As a motivational speaker and communication skills trainer, Dr. RickKirschner delivers artful programs on Business, Relationships and Life that are ideal for your event. In venues ranging from conference halls to boardrooms to grand theaters, with groups as large as 6000 attendees or as small as 4 executives in an off the beaten track locale, he helps his audience find the personal motivation and learn the needed skills to do the important work today for creating a better tomorrow.
He’s been interviewed on hundreds of radio and television programs, including CNBC, FOX and CBC. His ideas are found in newspapers and magazines including USA Today, London Times, The Wall Street Journal and Executive Excellence.
CureJoy is privileged to get Dr. Kirschner to express his invaluable views on topics ranging from his work, books and the prominence of change and open communication in building life changing valuable bonds.
Q. Your business is ‘The Art of Change.’ Who is it for?
My work is to help people, whether they are acting on their own or as part of a team or in a business, to bring about positive change through their interactions with themselves and others, through persuasive communication and conflict resolution. I work with medical students, managers and CEOs, small business owners and families who want to make something better, do something better, or have a better experience in work and in life.
To understand how The Art of Change works, let’s start by defining terms. As I use the word change, I’m not referring to exchanging familiar things, like clothes or air filters. I’m referring to the fact that real change is a transition from one state to the next, from the known to unknown, from what is familiar to what is unfamiliar. And because human beings are creatures of habit, having to change or making a change may give rise to fear, uncertainty, discomfort and doubt. Yet for some people, not knowing what will be is what gets their juices flowing. They can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next!
Whether you come at change eagerly or reluctantly, change happens. But positive change doesn’t happen to happen. And it can be a painful mistake to leave change to chance, because you’re going to live in thetomorrow of what is changing today!
What do I mean by art? Not the provocative kind that pinches your mind, or beautiful art that moves your heart. As I use it, art is the creative application of skill and imagination. And when you apply that kind of art to that kind of change, the result is progress. People become effective. Challenging relationships become more productive. Organizations excel.
That’s where skills come in that help you connect, relate and communicate your ideas successfully. Skillfulness in creating positive change through communication and persuasion can help you to build support, get your ideas across, bring people together and keep them together. I call such skills as these ‘skills for life,’ because once you’ve got them, they’re yours and you’ll use them again and again. It seems to me that the happiest and most successful people I’ve ever known have invested their time and money into developing these kinds of skills.
Think of it this way: Change is inevitable, but progress is not. You make the difference. The biggest changes that ever have happened were the result of people like yourself who showed up, stepped up, and took small steps forward.
To master the art of change skills for life, you have to begin somewhere. And in this case, you can begin with the question: What do you want to change? Now where you put the emphasis in that question determines the answer you get. So I don’t ask what do you wish was different (What do you WANT to change?) , or that someone else would do something about (What do you want to CHANGE?). No. The question, properly asked is this: What do YOU want to change? What are you willing to do something about, to identify and take a small step forward and then another one after that?
Q: Do people really change? And if so, how?
Yes, people do change. Learning to walk and talk is just the beginning of it. But people don’t suddenly change their behavior. First they have to change their mind, and to change their mind they have to know that change is an option. So I find it useful to think of positive change as something that happens in stages. The first stage of change is the recognition of ignorance, that state of mind where you don’t know what you don’t know. There are three kinds of ignorance that keep people from changing People don’t change because they don’t know change is an option, or they don’t know why they should choose change, or they don’t know how to go about it. When you recognize the one that’s holding you back, you position yourself to do something about it.
In my coaching work, I encourage my clients and patients to assume their own ignorance any time they want to change something in themselves, their relationships or their work. The value of assuming ignorance is that it forces you not to slow down, not to get too far ahead of yourself, and it also serves as a reminder to pay close attention.
The second stage of change is recognition! Recognition is that moment when we see the light, realize we have options we hadn’t noticed, and become receptive to new information about options, opportunities and possibilities.
Armed with new insights, ideas and information, we arrive at the third stage of change, Planning! This is the mentoring and modeling stage, where a person begins to organize the new ideas and information, access resources, and plot a course. Many change efforts fail in this stage, because preparation was insufficient. But I say failure is an opportunity, not to jump to bad conclusions (they didn’t mean it, they’re not capable, etc.) but instead, to identify the area of ignorance and restart the cycle of getting to Recognition.
