been hired to turn the company around. It had grown steadily for about twenty years when it hit a plateau. His job was to return the organization to the growth rates that it had expe­rienced in its heyday. He was excited about the challenge, and he thought his experience matched it exactly.

But when he got into the midst of it all and began to study what was going on, he realized something. The solution to this com­pany’s stagnation was not going to be simply a matter of doing what they had been doing but doing it better, or even of adding radical innovations. He was going to have to restructure the entire operation from head to toe. That was the only way that the compa­ny would be able to adapt to the new market and meet its mission and purpose. As he expressed it, they would need to “turn it on its head and redo the whole thing.”

That sounds like great fun for an energetic, creative person. And Simon was excited about it. But there was a catch. To do what he needed to do and what was right for the organization, the restructur­ing was going to be extremely painful in two significant ways. First, many employees would experience personal upheaval. They would lose their positions, get reassigned, be required to move, or even be laid off. Many people whom he cared for were going to be very upset and angry with him. Second, there were no short-term rewards to be had for Simon himself. The positive results of his actions would take a while to appear. Meanwhile he would look like the bad guy for at least a few years. People would think he had failed miserably.

Knowing Simon, I did not expect the second hurdle, the temp­tation to worry about what others thought of his performance, to be a big one for him. He was not the type to seek admiration and flattery from others. He did not do things for the sake of having a good image. But because he was such a people person, I did expect him to have a lot of conflict with the first hurdle. To cause so many people to be upset with him and put long-term relationships into serious conflict would be a very hard thing for him to do. As other-oriented as he was, I truly did not know if he could follow through, and I halfway expected a stall-out. What happened was exactly the opposite.

“Well, I announced the restructure,” he told me. “It was the right thing to do, and the only way that we will be able to accom­plish what I was hired for. But it has caused a storm of relational fallout. A lot of people are really mad at me now. I knew that was going to happen. So now I have to work things through with sever­al people. It is going to be a quite tough the next few months. I will spend hours and hours in one-on-one meetings with people I have known and worked with for years. It is not going to be fun.”

I was stunned not only at his sense of resolve, but also with the fact that he had overcome the fear of other people’s reactions. Then the déjà vu element hit me: in reality he had not overcome any fears of other people’s reactions to his decision. Not at all. Why? He never had that fear in the first place. He accepted those reactions as a reality that would result from doing the right thing, but it never was a fear. It never entered his mind as a factor in the decision to do the right thing.

That was the characteristic I saw in Simon that made him a déjà vu person, one that I had seen consistently in truly successful people. While they are very loving and feel deeply the pain or dis­tress that their decisions cause others. . .

Déjà vu people do not make decisions based on the fear of other people’s reactions.

Successful people who practice this Principle Nine are sensitive to those reactions, but when weighing whether or not a given course is right, whether or not someone else is going to like it is not a factor that carries any weight. Concern, yes; but weight, no. Our déjà vu friends care about other people’s feelings, but they do not base their decisions on them. They decide to do what is right first and deal with the fallout second.

This is true both in the world of work and the world of person­al relationships. Successful people tend to be self-controlled, as we saw in chapter six. As we said then, when someone’s locus of con­trol is outside themselves, they never know where they are heading in life. Instead of their values, goals, and purposes determining their choices, other people’s reactions do. As a result, they can end up all over the map, or as I thought my client Simon would do, they often stall out and find themselves unable to make a decision.

I love boating on the ocean. The boat’s autopilot fascinates me to no end, and I love to follow the course corrections it makes as the boat travels. Here is how it works: the captain sets a compass heading for where he wants to go. He locks in that heading on the autopilot, and the boat takes off in that direction. So far, so good. But where it gets interesting is when the craft hits a large wave or a series of waves. The autopilot does not allow external actions to alter its course. It keeps its original decision in place, heads straight for the goal, and goes through the wave. There is a splash, lots of rocking and spray, and an immediate correction by the autopilot if the ship is knocked off course in any way. And when I say immedi­ate, I mean immediate. The autopilot does not allow the ship to get swayed off its course even momentarily when it hits a bump in the water.

