Being personal is a relationship— made possible as trust grows between us. I invite you to join me in the process of discovering who I am. You invite me to join you in discovering who you are. Together, in this moment, we share in the apprehension, the mystery, and perhaps the ecstasy of creating something together.
What Is It Like to be Personal?
When I am being personal—
1. I am who I am. And I make little effort to be what I am not. Being personal starts with being, which is always a becoming. I am always unfinished—a process, an event. I am forever discovering myself and re-creating me.
But in my discovering I find an enduring quality. I am the one doing the discovering. I am always more than I think that I am, so there is forever a resident mystery in the process. I assume that this process is also going on in you and I let you be who you are.
2. I see myself as unique. And I acknowledge your uniqueness. I am an unreplicated life-process, one event of its kind. I celebrate myself and each of us as persons who form our own constellations of reality and being. Thus, when I relate to you I come from my own private place and respect your private place. When we do this, trust grows, and we are able to create new and unique places that we can inhabit together. Each relationship is therefore also unique and special, as much so as each person is unique and special. Just as no person need intrude on another, no relationship between or among two or more people need intrude on other relationships. This idiosyncratic nature of persons and relationships makes irrelevant and depersonalizing any comparisons or classifications. Acceptance of this uniqueness is a strong base from which to maintain my full personal relationship to others.
This deep awareness of my specialness is one source of my strength. Even with my openness toward others, I am the only one who completely knows me. I am the sole authority for my feelings and inner life. I need not compare myself with anyone else. We need not be competitors, and there is no race.
People who are fully into their own being and uniqueness are able to allow others to be who they are. Such persons learn to be personal in the sense of allowing others to "have their persons". They nurture uniqueness. Of all the people I have met while consulting, the one who stands out in this capacity is a person who, in spite of multiple corporate norms that pressure him to be otherwise, is very much his own person and allows others to create their own business and personal lives. He also has a talent that I associate with other really authentic people: He gives credit to others for what they do and what they are. He has a sign on his desk that reads: "You can do anything you want in this world as long as you are willing to let other people have the credit." He also lives this credo to its full extent. To me it is significant, and certainly not accidental, that he is also one of the most productive, creative widely respected, and sought-after top executives in the business world. He is unique, and, in all of his relationships allows others their uniqueness. He respects himself and respects the people he meets or works with in the same honoring way. I've seen him be like this with his son, with other executives, and with workers in the plant. He nurtures their dignity. He is being personal.
3. I am close to my own internal reality. Staying with my insideness is especially difficult when there are so many pressures on me to conform to other's views of reality. One road to intimacy is to express to another whatever phenomenal reality is available to me at the mo-ment. To be impersonal is to move toward peripheral areas, and away from my core or center, or away from yours. Intimacy, understanding, and trust come from my inner being touching yours.
4. I take full responsibility for my feelings, opinions and perceptions—for my own life. I create what I am and determine what I do. The more trust I have for both of us, the more it is possible for me to take possession of my own attitudes, accept my own body, make "I statements" about what I see and feel, and "own" what is inside me.
But when I am afraid, I may protect myself from possible controversy, quote an authority to lend credence to my ideas, ride piggyback on someone else's strong opinion knowing that I have at least one ally, or wait for a more courageous person to take a strong position before I express mine. These behaviors, instigated as safety measures, do not really protect me, are not very satisfying, and keep me from risk-ing depth relationships with others.
5. I am what I seem to be. There is face validity to what I do and show. I show my inner feelings to others without distorting or masking the message. To be impersonal is to camouflage my message by deliberate or unconscious-habitual masking, by forced or affected humor, needless formality, complexity, deflection, or other indirection’s. I do not manipulate myself in dealing with others.
Energy spent in building facades, in trying to seem different from what I am inside, is misdirected into neurotic defense and does not serve me well. It makes authentic relationships very difficult. One day Blair, who was about sixteen, came home from school. Seeing me, he said "Wow! You just got your hair cut. I thought you were letting it grow long." I told him I was leaving the next day to work with a new client organization and was a bit anxious about it. Blair asked, "Isn't it somewhat hypocritical to do that and then go up and tell them about that 'not-meeting-people's-expectations' bit?" And then he added, "But then I suppose you feel you have to do that in order to communicate with people." Blair, who doesn't make such compromises and is always just what he seems to be, is also accepting of my fears and the way I handle them. I admire him for his integrity, and I have learned a great deal from him and from his open way of being personal.
