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In “one fatal keystroke” Rose Zory, the Chief People Officer at Carat Media sent an “for top management only” email on the messaging managers should use when firing (oops, rightsizing) some employees.

She sent that email to every single person in the company. Carat is Europe’s largest media group, by the way. It provides advertising and public relations services, expertise it badly needed at that point.

Now comes the flood of advice (again!) about how to avoid such email embarrassments and what to do when they happen. What would you do?

”I had a doorbell moment this week,” Patricia told Tracy.

Both have sons serving in the same Marine unit in Iraq. Patricia is describing the fear that grabs her the moment her doorbell rings unexpectedly, thinking that the officer on the other side has come to tell her that her son is dead.

Tracy understands.

Hint One: Through shared experience, expressed aloud, we adopt “shorthand” expressions and feel understood, closer and often even comforted.

When Tracy’s son, Derrick was deployed, she knew that those who would most understand her feelings were other mothers in the same situation so she started a support group.

Wrote Cynthia Gorney way back in 2005 when the war still seemed new, “Draped over a banister in Tracy’s house was an unwashed T-shirt Derrick had dropped during his last visit home. I thought Tracy was apologizing for her housekeeping, which I had already seen was much better than mine, but she cleared her throat and said that what I needed to understand was that she hadn’t washed the T-shirt because if the Marine Corps has to send you your deceased child’s personal effects, it launders the clothing first. ‘That means there’s no smell,’’ Tracy said.”

Hint Two: Smell is the most directly emotional sense.  Nothing else comes close. Use smell as memory anchors of your shared experience

“Tracy’s closest friends in the world right now are other parents whose sons and daughters have served in Iraq or are serving there now.

Hint Three: Your strongest emotions right now can lead to your closest sources of support.

“Tracy knows that the grandfather clock in Patricia’s house chimes nine times when the other clocks say it’s noon because the grandfather clock is set to Baghdad time.

Tracy knows that Patricia has figured out how to tell if someone is in her driveway by squinting at the reflection off a certain glass-covered picture in the dining room, so that if it should ever be two men in uniform, Patricia will know they have arrived before they start ringing the bell and before she is obliged to look directly at them and hear what they have come to say.”

Hint Four: The specific detail paints the picture that people will see in their mind’s eye and shapes how they will feel and remember what you say.

I am gratified by the 249 comments to this post I wrote for Harvard Business Review and seek your specific tips on quotability, the first step to connecting in this increasingly complex, information-flooded, and connected world:

You can feel the tension in the compressed smiles, quick nods and pointed questions at the annual Morgan Stanley Global Healthcare conference. Schedules are packed as the high-stakes finance crowd gathers to hear 20-minute rapid-fire talks by CEOs of start-ups and public companies who seek funding or favorable stock analysts’ reports.

Presenters speak fast, using complex medical and financial terms.

In contrast, my client, the CEO of a new biotech company walks on stage, rolls up his shirt sleeve, and stops at the center of the stage. As he turns to the audience, he pauses briefly to smile. He raises his bare forearm, pointing at a patch. “When patients put on our medical patch they will feel the pain-relieving effects faster than the latest Porsche can go from zero to 90.”

By linking the speed of the medication’s effect to a Porsche’s acceleration, he evoked the “Compared to what?” conversational cue. We are wired to draw connections between things, even where there aren’t any.

This makes the world seem more understandable, familiar, even safe.

If your “Compared to what?” connection grabs people’s attention, you have set the context in which people will view it and decide upon it, just as a general chooses terrain favorable to winning a battle.

Here are some examples of different ways to craft such a message:

Use a familiar slogan in a fresh way: After a company has spent millions to make a slogan familiar, skew it in a new direction for your intended meaning. Piggybacking on the famous “Got milk?” slogan, the Redwood Hospital in Northern California launched a billboard campaign to seek blood donations with this appeal: “Got blood?”

My friend, Paul Geffner, once owned a chicken take-out joint in San Francisco called Poultry in Motion.