Most people don’t operate this way. They know their ship’s “heading,” the direction in which they want to go, but they look out over the prow and see a wave—someone’s adverse reaction to their decision. The wave looms larger and larger until it appears even bigger than their decision and the goals and values that drove that decision. So they change their course. They adjust their head­ing starboard to try to go around the wave. By then they have lost their heading. They avoided the crash into the wave and getting soaked by the spray, but they are now off course.

No, in reality that is not quite true. They are on course, but it is someone else’s course, not theirs. They have kept someone happy, but they have lost their own way. As a result they will never get to where they wanted to go in the first place because there will always be another wave coming.

If they had not been afraid of getting a little wet or plowing through bumpy water, they would soon be well on their way. The bump would be behind them, and the sea would eventually smooth out and return to calm. If it did not, then there was a deeper problem in that sea of relationship to begin with, and no amount of pleasing or appeasing is likely to help.

So here we have the last of the Nine Things you must do to be a successful person. Let’s look at some of the seas that have to be nav­igated in life with Principle Nine, and determine what waves they have that might tempt you to lose your way.

I Do Not Want to Hurt His Feelings

Sarah was at the end of her rope and had no more hope for her dat­ing relationship with David. When they had begun dating, she thought he was the greatest. Attractive, in command of life, suc­cessful, intelligent, and charming were the words she used to describe him to her friends and family. She thought the search was over. Smitten, in a word.

But, as time went on, she had to add a few other words to the mix. Words like controlling and possessive. The enormous atten­tion that she thought so incredible in the beginning soon became smothering. He could not stand for her to be away from him. If she had to be away for work or to take care of her own interests, he became angry or withdrawn. At first this behavior merely sur­prised her. It had never occurred to her that he had any insecurity at all, because he was so self-confident and assertive in the external world, and easily went after whatever he wanted. She had liked that about him. He seemed strong and aggressive.

After several months, however, she could not deny that David had some real insecurities for which he was not taking responsibil­ity. She tried to get him to see that their relationship could not work if he could not allow her to have time for herself, She tried to talk him into getting counseling to help with his problem so things could work for them. But he would not. Finally, she decided to get the help herself, and that is when she came to me.

Sarah was in turmoil. She knew that she could not go on with David, for he was driving her crazy with his obsessive jealousy and control. I did not have to talk her into realizing that this was not a good foundation for a relationship, so I asked her why she had come. “How can I help?” I asked.

“I can’t tell David that I want to end it,” she said. “I just can’t.”

“Because of all the things you like about him? You find it hard to let go of all of his good parts?” I asked.

“No, not really. I mean, yes, but no,” she said. “I will miss all the wonderful things about him. I hate letting go of that good stuff, but I don’t fear it because I know that I will get over it.”

“So, call him and end it,” I said. “What is keeping you from doing that?”

“I just don’t want to hurt his feelings,” she said. “I feel so bad for him. I can’t do it. I mean, I don’t even have the heart to tell him I can’t spend the weekend with him anymore. It hurts him too badly. But I know I don’t want this long-term.”

It took her several months to get out of the relationship with David. She would get all geared up, go for it, and guess what would happen: he would be devastated. He would talk to her about all the good that they had going and how he could not live without her. He would tell her that he loved her more than anyone ever would, and then ask how she could walk away from a love like that. And facing such a wave, she would agree and relent. She would cave in, have sex with him against her values, and swiftly, in one evening, find herself off course—right back in the relationship as deeply as ever, starting over again when what she desperately wanted was out. His reaction would steer her off course.

But slowly, through our work and the support of her friends, Sarah got back on course. She got out. What saddened me for her were three things, which became the focus of my work with her. First was the amount of precious time she had wasted with David in the prime of her dating life. She let more than a year pass after she really knew that it was not going to work. Secondly was the mental agony she went through in avoiding the inevitable. What should have been one evening of pain followed by an aftermath of temporary grief turned into months and months of breaking up, not breaking up, sort of breaking up, sort of getting back together, and all of the other ways to describe being entangled with, but not committed to, the wrong person. It was “bad pain,” which basic­ally means pain that serves no good purpose.