6. I have clear and visible motives. I spontaneously reveal my motivation in the process of being my message. It feels personal when we, as communicants, have little pretense, know what our motives are, and are aware that we know this. We may be aware, in our communications, that we have large areas of latent or unconscious motivation that are unavailable to either of us. But when we are being personal with each other, we are reducing the disparities between my perceptions and your perceptions of the motives of each of us. To be impersonal is to attempt to hide my motives or to clean them up for presentation to you.
In a discussion the other day, I heard a woman say that she didn't like "...people who have motives. They always seem needy and I avoid them." My guess is that she didn't like people who seemed not to be aware of their own motives, whose intentions were manipulative, whose motives were hidden, or who had motives she didn't like. Everyone has motives, and they are likely to be complex. When questioned about our motivations, most of us launder them in showing them to others—and certainly to ourselves. People who come to another person with intent to control, teach, influence, or manipulate, sense the probable resistance; and they consciously or unconsciously attempt to camouflage the motive.
The less trust we have of the other, the more we feel we need to defend, and the more likely we are to pretend to ourselves and to others that our motives are acceptable, simple, pure—uncontaminated with wants that might be seen as unwelcome or negative. Most of the time, and certainly at one time or another, every person is likely to have the full range of human motivations. This is part of the human condition. And each of us, especially at moments of low trust and high defense, will sometimes hide our motivations and seem to be what we aren't. Trust comes with the mutual recognition and acceptance of these realities.
In high trust and low defense, people come to others largely for such motives as desires for companionship, affection, warmth, excitement, listening, or friendship—motives which are not seen as manipulative and do not arouse fear. Being personal means that part of our discovery process is a joint quest for what our motivations are, what we are wanting from life and from each other. Hiding these motivations is likely to decrease trust, which is dependent upon openness in all facets of our lives.
7. I free myself from my roles. Duties, expectations, and external demands lead to impersonal behavior. I am being personal when I respond to my own wants, current feelings, gut impulses, and intuitions, rather than to what you or I see as role demands, responsibilities, or expectations. I cannot be personal when I am consciously or unconsciously being a mother, a teacher, a manager, a helper, or a lover. Even when the institutional or societal structure puts me into a role, pays me for this, and sets up appropriate institutional sanctions and prerogatives, I am still free to respond as a unique person in every situation. To trust—to be personal—is to act on this freedom. Persons who do this are also, in the process, able to measure up to what others think of as the legitimate demands and responsibilities of the role. They do this without thinking about role requirements or strategy demands. That is, workers, children, students, patients, and subordinates do respond to highly personal supraordinates in ways that would be described by observers as both responsible and responsive. The paradox is that role demands are best met by being non-role. Role fulfillment is not met by manipulating myself or others.
Role-making occurs easily when people are fearing and defensive. I remember becoming suddenly aware of the seductiveness of this process while hurrying to teach a university class. Being quite late and upset at this, I became annoyed at the pedestrians on the crowded campus crossing the roadway and delaying my car. Just seconds later, after hurriedly parking my car, I became even more righteously angry at the inconsiderate drivers who endangered the lives of us pedestrians who were hurrying across the very same driveway. In my frustration and defensiveness at being late, I had reversed roles in a very few seconds, identified strongly with each role, and also scapegoated each role in turn. Depersonalizing, stereotyping, irrational scapegoating, condemning classes of people—all done in a few moments time by someone who had written often about the unnecessary and harmful effects of role behavior!
8. I free myself from role perceptions—from mine and yours. When I categorize myself or others, I start the process of making us nonpersons. It is easy to box people. I build barriers when I label someone as sick, neurotic, or needing treatment; as a child, a worker, or a homosexual. Persons and events flow and emerge into idiosyncratic quality in the process of being. It may sometimes be necessary for technical purposes or in non-personal situations to codify, dichotomize, measure, or miniaturize. Even this "necessary" is being questioned by the "label liberation" movement. What we are objecting to here is such coding in the process of relating interpersonally. Parents, managers, and teachers do well to avoid the practice of classification and coding, as enticing as it may seem for administrative and other role functions.