Startle with specifics: “Ten times as much funding is devoted to research on the prevention of male baldness as malaria, a disease that kills more than 1 million people each year,” said Bill Gates on the need for creative capitalism to serve more people.

And venture capitalist John Doerr, who has invested in green technology, likes to say, “We can bail out the economy — we cannot bail out the environment.”

In a TV commercial for outdoor gear maker REI, we see the backs of two women who are sitting atop a peak, taking in the scenery at night, when the announcer intones, “October 28th. Jenny Kruger finds out that even the finest four-star restaurant is no match for one with 4 million stars.”

Add a dash of dry humor: A Cuban, after apologizing because he could not offer his guests anything to eat, explained the consequences of Castro’s Revolution: “The three successes were education, healthcare and sports. Three failures were breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Now, more than ever, your capacity to create indelible messages is vital. More than money, smarts, social standing, or attractiveness, in this increasingly complex yet connected world, being most frequently quoted can keep you or your brand top-of-mind.

Whoever most vividly characterizes a situation determines how others see it, talk about it, and act on it.

When asked how he managed to write such gripping horror novels, Stephen King once responded, “I cut out the boring stuff,” and so can you. As a journalist, I slogged through more interviews than I care to recall, in which smart newsmakers would often drown in their own generalizations and jargon, despite being desperate to make a point across.

Don’t make that mistake.

The stories that grab us are those with the most vividly apt illustrations.

Interestingness, like a cork, always bobs up to the top of our attention.

… you may want to recognize ways to avoid such self- sabotage — not that you would need such advice, of course, yet your intelligent friends might.  According to the 15 experts cited by Yale professor, Robert J. Steinberg, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, high I.Q. people are more likely to fall into faulty thinking, yet other experts think that some of their conclusions are faulty.

”Stupid,” for example is used in the book to mean “wrong” and “smart” refers to intelligence – of a certain sort. President Clinton, for example, is called stupid because he got caught in his lies regarding the intern. Perhaps because they are “smart” some of the book’s contributors sometimes fall into the trap of sounding fuzzy and/or contradictory in defining smart and stupid behavior.

“Intelligence by itself doesn’t make you rational. Thinking rationally demands mental skills that some of us don’t have and many of us don’t use,” suggests Kurt Kleiner. And context has considerable influence on what we see, feel, think and do.

It helps to think both fast and slow and to see how blind belief in ideology can make us fall for dumb ideas.

Yet others have suggested that we can make wiser decisions by sidestepping four apparently obvious yet sometimes ignored Mental Traps:

1. The Egocentrism Fallacy: Expecting that the world revolves, or at least should revolve, around you. Acting in ways that benefit your, regardless of how that behavior affects others.

2. The Omniscience Fallacy:  Believing that you know all there is to know and therefore do not have to listen to the advice and counsel of others

3. The Omnipotence Fallacy:  Thinking that your intelligence and education somehow make you all-powerful.

4. The Invulnerability Fallacy: Presuming that you can do whatever you want and that others will never be able to hurt you or expose you.

Improve your performance. Get motivated to persist longer.

The findings from Carol Dweck’s experiment can help us stick to a task that matters to us. Students were randomly assigned to read one of two articles, the first suggested that intelligence is “fixed”; the others argued that it was or “malleable” – open to improvement. Then all asked to do a difficult task.

Those who’d read that intelligence was malleable were more persistent in gaining mastery in that task.

Most gratifyingly, other studies found that:  “teaching students the malleable theory of intelligence not only aided their performance in the face of obstacles on an individual intellectual task, it actually raised their college grade point average and their commitment to school.”

There’s more good news.

Since, as Malcolm Gladwell and others suggest that mastery of a subject requires 10,000 hours of learning and practice, this strengthened desire to persist on a task (or subject) could evoke a self-fulfilling prophecy of mastery.

To further hone your performance, understand the Incentive Caused Bias, other decision making traps we all fall into – and how to argue better.