The fourth stage of change is Action. With a plan in place, you can move forward, one step at a time. People often need a lot of reassurance and encouragement to take action and go forward. Without it, they may lose heart, lose faith, give up, give in, and fall back to familiar territory. I encourage my clients not to be surprised by false starts, because when people try something new, things rarely go as expected.
The final stage of change is repetition. Beginning a change takes a lot more energy than sustaining it, yet it’s still necessary to sustain a change for it to become permanent. You can’t just walk away believing the situation is handled. and nothing more is needed. Well, you can, but you might be terribly mistaken. Like I said earlier, human beings are creatures of habit. Well, habit is created through repetition and intensity! Until you can do something without thinking about it, you’re still in the 5th stage of the change process.
It is a mistake to expect people to go from ignorance to action in a single step.That kind of expectation is likely to introduce too much dissonance, with the result that nothing changes, or change doesn’t last. Instead, don’t push the river, as they say. Patience is truly a virtue. Because change happens one stage at a time.
Q: You’ve authored or coauthored 9 books on communication, conflict resolution and persuasion. But what can a person do who has no influence?
The idea that a person has no influence is problematic. That’s because life is an exercise in self fulfilling prophecy. I call it the nature of sanity. Whatever you assume to be true, you will act as if it is true and then look for proof.
I’ve heard very powerful people claim not to have enough power. I’ve also witnessed people with very little going for them who succeed at great things. Mindset is the key. And the mindset that you don’t have influence is self defeating. Instead, I think it is useful to assume that you do have influence, because then the question is, ‘How do I use the influence I have?’ The fact is, you influence people by what you say and what you don’t say, what you do and what you don’t do, and how you respond to what other people say and do. Learning this one lesson can change everything, because it then becomes possible to acquire skills to use your influence, rather than efforting at gaining influence without skills.
Q: What is the most important communication skill for a person to master?
I came to the conclusion a long time ago, that successful relationships come from the scientific principle of resonance. Resonance occurs in nature whenever vibrating objects respond to other vibrations or frequencies that approximate their natural rate. Resonance occurs in your life when you and another have a mutual understanding, or a mutual interest, or some other interesting commonality. Resonance occurs internally when all your parts are in alignment with each other.
We’ve all experienced the power of resonance. It can touch us, move us, make us well up with tears or sway to a beat. Sometimes we are quite literal about it: “What you’re saying really resonates with me.” Resonance is what makes that click happen between people when they really connect.
But just what is it within us that resonates? People have a wonderful ability to filter out dissonant signals in order to find and resonate with matching ones. That’s why birds of a feather flock together. And that’s why misery loves company too.
The first thing you must do to build a relationship that leads to trust and cooperation with anyone and with everyone (including yourself) is create a resonant field as a container for your interactions. The communication skill that let’s you create that resonant field or container is called blending, and it is the skill that makes all other communication skills effective.
The good news is that you know how to do it already. It’s what you do with your friends. Unless you have no friends. In which case, you really should learn the skill of blending. I define blending as reducing differences and sending signals of similarity. And the basic rule of communication is important to keep in mind: Nobody cooperates with anybody who seems to be against them. So blending is letting other people know that you are on their side, not by saying it, but by showing it and sounding like it. And blending works the same way when we are in conflict with ourselves. You have to take the side of the part of you that’s troubling you in order to gain the trust necessary for a breakthrough.
Q: In your coaching work, how do you help people to find their motivation?
Motivation is such a fascinating subject. People use the word yet have little idea of what it means and how it works. So some years ago I decided to learn what I could about this interesting topic, and here’s what I learned.
Motivation is all about ‘direction of movement,’ and there are only two directions of movement that are involved: Towards and Away. The towards motivation is all about desire, about wanting – the desire to do what’s right, or gain a reward, or succeed at a challenge, or improve your worth, or fulfill your purpose, or simply to experience some pleasure.
The away motivation? That’s all about fear, about not wanting – not wanting to do wrong, not wanting to lose, not wanting to fail, not wanting to feel worthless, or empty, not wanting to suffer pain.
Fear and desire both serve a useful purpose. Desire beckons you on with a siren song, when the goal is big and the road is long. But in the face of difficulty, sometimes a little fear is the kick in the rear that gives you just that needed push to keep going when the going gets tough.