9. I focus upon the relationship. The relationship between us is a new reality that transcends either of us. To be personal is to be open to, to be aware of, and to focus upon this relationship, this interbeing, this unique happening—this event that has the potential of nourishing us both; this new organism that emerges, takes life, and can become so magical. I am being personal when I enter into intimacy and depth.
To venture into being personal is to come to terms with a fundamental aspect of the human condition—out interdependence. There is good cause for the deep ambivalence that persons have about "getting personal". "I don't want to get personal, but "expresses the push-pull in the impulse to do so, the latent awareness of the excitement and the risk, the potential and the danger of getting close, of getting beyond comfort and safety, of getting out of the low-risk zones. The deadening pervasiveness of meaningless chit-chat and no-risk, impersonal talk is testimony to the constraining and life-dulling effects of our fears, our lack of awareness of how to be satisfyingly personal, and our lack of experience with the deep life-bringing satisfactions of intimacy. I am surprised anew each time I see the eagerness with which people respond to new glimpses of intimacy when coming in contact with authentic, personal people in a TORI Community Experience, where the environment nourishes trust and depth.
10. I come to discover rather than to defend. When I am fearing, I defend. With emerging trust, I discover that a defensive posture does not really defend me or make me invulnerable. It raises the defenses of others, robs the moment, increases the distance between us, and makes it less likely that we will enter into a co-discovering journey.
One thing to learn about defensive behavior is that I always have a choice. I can choose to continue to defend myself, or I can join you in a discovering process. To learn to trust is to learn that I really do have this choice.
11. I am spontaneous and natural, and have no plan or strategy. I am more personal when I am emergent and impulsive, and when I seem to be so. People who are close to life are able to free themselves from role prescriptions and from their own or other's programmings. I depersonalize and create distance when I plan strategy of approach, when I program my message in order to influence you, and when I try to anticipate what I will do when we meet. I do not try to manipulate you in dealing with you.
In my consulting I have worked with a number of trusting and spontaneous people. One who is notably personal in this way is the director of organizational development for a corporation widely re-spected for the quality of its training programs. Having heard of my work, he hired me as the external consultant for a three-day team development session for top management. During the two-hour drive from the airport to the conference center, he and I—working together for the first time—talked about a multitude of things, but never once did we mention the conference. We walked into the meeting and reacted spontaneously to the situation.
This man obviously trusted me, his top management team, and his own spontaneity and ability. Because I was trusted, I responded well to him, as did those at the conference. One factor that made the two of us so effective as a consulting team is that neither of us had a plan, a strategy, or an "intervention" to impose on the executive team. Fourteen of us started with a fresh slate, immediately became very personal, were very creative and productive, and participated together in a meeting that was rated by the team as one of the best sessions they had ever experienced. Contrary to current management myths, it is quite possible to be process while working effectively even in the most pressure-packed organizational setting. This manager happens to be in industrial relations. I have seen equally spontaneous, natural, role-free, and creative people in manufacturing, research, and other fields of management. Being personal and non-strategic is one way of being an effective manager and a full human being.
12. I show my feelings. Feelings are the stuff of personal relationships. To avoid, ignore, or move away from feelings when they are present or are dominant is to depersonalize. Feelings are always present, always a part of the active being. When they become a significant part of awareness—in me or in you—they warrant personal expression. They are ingredients of intimacy. As I write this I am strongly aware of a flood of mixed feelings about this writing. I am excited about the ideas I am focusing on, scared at how they might be received by the reader, bored with the physical typing, impatient with the restrictions I'm placing on myself to be disciplined, afraid that the discipline may not only not be comfortable for me but uncomfortable to the reader as well, and having many start-stop feelings about being so impersonal in talking about being personal. And having some feelings about my many motivations in writing this book. I'm struggling with these feelings, enjoying some of them, and choosing to move on.
13. I am concrete and specific. Abstract and generalized speech is associated with depersonalization. When I am personal I talk about specific instances; about concrete feelings, behaviors and ideas that are a specific expression of me and my state of being; or about a concrete and specific perception of you or of our relationship. General speech is safe speech. The risk is greater when I cite specific instances, talk about specific people, and relate my feelings to concrete events. Persons get lost in abstractions, generalities, and principles.