The third thing, though, and the big thing that we finally focused on, was this: in her over-dependence on other people’s reactions to her decisions (in this case, being too concerned about David’s hurt feelings), she had lost the ability to feel, find, define, clarify, know, and act upon what she wanted. She had lost herself in a bad way. Worried about his immature reactions, she had lost touch with the ability to know what she wanted because she was overly concerned with what David wanted. She had to learn to “upset the right people.”

In the process of our work, she discovered that this tendency was affecting her negatively in many areas. She saw that in her work she had picked bad business partners and agreed to do projects that were not in her best interests. She had multiple ties and arrangements that she should not have gone into but could not see the dangers clearly enough because of her tendency to avoid disap­pointing people or making them angry. This tendency blinded her to other people’s negative character issues, and she had made some bad choices. Because she was overly concerned about the reactions of others, she often did not see their character problems until later in the relationship.

At the same time, I had another client who was in a new rela­tionship with a man. Same beginning—a guy who was attractive, winsome, energetic, accomplished, and all the rest. But after a few months when the possessiveness and control became apparent, she came in and said, “I had to end it with Reed. I just couldn’t see living like that. I could not do anything for myself without it becom­ing an issue. That is not what I want in a relationship, so I broke it off. I will miss him though. He was pretty cool.”

“How did he take it?” I asked.

“Not well,” she said. “He was really upset and begged me to reconsider. He made all kinds of promises to change. He cried, and it was hard.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I just told him I was sorry it had to be this way, but I did not want to be together anymore. Even though it was hurtful, it had to be. Then I left. I went over to Laura’s for the night, because I was pretty upset afterward too. But I know it was right. If I hadn’t done this, I would be dealing with the same issues forever. I don’t want that.”

That was the response of a déjà vu person. Hard to do, tough on both sides. She was considerate, but she would not be thrown off course. She knew the right thing to do, and she knew that his response was not going to be happy.

Those two things, as my friend Simon realized, are very differ­ent issues. And recognizing the difference is the déjà vu person’s way to see this problem:

What you should do, and what someone’s response is going to be, are two very different issues.

And because they are different, déjà vu people do not mix them together. They do what they need to do, and then they figure out the best way to handle the situation with the other person’s feelings. But they keep the two issues separated as two different problems.

Think of situations where being overly concerned about hurt­ing someone’s feelings can cause a person to stall out or drag a bad thing on too long:

• Firing a person

• Confronting a person

• Saying no to a request to do something that involves time, energy, money, or other resources

• Saying no to a request because it would violate one of your values

• Doing an intervention with someone because of her very destructive behavior

• Telling a person that he has overstayed his welcome

• Making someone aware of a flaw that she does not see in herself that is hurting her relationships with others

• Breaking up with a person you are dating or telling him that you are not interested

The Difference between Hurt And Harm

One of the important distinctions that déjà vu people make in this situation is to understand the difference between hurting someone and harming him. Hurt is a normal part of life. Our feelings can be hurt when we get confronted, for example. We have to swallow our pride and look at something negative about ourselves, and that hurts. But it hurts like surgery hurts: it is good for us. It hurts, but it does not injure or harm us.

Getting rejected is like that. Hearing “no” hurts at times, too, especially if we really want something. Failing, or getting fired, stings. But those things do not harm us. They are a part of life, and we learn from them if we are looking at life correctly. Hearing hard truth can actually help us. As Solomon says, “Wounds from a friend can be trusted” (Proverbs 27:6). Hurt does not mean harm.

Harm is when we injure people by doing destructive things to them. We do not offensively inflict injury on another person when we make a decision to do something that pains him if it is done for a purpose, or for one’s own well-being. Learn the old saying, I am not doing this to you, I am doing it for me.

That is not inflicting harm at all, even if the person on the receiving end acts as if it is.

After All I’ve Done For You ...

Another barrier that many people feel when making decisions is guilt. When they choose to do something for themselves, or make any kind of decision based on their conviction that it is the right thing to do, they sometimes feel as if they have done something bad because of people’s adverse reactions.

I had one déjà vu experience along these lines when a friend put his elderly mother in an assisted care facility. His family had been helping her in many ways as she got up in years. Although she was relatively healthy, the burden was getting to be too much for any of them. The situation had reached the point where their family life could not continue intact if she were not where she could get the kind of help they could not provide.

