“800-CEO-READ” offered the following book review during their book giveaway:
Christopher Kukk first learned the power of compassion working in a field you’d imagine would be one of the most cutthroat—as a counterintelligence agent in the US Army. It was there he learned it was more effective to sow seeds of support, goodwill, and mutual interest rather than fear and intimidation in the communities he was operating in, to be more understanding and responsive to people’s environment and needs rather than ruthless, more compassionate than callous.
Now, as a teacher and founding director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity and Innovation at Western Connecticut University, he has been spreading the gospel of compassion into classrooms, boardrooms, and communities across America. In The Compassionate Achiever, he brings that message to the printed page. And although it is a personal development book, it begins by looking at the issue more broadly, from a perspective of humanity’s development:
[C]ooperation has been more important than the idea of competition in humanity’s evolutionary success. A cooperative perspective in more important than a competitive mindset in any group’s success. Compassion is the reason for both the human race’s survival and its ability to continue to thrive as a species.
Kukk lays out the physical and social science evidence of how we are hardwired for compassion, and how our evolutionary survival has depended upon it. In doing so, the idea of “survival of the fittest” (a phrase Darwin never wrote, by the way, and an idea his writings on the “sympathy hypothesis” contradict) gives way to a more nuanced reality of “survival of the kindest.” Natural selection may be competitive, but it is those that are most cooperative, collaborative, and connected that win that competition. Which is all well and good, but what has compassion done for us lately, and what can it do for us today? Well, in the corporate world, Kukk tell us that:
When you examine many of the most successful organizations around the world, you find that they capitalize on fostering cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. Companies such as General Mills, Aetna, Target, and Google have buried the competitive culture and resurrected compassion. They have woven compassion into their corporate structure to increase employee satisfaction, boost productivity, and raise the bottom line. Although many people believe that you need to be hard-nosed and ruthless to succeed in business, highly successful businesses not only know better, but also understand how to be better, and it’s through compassion.
But that is the larger, evolutionary and organization level. I’m sure you’d like to know how it helps you achieve individual success, as well. Kukk explains how acting out of compassion is the underpinning of that, as well, how helping and strengthening your connections to others helps stand you up and make you stronger. And it is not an either/or, zero-sum proposition, but a both/and, symbiotic, and interdependent one:
When you help another, it also physically and psychologically strengthens you. The social interaction of helping another provides individual benefits to you. The price we pay by not taking action to help others is the diminishment of ourselves and the deterioration of communities.
It is also something that is learnable, that can be put into practice with an easily remembered acronym, LUCA:
listening to learn, understanding to know, connecting to capabilities, and acting to solve.
Kukk devotes most of the book to cultivating compassion through those four pillars, dedicating an entire section of the book to each. Each practice has many learnable skills and smaller daily practices within it, and each is painless if only we can remember to be conscious of others. That consciousness and compassion, in the end, will lead to our own success: “Compassionate achievers,” Kukk proclaims, “challenge the notion that you have to look out for number one in order to be number one.”
There is a trend of books emphasizing emotional intelligence over technical intelligence. As artificial intelligence and automation advance in taking over the more technical aspects and tasks within our organizations, the most valuable skills will be the most fundamentally human. The Compassionate Achiever will teach you how to build strength through kindness, unity of purpose through understanding. It is, in the end, about helping ourselves by helping others. So, if you’re really selfish, you should begin to act more unselfishly. It is the best way to get ahead, and contribute to the creation of a community that is more healthy, resilient, and less violent. Christopher Kukk offers practical and practicable techniques for doing all of this on a personal, interpersonal, and daily level.
The original review can be found by clicking here.
Our current default way of thinking about becoming successful—the competitive king-of-the-hill mentality—reduces both the level and likelihood of success.