Give customers the bragging rights that spur them to tell others about their experience at your place or event.  I wondered. Was it the butterscotch-colored walls, light coconut scent wafting through the door as I opened it or the cushy island of deep blue carpet under my feet as I stepped into the boutique hotel?

I don’t know yet I instinctively sighed with relief. And that was before I saw the the smiling doorman walking towards me, saying, “We’re glad that you’re safely out of that storm. Let me help you with your coat, if you like, and your bag.”

The lobby was light with the soft, full-spectrum lights that store make-up counters have, making us all look and feel our best.

Hint: Positive sensory cues multiple their emotional effect when we feel more than one at once or in quick succession.

In fact, without my knowing it at the time, that doorman looked more handsome and caring than I would have experienced him if the entry to that hotel had shiny metal railings, an elaborately patterned carpet and/or a dark colored wall. Further, since the “closing scene” when I left the hotel the next morning was as a positive as the opening scene, I tended to forget the slow room service or  cramped bathroom, according to research on the power of the sequence of events within an experience – from a vacation to a colonscopy.

That’s why it behooves anyone who wants their guests, customers, conferenceattendees or families at home to feel welcome, brag about their experience and act nicely to storyboard the sequence of multi-sensory experiences that those they serve or love experience in their “place.”

Even apparently small physical experiences make a big emotional and even learning difference. Adapt these multi-sensory cues to emotionally engage with others:

1. Children “are better at math when using their hands while thinking,” found to Josh Ackerman, a MIT psychologist. Further, the weight, texture and hardness of objects we touch affects our opinion of the people and the situation.

2. Actors recall lines better when moving and we remember more when walking, gesturing, eating or physically working on something.

3. “People are more generous after holding a warm cup of coffee and more callous after hold a cold drink,” discovered Yale University psychologist John Bargh.

4. Patterns, whether on the walls or floor or upper part of one’s clothing, break up the observers’ attention span and, like ambient noise in a room from the heating or air conditioning system, make us more agitated and inclined to become irritated by each other’s behavior.

5. Scent is the most directly emotional sense and thus a two-edge sword. If the evoked memory is positive it hits deeply and, if not….well, we are more likely to project bad characteristics on the scene and individuals around us.

6. Enable people to engage in the scenes or objects around them and gain bragging rights as a consequence. Have a “What’s next for you?” sign on a large bowl of positive sayings or fortunes near places where they must wait or pause, such as check-in areas.  Staff can encourage them to read theirs aloud. (The more actions we take on behalf of something the more deeply they believe in it, identify with it and will share it with others.)

7. Encourage colleagues to stand and walk side-by-side with those you serve this “sidling” is more likely to evoke a convivial  “us” feeling.

8. Create a story about your region, place, interactive object or monument or event, hopefully involving humorous, heroic or otherwise emotional incidents andindividuals, where you can invite those you serve to become a part of that story, asPeter Gruber suggests.

They may become a part  of “our” story when they can participate your custom ritual, receive your souvenir as a gift, eat the snack that’s part of the story or you take a photo of them in front of the scene on the wall that represents a highlight of our story – and email it to them after they leave.

9. Continue to keep them involved with “our story.” Use geosocial apps that enable them to connect with each other – and your staff – as they walk through your store, hotel, hospital, sports arena or event. That’s what DoubleDutch did for TED conference attendees. And use augmented reality apps, as in Tuscany, yet to enable people to discover more about your area, place or meeting.

What multi-sensory cues have you used to involve people in your place, event or other experience?  Also share your favorite cues to bring us closer via Twitter. I am @kareanderson.

We women generally worry more than men.  For example, “While men are bearing the brunt of the job losses, women report much higher levels of fear and worry about their families’ financial security than men do” and women worry more than their husbands about prostate cancer coming back.

Yet it is vital to recognize the difference between worry and fear.

How, for example,  can we know when a fear for personal safety is justified and when a worry is sapping our spirit and making us see the world simply as a dangerous place?

“Our fears are fashioned out of the ways in which we perceive the world,” wrote Gavin Becker, author of The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence.