When my friend told his mother of their decision, she ranted at him with enough guilt messages to weigh down several families. “After all I’ve done for you,” she began, and it went on from there. “Just send me away to die!” she said, even though she was perfectly capable of partaking in all sorts of activities at the facility if she chose. His response?

“Mom, I am sorry that it feels to you like we don’t care. Certainly we do. And we are going to visit often. But we just cannot take care of you at home anymore. This is the best decision. Now, you have a choice. You can be angry about it and refuse to enjoy this wonderful facility and all the great people here. You can sulk and miss out on its benefits. Or you can try to enjoy it, take part, meet the people and have a good life with them and with us. It is up to you. I will help you, but you are going to have to choose to make this work for you,” he said.

He hit the wave in a turbulent sea. She did not like it. Spraying guilt upon guilt, she tried to steer the ship onto an alternate course. But he was fixed on a heading and did not allow the guilt message to get him off the course he had set as best for his own family and her as well.

“Do Not Rescue an Angry Man”

I was on a financial radio show recently taking calls about setting boundaries in families with financial issues. A woman called about her forty-year-old sister to whom she and her husband had been giving money for several years. It seemed that the sister had a lot of problems and “needed their help,” as she put it. But the caller was beginning to wonder if helping was really helping. In other words, in spite of all the “help” they had given her sister, she was not get­ting any more self-sufficient.

“Does she work?” I asked.

“No, she lives off my father’s Social Security,” she said. “But that, along with some other family money, does not seem to be enough. Or, more accurately, she always seems to overspend what she has coming in. So we always help her out in the crunch. My husband and I are getting tired of it.”

“Has she had mental illness or some disability that keeps her from working?” I asked.

“Well, she has seen a lot of counselors, but she always quits before they do her any good. She is on some kind of medication, but there is nothing really wrong with her that would keep her from working. She gets a lot of jobs but then quits after a few days when they want her to do something she doesn’t want to do.”

“If there is no real reason that she cannot work,” I said, “and no real danger from illness or disability, then why don’t you set up some requirements for her to meet if you are going to give her money? For example, you could insist that she stay in counseling and do some work or you are not going to support her. Anytime we support someone, there should be structure to it with clear expec­tations understood by the recipient and enforced by the giver. Why don’t you do that?”

“Well, our experience is that whenever we withhold help from her, she gets really mad,” she explained. “She blows up and blames us for her problems. We don’t want to make that happen again.

“Let me tell you something,” I said. “There is a direct correlation with people who are out of control in their lives and their hatred of the word no. You usually do not see responsible people get angry and go on the attack just because they do not get what they want. But often you do see irresponsible people getting mad when they hear no. Just like toddlers who do not get what they want, they throw a tantrum. And if you give in to it, you will find out how true the words of Solomon are. He said, ‘Do not rescue an angry man, lest you have to do it again tomorrow’ (Proverbs 19:19, my para­phrase). In other words, if you give in once to her anger, get ready to do it again the next time you say no.”

That is the thing to remember about trying to appease control­ling and angry people. If you let their anger decide your course of action for you—whether to give or not to give—then you have just trained them in how to get what they want out of you. You have set yourself up for the same experience again.

In addition, do you really want to give to someone who is only going to hate you if you do not? What kind of a relationship is that? What kind of love is that? True love would accept your choice and respect your having to say no.

If you are resetting your course based on the fact that someone might get angry with you, you have chosen a flimsy foundation upon which to make a decision. You have lost control of yourself, and that is not what successful people do. They are not held hos­tage by anger.

As a footnote to this discussion, I will tell you that I am seeing a disturbing trend. I have no empirical evidence to back this up— only anecdotal. As I make live media appearances and do seminars around the country, I am getting an increase of questions from parents of adults who have been supporting their adult children well into their twenties, thirties, and even forties, but with a partic­ular twist. When the parents cut off these “children” and stop pay­ing for their lives of nonwork, the children are getting angry with the parents for not supporting them as adults! I actually get that situation fairly regularly, and I cannot remember that being the case ten or fifteen years ago.