When you examine many of the most successful organizations around the world, you find that they capitalize on fostering cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. Businesses built upon an effective culture of compassion were found to have “high levels of productivity resulting from relatively high worker loyalty, low turnover, and hence low recruiting and training costs. It translates into closer relationships between employees and frequent customers, thereby contributing to sales and marketing efficiency.”
Employees who help each other are the engines of successful companies, and the best top executives know it. Understanding what others need or need to avoid and then acting on that understanding is at the heart of what compassion is and what a compassionate achiever does.
Learn more about my new book, The Compassionate Achiever, coming next month.
A new study from Yale University has found that the spread and intensity of gun violence in the United States mimics and behaves similar to a biological disease. The Yale researchers conducted an “epidemiological analysis” of a group of 138,163 people over an 8 year period (2006-2014) and were able to reliably predict who would become “a subject of” or “infected with” gun violence. The central conclusion of the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (3 January 2017), was that “Gunshot violence follows an epidemic-lik
e process of social contagion that is transmitted through networks of people by social interactions.” In other words, when someone you know is involved in an incident of gun violence, your risk of becoming involved in gun violence increases, at least temporarily.
The researchers were able to “trace the infection” of gunshot violence through a network of Chicagoans by following “chains in which one person becomes infected, exposing his or her associates, who then may become infected and spread the infection to their associates.” The authors found that such “cascades of gunshot violence episodes” continue to run through the network as long as there is someone associated with a shooter or a victim. In short, your risk of infection increases—just like a biological epidemic—the more you are simply exposed to the disease (i.e., it doesn’t matter whether you know the shooter or victim; if you know either one, your risk of being involved in an incident of gun violence is heightened).
Since gun violence spreads as a social contagion, it means that we have the capability to abate it. The authors conclude their analysis by offering insights into reducing gun violence such as treating it as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice problem. If we were to treat gun violence as a public health epidemic, it would force us to develop new strategies for reducing it other than the punish-the-offender approach. The study’s main finding that gun violence spreads like a disease through networks of social interactions means that fostering compassion throughout society can have a profound effect on reducing the number of the more than 200 people who are murdered or assaulted with a firearm every day in the United States. One way to combat violence in general is to strengthen compassion on the individual and communal levels. From explaining how to develop self-compassion to creating cities of compassion The Compassionate Achiever offers several ways to help inoculate you and your community against the social contagion of violence.
The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Your Success is now available for pre-order from the following retailers:
AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | INDIEBOUND | BOOKSAMILLION | GOOGLE PLAY | iBOOKS
My New 4-Step Program for Cultivating Compassion
Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and scholar, said that “There is a place where words are born of silence.” The silence of the Weaving Wise/Whys blog over the last few months I know has been deafening. Thank you for staying with the blog and for your patience though the silence. For out of the silence, my new book (The Compassionate Achiever) was born.
The Compassionate Achiever was also born out of my concern that many people seem to be unaware of or overlook the fact that compassion is an important factor in attaining success. When you ask people to list the qualities of a successful person, they usually mention grit, courage, perseverance, and intelligence but rarely do you hear compassion. One problem with such lists is that they are exclusively self-focused and don’t include any concern about others. Do we really want a world filled with self-absorbed achievers?
When you follow a compassionate path in whatever you may be doing in life, the byproduct is success for you and the people around you. Whether you are trying to get a promotion, reach a financial milestone, complete a degree, or help a child learn to read, compassion helps you to accomplish your goal more efficiently and effectively, and it makes the achievement more enduring, fulfilling, and rewarding. Compassion is win-win. It helps you to be successful, and it helps solve problems and create opportunities for others.
My hope is that The Compassionate Achiever helps to not only spread compassion but also alter the common perception of how to attain success. I’ve heard the adage that “it’s lonely at the top” over and over again throughout life but it’s never lonely at the top if you’re a compassionate achiever.
The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Your Success is now available for pre-order from the following retailers:
AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | INDIEBOUND | BOOKSAMILLION | GOOGLE PLAY | iBOOKS
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