14. I am here, now, with you in the moment. Being in another place, in the past, or in the future is to be impersonal. Living fully in what I am feeling right now about you, responding fully to what you are feeling at this moment, and letting us join in the being and the doing are aspects of being personal.
There are many ways of escaping from the fullness of the moment: talking about my feelings rather than being in the feelings, analyzing my behavior or your perceptions, observing ourselves doing what we are doing, being into our roles, telling "personal" anecdotes, speculating about what will happen next, asking questions, escaping into hu-mor, "getting down to business"—moving away from what is going on between us in our relationship. Being here, now, with you is to be personal. I am always free to choose whether to do so.
15. I bring all of me to the moment. Being personal is to bring all of my person into everything that I do. I am all here with you now. To be whole is to integrate my total being into all the moments of my life. To be impersonal is to ration myself in bits and pieces, depending upon the people I'm with and the situations I'm in. It is a matter of presence, wholeness, and integration of one's life. I have a choice as to when and if I want to fragment myself or to bring myself whole to my relationships.
I think of several persons who, even under the frequently depersonalizing pressures of organizational life, are able to maintain a holistic way of life. They can enter with wholeness and integrity into the interpersonal contacts they make during the work day. One person, from whom I have learned a great deal about being personal, is a woman executive who is notably successful as one of the few women executives at her level in a corporation with which I consult. She is feminine, warm, gentle, sexual, personal, and non-defensive, and, at the same time, very competent, creative, job-focused, and excited by her work. She is highly respected by both the men and women who report to her and relate to her laterally. What is so relevant here is that she expresses herself fully as a person in all of her relationships, even in situations in which some women executives feel they must "act masculine" in order to succeed in what has been a "man's world." Whenever I have worked with her or talked with her she is fully available as a total person. She is being personal.
16. I make available to you my humanness and my vulnerability. I make no effort to hide my vulnerabilities, darker sides, hidden strengths, unfiltered preferences, or pomposity’s. I show all of myself in an effort to make all of me available to you.
Intimacy and trust are reduced by consciously trying to put my best foot forward, deliberately doing what is appropriate, seeking to protect you from my reality, or rationing my expressions in the interest of what I think would be good for your peace of mind. Trust and intimacy are not furthered when I use my humanness as a strategy to gain your confidence in my professional skill, or when I try to program our intimacy. Being personal is to be human and to show this, not to use my humanness to influence you.
17. I somehow incorporate my fears into our meeting. The fear-trust polarity is the basic dimension of all humanness. Fear is always with me in one or more of its many guises. But it is frightening for me to look at my fears and even more fearful to show you that I am afraid.
I may devote so much energy to the denial of fear that I forget that everyone else is frightened, too. Revealing the form of our fear is a bonding process, a sharing of humanness, a communication that crosses the lines of race, sex, and nationality. Discovery of our oneness allows us to focus, to merge, to tune in—and to recapture energies diluted in the service of pretense.
18. I include you in my world and in my space. Being personal involves for most of us a perceptual and attitudinal shift—a shift which includes awareness of both the other person and the relationship between us. It means inviting you into my private world. It means the recognition that each of us is part of every other person. The deep awareness of this allness and having strong feelings about the inclusion are integral parts of being personal.
19. I enjoy physical, psychological, and spiritual closeness. It is impossible to be really personal without enjoying the process. Genuine intimacy is a reciprocal relationship, self-rewarding to each participant. When bodies, minds, or spirits touch, the process is nurturing.
Is there ever a doubt that the newborn infant likes being touched? Or likes touching? Somehow in the process of living many of us learn to fear and to defend, and in this process we "lose touch", our bod-ies forget the joys of touching, we give our dogs and cats the touching that would nourish our friends and our children, and we inhibit our impulses to touch strangers or friends or even those we love. What keeps us from touching—in mind, body, and spirit—are the fear-bred forces of guilt, anxiety, propriety, expectancy, custom, imitation, and a host of inhibitors of these universal wants. Touching, in wholeness, is an essential aspect of being personal.
20. You are important to me. Being personal is an authentic invitation to a full relationship in this moment. Thus it would not be possible for me to be personal without seeing you as of worth. People who are able to be personal do so because they value persons. My moments are the fabric of my life. Sharing them with you, in this way, is the most caring gift I can bring to you. Because being personal is a joint venture, what I bring must be a gift to both of us—or it is a gift to neither.
