What You Appreciate Appreciates

by Eric Garner

Last weekend, it being the Spring equinox, I got up at 6 o'clock and watched the sun rise over the sea.

The sight was so beautiful that I decided to repeat it the next day. Only to find that the sky was cloud-covered and the sea a forbidding grey.

It got me thinking about Appreciation and how easy it is to appreciate the things we label as "beautiful" and "good" and how hard to appreciate the things we label as "ugly" and "bad".

It reminded me of one of my first training lessons given by my supervisor when I worked in a customer service centre. Whenever she caught any one of us using what she called the 3 C's - complaining,
condemning and
criticising,
- she would order us to replace it with one of the 3 A's,
acknowledging,
accepting and
appreciating.

Like Love in Faith, Hope, and Love, I've always thought that the greatest of these was Appreciation.

I'm quite sure that, if she were still working today, my supervisor would be a champion of Appreciative Enquiry, the idea that change works best when it is based on the things that you appreciate and which work, rather than the things that you don't appreciate and which don't work.

It's an idea that I've used on more than one occasion when working alongside someone who, in another time, I might have labelled "unhelpful" and "impossible to work with". By adopting my supervisor's lesson and replacing criticism with appreciation, I've more than once found something remarkably valuable in such people and turned a going-nowhere relationship into one with possibilities.

I call it "seeing the jewels in other peoples' crowns".

More recently, I happened to be reading a story by Alan Cohen who reminds us that when we allow ourselves to feel cheated out of life's wonderful moments, we end up playing victim, playing hurt and playing small. And the amazing thing is, it's only a small shift in appreciating that takes us to the opposite of these, to healing and wholeness.

This is how he tells the story.

Consider the scenario of a man walking down a street when a flowerpot falls off a windowsill above him and crashes at his feet, narrowly missing hitting him. There are several paths of response the fellow could take:

(1) Victim: he slips into feeling vulnerable, goes home, feels sorry for himself, and sends away for self-protection equipment;

(2) Retaliator: he dashes up to the apartment from which the flower pot fell and punches out the owner;

(3) Stoic: he reasons that it was simply his karma for the flower pot to miss him and he keeps walking; and

(4) Healer: he goes to the florist on the corner, purchases another flower, finds the apartment from which the pot fell, and gives it to the owner to replace the one he accidentally lost.

I guess there's a thread running from my 3 A's supervisor through seeing the jewels in others' crowns right up to Alan Cohen's flowerpot man.

It's about learning how easy it is to appreciate the finer things in life but knowing how more important it is to appreciate the rest.

Life shouldn't be about the occasional wonderful moments. But about the wonder in every moment.

About Eric Garner
Eric Garner runs ManageTrainLearn, the site that will make you a better manager, trainer and learner. Visit us at http://www.managetrainlearn.com for FREE e-learning software, FREE quizzes, FREE bonus ebooks, FREE newsletters and articles and an amazing learning experience.

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