The most highly motivated people you’ll ever meet have both motivations. They know what they’re moving towards, and they know what they’re moving away from. With open minded people, this is just about all you need to know about their motivation.
However, with people who have strong opinions, who have arrived at the end of the road of thought, or who seem closed to your ideas, you have to be more precise in understanding what motivates them. If you just take a shot at it and miss, the opportunity pass you by and exist no more.
But a precise model of motivation is hard to come by, and after failing to find one that served that purpose, I became highly motivated and took the matter into my own hands. I developed an original model of motivation, the Kirschner Motivational Model, which I’ve written about extensively in my most recent books on persuasion, ‘Insider’s Guidebook To The Art Of Persuasion,’ ‘Insider’s Playbook To The Art Of Persuasion’ (Talk Natural Press, 2008), and in ‘How To Click With People’ (Hyperion Books, 2011).
So in answer to the question, how do I help people find their motivation, I do it by asking for it and listening for it. This is a specific set of understandings, and a specific strategy for listening that I teach in my workshops and training programs.
Q: What is the best advice you can give to people who aren’t skilled at managing relationships?
I have two pieces of advice: First make useful assumptions. And second, be a better listener.
Useful assumptions give you informed perspective on where people are coming from. Limiting assumptions tie you up, hold you back, and trap you into self defeating and counterproductive behavior. If you’re going to assume something, and you are, then I say assume something useful. For example, what do you think is more useful to assume about people? That they behave badly in order to mess up your life? Or that they behave badly when they don’t know any better? Which is more useful as an assumption, that people make bad choices, or that people make the best choice they have, and that if they could do better, they would do better? Useful assumptions help you give people the benefit of the doubt, meet people where they are, and find a way forward.
The act of listening itself is profoundly powerful in our lives, and many benefits accrue to the listener who knows when and how to listen. If someone tells you their motivation and you hear it, you can speak to it with your idea. If someone tells you their values and you hear them, like they hate waste and love efficiency, you can frame your ideas in the context of those values, what waste will be avoided and what efficiency can be brought to bear using your idea, and thus talk with them as an insider rather than an outsider.
I suppose we could say that at the end of the day, the way you get somebody to get you is that you get them first. And that requires listening, not just to the surface of what they say, but asking questions to learn what’s behind the surface.
Q: How did a naturopathic doctor become an author on change and communication? What’s the connection?
My speaking, training and writing careers began inadvertently, when my academic dean, Dr. James Sensenig, asked me to represent my medical school, National College of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, on a hosted television show and forum. I asked him, “Why me?” and he said, “Nobody else is available.” Ah, destiny.
An area physician in the audience was impressed by my passionate participation on the program, and took me under his wing to teach me the two skills he said I wasn’t learning in school. “What skills?” I asked him. “You need to learn how to listen and how to talk!” he declared. “Why?” I demanded to know. And his answer was a blinding flash of the obvious. He said, “Most patients would actually get better if their doctors would just listen to them. And most doctors make their patients sick by the way they talk to them.”
So I brought my best friend along with me for the educational experience, and together we read books that this doctor recommended to us, attended seminars that he found for us, all the while still making our way through medical school. Then we started using the communication skills we were learning with our patients, and saw such dramatic results that we felt obligated to share our learnings with our peers. We put together a workshop on doctor/patient communication, and lo and behold, it turned into a new career. The rest, as they say, is history.
While I am no longer in practice as a doctor, I have a great deal of admiration for those who choose to enter the naturopathic medical profession. In my view, the world needs doctors who respect nature, and who are willing to learn the alternatives to the conventional medical model of getting patients hooked on medications for life! That’s not health care, that’s disease management. There’s certainly a time and a place for it, and it’s a great last resort when all else fails. But I don’t believe that drugs and surgery should be the first line of defense against illness, particularly in light of the fact that the fast majority of all chronic illness is related to the mental, emotional and behavioral choices people make, their ‘lifestyle.’
I’m all about positive change. I can tell you, without any hesitancy, that I’m convinced this very moment in human history is THE PIVOTAL MOMENT, the moment on which the whole future turns! That’s true for you, me, all of us, each of us, and in every moment.
People who are good at bringing about change for the better seem to have a few things in common. For one thing, they ask great questions. And they take initiative. They act. They don’t necessarily look for the big leap of faith and then jump, but they do find small steps forward. And the longest journey begins with a single step.