Being personal is a self-rewarding process: The more personal I become, the more significant people are to me. There are no limits to the process other than those I create with my fears. Being personal is the genesis of the authentic family, the caring community, and the interdependent world.
"Being personal" is defined above in an obviously more full-bodied way than is often used in popular speech. It is the first of the sequential TORI discovering processes, and it triggers the flow into all of living. Trust starts with trusting myself enough to put myself into everything I do. That is one major theme of this book.
Personal growth starts with being personal. How I integrate my fearing and trusting into my being and becoming determines how personal I am able to be. This synergy determines the flow of my life, my ex-periences of pain and ecstasy, the paths of my growth, and the effectiveness of my actions.
This book is a presentation of my life-view. It comes from my experience of my trusts and fears. My version of TORI theory is what I have created from these experiences. It is in one sense a description of my personal growth. When one of my psychoanalytic friends interpreted my "preoccupation with trust" as my massive reaction to fearful and distrust-provoking episodes in my life, I readily agreed with him. I assume that this fact goes a long way toward validating the whole theory. Each person who reads, uses, or tests the theory validates it for himself or herself from personal life experiences.
When my fear levels have been high enough, I have been disoriented and immobilized. My first wife left me because of the desperate difficulties I had in trying to be intimate and personal. For a while, I even blamed her for my fears and difficulties. My fears are many and deep. Any interested reader, I would hope, can see them, for they are projected into this book.
At times I have given myself intense pain. Twice I have experienced prolonged, two- or three-month periods of depression during which I contemplated many self-destructive actions, including suicide. About fifteen years ago, I gave myself high blood pressure at a dangerous level. During times of intense pain, I mobilized defenses that didn't defend or protect me. I blamed other people and events for my misfortunes, but more often I punished my own mindbody for hurting me. My depths, at some of these times, have seemed like no other depths.
My "theory" has created my hurts, and it has also helped me integrate my experiences. At the depths of my deepest depression, I decided in mind and body not to commit suicide and I discovered and created me in a way that I had not even fantasized before. I created me and my strength. I know me at a new level. Though I have for many years believed in taking responsibility for myself and my life events, I now find myself taking responsibility in new and more genuine ways. When I was deeply frightened by my self-induced high blood pressure, I took a deeper look at me, what I was showing to me and others, what I really wanted in my life. With much help from people who loved me, I developed a new way of life that reduced my blood pressure to normal in 18 months. From this and other experiences with trust I have given myself a new and deep serenity, a new life.
When my trust levels have been high I have had many beautiful and life-giving experiences. I have loved and been loved in many ways. More than at any other time in my life, I am doing what I really want to do. I am creating my "theory", and it is making me whole.
I have been consciously creating my theory for as long as I can remember, and unconsciously long before that—certainly since, as a freshman student at Brigham Young University, I became entranced with psychology and had a love affair with William James and his magnificent humanness. Though I have published bits and pieces of my theory in articles and chapters, I have been too fearful until now to put the theory into one visible book and to put myself on the line. Though at times my timidity has astonished me and embarrassed me, at the moment of writing this I look fondly on it as an integral part of my gentleness, which I enjoy and like.
The block that keeps me from being more personal is my fear. The "reasons" that I give myself or others for not being more personal are disguises of my fear. I am able to unblock myself when I recognize that I create my own fears, that I can make them my enemies or my friends, and that being personal is not nearly as dangerous as it appears in my fantasy.
When I trust myself, trust you, and trust the process, my behavior becomes personal, regardless of other factors in the situation. Trust is the catalyst. With it all things are possible. I can be as personal as I wish. It is possible to make small steps, within my fear/trust level, and create satisfying and self-rewarding experiences by being personal. I find that when I am being authentically personal, the results are positive and fulfilling. It is when I am playing games and not really being who I am, that I create my problems and dissatisfaction.