Is there something different about this generation? Did some of the baby-boomer parents who rebelled against authority in the six­ties not set the needed limits and impart discipline to their kids when they were growing up, causing those kids to enter adulthood not knowing what “no” means? Or does it just mean that the baby boomers are the first generation that has had the resources to con­tinue to support their adult children? Who knows? Whatever the reason, if you have adult children, do not allow their temper tan­trums to control your life. Déjà vu people would never do that!

A related scenario I often encounter on radio or at seminars involves a person whose spouse needs serious confrontation and limits, but the fear of an angry response to confrontation keeps the bad situation stuck in place. For example, a woman called recently and described a husband with a drinking problem who was ignoring his responsibilities as a father and husband. Her way of dealing with him was to alternate between appeasement and whiny nagging that was disguised as making requests of him to meet his obligations.

I suggested that if he were not responding to those appeals— alcoholics typically do not—then a more direct confrontation would have a better chance, especially if it required him to seek treatment or face consequences. Her response revealed the dynam­ic that was the glue for this problem’s ability to stick around for so many years: “I can’t do that! He would get angry!”

There it is in a nutshell. She could not do the right thing because of his reaction. “Of course he will get angry,” I said. “That’s what alcoholics do when they are confronted. That is their job! But your job is to have the proper resources there with support, or even professionals, to not let his anger dictate what is going to happen.”

I continued, “Do not give him control of what you do, or what the interventionist says, or what choices are given to him just because he gets angry. Who cares if he is angry? That is part of his sickness, and we expect it. Just because the patient screams does not keep the doctor from administering the shot. As long as you stay the course, he is only in control of himself and whether or not he gets with the program. His anger cannot dictate what his options are going to be. Even if he is angry, the rest of you can still tell him the way it is going to be, what he has to do to keep living in your home, or whatever consequences you and your support team have decided upon.”

It was as if aliens had landed in her yard. She was stunned that she or anyone could continue to follow a plan or maintain choices in the face of his anger. For the first time, a little realization dawned on her that his anger was not the compass to which everyone else set their heading.

Loss of Approval or Love

Sometimes those who need to confront are afraid of not only a negative response such as anger or guilt, but the loss of something positive that they value too highly to risk. Earlier in this chapter when we looked at Simon’s choices, we noted that he faced two possible scenarios, each of which were going to prove difficult. One was that people would be upset, and the other was the loss of Simon’s short-term rewards, such as people thinking he was doing a great job and looking up to him as a successful leader. For Simon, being a déjà vu person, this temporary loss of a positive image was not a problem. But for some people, the fear of losing others’ approval or love is a big value, bigger even than doing what they need to do to solve a problem.

I had a client who was a very successful pastor. His work has touched the lives of millions of people. He is well respected by all who know him and his work, and his family is immensely proud of him. But it was not always so.

His father owned a successful family business and was well known in his industry, amassing a lot of power, wealth, and influ­ence. And with the business being in the family and so successful, it was assumed that the only son would follow in Dad’s footsteps and succeed him as president of the company.

But, in college, my client received a different call. He dived into his faith wholeheartedly as a sophomore, and by his senior year he knew that the ministry was his future. He was excited, but he knew his family would not be. Who would take over the business? What would his father say? While he did not know the answer to the first question, he had a pretty good idea about the second. Because his father was a person who was used to getting his own way, my friend would most likely lose his father’s approval. And that is exactly what happened.

The onslaught was furious. His father, though a professing Christian, had little respect for people outside of the business world. He thought that if you were a “real man,” as he put it, you would do a “real man’s job.” Seeing the ministry as a softer vocation than industry, he questioned his son’s manhood, his devotion to the family, his strength, and other character traits. It was an awful time for my client.

But, through his déjà vu character and the strength that God gave him, he did not change his course. He was saddened by the loss of his father’s approval, but like other déjà vu people he saw that as a separate issue from the decision itself He had to make a decision about his life, and also he had to deal with his relationship with his father. He did the right thing and encountered the waves with his father, thus demonstrating the strong character his father was saying he did not have, an interesting paradox in itself. If he were weak, like his father said he was, then he would have caved in and done what his father said a strong person would do. The reali­ty was exactly the opposite. His strength was what enabled him to do what his father perceived as less manly.

Years have passed now, and the two men are reconciled. It took a while, and in the beginning of his ministry his father did not show his son a lot of respect. As the son’s ministry has grown, his father is now beaming proud of him, as well he should be. But if my client had given in to the loss of his father’s approval, there would be no one for the father to be proud of, only a “successful” puppet.

That is never the way of déjà vu people. They go against the odds if the odds are against what is right. They are willing to be the odd one, risking loss of approval in order to do the right thing. They understand that the approval of others does not go very far in making one truly fulfilled. It may be nice for a moment, but getting up every day and doing what you believe in is much more lasting.

Learning To Upset the Right People

In one of my seminars a woman once asked, “Dr. Cloud, how do you deal with controlling people?”

“You convert them,” I said.

“What?” she replied, assuming that I meant a religious conver­sion. “To what?”

“Convert them from being controlling to being frustrated,” I answered. “The only way people can be controlling is for you to make them that way by doing what they want. Here is what hap­pens: They get angry, or use guilt, or get pushy, and you give in. Then you come here and describe them as controlling. In reality, if you did not do what they wanted, you could not describe them as controlling, could you? If you say no to them and do not do what they are demanding, then they have no control of you. So you can­not say they are controlling at all; they are in control of nothing. They are just frustrated as they try to get control of you. You have converted them from being controlling to being frustrated simply by not giving in to their demands. It is that simple.”

I went on to give examples of ways to maintain the relationship by empathizing. You can say something like this:

“I am so sorry it is frustrating to you when I say no. I can see it is hard for you to accept.”

“I am sorry that it feels to you like I don’t care. That must be dif­ficult. But I do hope you can see that I do care.”

“I am sorry it is so frustrating to you that I am making this choice. I hope you can accept that I still care about you even though I have decided to do this for me.”

That is what déjà vu people do when others give problematic reactions to their choices. They do not return the anger, as we saw in chapter nine. They give better than that. They give love, care, sensitivity, and empathy. They do not become reactive; they listen and care. But they do not give in. Instead they follow a parallel track of giving love and keeping their stand intact. “I love you, Dad. And I am going to be a pastor. I know that must be very disap­pointing to you. I am sorry it is so hard.”

Strategy Is Not Bad

Déjà vu people who do not base their decisions on the reactions of others are not foolish. If they expect the person being confronted to go ballistic, or retaliate, or do something destructive, wise people take that into account. For example, in the case of the woman call­ing about her alcoholic husband, I suggested that she confront him with professional alcohol counselors present, as well as other sup­portive people. There are many situations that require strategy and discretion. If the problem person is out of control and dangerous, the wise strategy may be not to confront, but to keep quiet and go to a shelter.

At other times and in other situations, such as negotiations, it is smart to foresee how a person is going to react and plan a strategy as to how you are going to manage that reaction or deal with it. Taking such extreme reactions into account and strategizing to deal with them has nothing to do with fearing them. Dealing with such reactions wisely is not the same as letting fear of them control your decisions. The problem scenarios are those in which feared reactions either dictate the course you take or allow the reactive person to gain control of you. It is fine to use a smart strategy to deal with them and avoid unnecessary conflict and chaos. Life is too short to put up with that stuff. You just cannot let reactive people steer your life course.

Set Your Heading

To be a successful déjà vu person, you may not keep everyone around you happy. In fact, if you are successful in life, you are guar­anteed not to! Jesus said it best: “Woe to you when all men speak well of you” (Luke 6:26). When all people speak well of you, it means that you are duplicitous and a people-pleaser. You cannot speak the truth, live out good values, and choose your own direc­tion without disappointing some people.

The key is not to count your critics, but instead to weigh them. Do not try to avoid upsetting people; just make sure that you are upsetting the right ones. If the kind, loving, responsible, and honest people are upset with you, then you had better look at the choices you are making. But if the controlling, hot and cold, irresponsible, or manipulative people are upset with you, then take courage! That might be a sign that you are doing the right thing and becoming a déjà vu person!