I sometimes discover myself making false starts in the direction of being personal. Often these are in the grey areas of consciousness; I am only partly aware of what I am doing when I'm doing it. I tell stories about myself in the hope that listeners will see me as I would like to have them see me. I sometimes stay in "party talk" with a person, wondering why the other person is being so impersonal with me and resenting this, dimly aware that we are both experiencing discomfort and not knowing how (really, being afraid) to be more personal. I am sometimes bored with what another person is saying; not knowing how to express my boredom without hurting the person (really, being afraid to say it), I build up a mild annoyance and search for ways of breaking the connection. And so it goes. Or, rather, so it did go. I am learn-ing to be more direct, to be more personal, to reveal what I want. And I'm finding that when I trust enough to be this way, good things happen to me and to people around me. Being personal is a satisfying, even exciting way to be.
TORI theory originates in the user's being personal. Each person who uses the theory creates it as an expression of himself or herself. Only an authentic user (i.e., one who is "being personal") can understand, in the mindbody, the theory itself or can apply it. This "personal" aspect of theory construction is more central than is often apparent. A physicist once told me that he could predict the theories of the major physicists from their personality dynamics and social behavior. This origin-in-the-person aspect is true of all theory building, but it is especially true of Trust-Level theory, which is deliberately constructed to optimize this person-centering and idiosyncratic aspect of both the sub-stance and process of theory building.
Being personal is the key initial step in creating my environment. Contrary to many messages that we all hear (from our environment, the environment does not create me; I create my environment. For this statement to be true of me, I must take a proactive attitude toward my life. I have choices—all that I wish to make. I choose to stay in my roles or to move out of them. I see what I want to see and hear what I want to hear. I choose to change my physical or my social environment. I choose to present my authentic self to you, or I choose not to. I create my fear. I choose to be the captive of my fear, or I choose to be free of it. The awesome consequences of such a viewpoint are discussed in the following chapter.
Parents, teachers, therapists, managers, and ministers—everyone, really —are more effective when they are being personal,. An unfortunate and persistent myth comes from our common fears. It is the false belief that in order to be effective, people who have positions of responsibility must take appropriate roles in order to meet the legitimate obligations that come with "responsibility". They believe that they must be impersonal at the very times when being fully "personal" is most needed, would be most effective, and in fact would be the best or even the only way of meeting the "obligations" that are imputed to the role. In a crisis, a mother needs to be there as Mary, a full-blooded person, rather than as a "mother". The minister needs to share the personal grief, not give assurance to the sufferer. The teacher needs to join in the personal search, not teach the student. The manager, as will become so apparent in Chapter X, needs to join the enterprise as a person, rather than to "manage" it. To be effective in a role, we begin by getting out of the role.
Being personal is significantly related to organizational effectiveness and productivity. Research studies and organizational experience are in substantial agreement that high productivity is significantly related to the degree to which there are personal relationships on the job. "Being personal" does not mean, for example, that the manager or supervisor invites the worker home for dinner, tells stories with the gang at the bar after work, asks questions about matters that are "personal" and thus unrelated to the job, or even keeps the office door open. It does mean that the supervisor or manager is an authentic person, expresses honest anger or joy, responds to others as human beings rather than as persons who get the job done, brings his or her wholeness to the moments of interaction on the job or in a meeting, and joins others in discovering how the job can be done rather than telling others how they should do it.
Being personal is the passageway to interbeing, authentic intimacy, depth of community, and to higher states of consciousness. New developments in our theories and experiences with intimacy and depth indicate that all of life can be more personal—must be more personal for us to survive as a culture. Starting with being more personal in some of my moments I can carry on the process as far as I wish to take it. Our images of intimacy can be frightening. Last fall, on the first evening of a TORI group, a woman said to us: "I'm afraid that if I get too close to any of you, I will feel bad when I leave on Sunday afternoon: so I'm going to keep things as impersonal as possible." She was unable to stay with her original plan, but her reactions to her own fear fantasies allowed her to keep from getting close to anyone for an impressive number of hours. Whether we express such attitudes, even to ourselves, most (all?) of us at times treat life in the same way. When this woman's trust overcame her fears, she changed her behavior radically and began to be the way she "really" (at some level) wanted to be; she became a warm and outgoing member of the community. It is my assumption that all people want to be intimate and loving, at a level that is very apparent in many of us, and at a depth for some that is almost inaccessible even to themselves. It is from these common wants that a caring community emerges. When trust transcends fear, all things are possible.
All human living is enriched when it is more personal. Thus this chapter is a relevant introduction to the substance of each of the chapters that follow. In the next chapter, let's move from the person to the environment that we, as persons, create.