Better to learn how to recognize when someone’s hostile or other less apparently dangerous actions are, in fact, a danger to you, so you can act to protect yourself, and not let unfounded fears and worry contaminate your life.

What can we do?  Revise FDR’s advice, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” by using our gut instincts well, with this variation:  “There is nothing to fear unless and until you feel fear.”

Whenever you’ve felt profound fear, it was linked to the presence of danger, imminent pain or death.

Said DeBecker in a National Public Radio interview, “When we get a fear signal, our intuition has already made many connections.  When you feel fear, try to ‘link’ it back to a past situation where the feeling that was similar to see if your fear is, in fact, justified.”

When you feel it, take notice to find the link back to see if you need to take action.  How rational are our fears?  In the 1960s a study was done on what single word evoked the greatest psychologically strong reactions of fear.  The study included words like spider, snake death, rape, murder and incest.  Shark evoked the strongest reaction.

But why?  Sharks rarely come in contact with us.  Three reasons:  the seeming randomness of their strike, the lack of warning for it and the apparent lack of remorse.

Yet man is a potential predator with far more abilities to approach, disguise and deceive.  While the media often portray human violence as random, de Becker points out how it seldom is, and how you can anticipate the patterns in most cases, if you listen to your instinct of genuine fear and take action.  DeBecker’s book describes how you can better protect yourself by learning to recognize and act on the intuitive signals you pick up but reject as unfounded.

Worry, on the other hand, is the fear we manufacture.

Worry, anxiety, concern and wariness all have a purpose, but they are not fear.  Any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really should not be confused with fear.

Worry will not bring solutions.  Worry distracts from finding solutions.

See it as a form of self-harassment.

To free yourself from worry sooner, understand what it really is.  Most people worry because it provides some secondary reward such as:

• Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.

• Worry allows us to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something.  Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.

•  Worry is a cloying way to have a connection with others.  Worry somehow shows love.  The other side of this is the beleif that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about that person.  As many people who’ve been worried about know well, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.

• Worry is a protection against future disappointment.  After you complete an important project where the success of your approach won’t be known for some while, for example, you can worry about it.  Ostensibly, if you can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens.

But how would you want to spend the time while you find out:  worrying, playing or initiating another action on another endeavor?

For some people, worrying is a “magical amulet”, according to Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman.  Some people feel it wards off danger. They truly believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening.

Most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur.  This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen.

The connection between real fear and worry is similar to the relationship between pain and suffering.  Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life.  Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary parts of life.  Worry interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens your life.

When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?”

To be free of fear and yet still get its gift, consider these techniques:

1. When you feel fear, listen.

2.  When you don’t feel fear, don’t manufacture it.

3. If you find yourself creating worry, explore and discover why.

We choke on anxiety.

Anxiety, unlike real fear and like worry, is always caused by uncertainty.  it is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence.  If you predict you will be fired and you are certain that your prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired, but about the ramifications of losing a job.

Predictions in which you have a high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever you need to do.

You can reduce your anxiety by improving your predictions, thus increasing your certainty.  It is worth doing, because the word anxiety, like worry, stems from a root that means “to choke,” and that is just what it does to us.

Our imaginations can be fertile soil in which worry and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable law:  “Only that which is absent can be imagined.”  In other words, what you imagine — just like what you fear — is not happening.

Years ago a candidate for California Superintendant of Schools repeatedly insinuated that his opponent was lying on her business tax returns and had an affair with a student intern. His charges were immediately disputed by her accountant, the student and several co-workers at her firm.

Not surprisingly, the attacks generated considerable interest in their first televised public debate that provided an unexpected akaido-style lesson for anyone who gets publically attacked.  The debate was moderated by three seasoned reporters who sat at a table in front of the studio audience, facing the candidates who stood on stage behind podiums about ten feet apart.

When the first reporter asked the candidates about their budget priorities, if elected, the critical candidate answered first, emphatically reiterating that he would be transparent and accountable, unlike his opponent, when spending public monies and then repeated his two charges against her, with the TV camera coming in for a close-up of him as he concluded, then swiftly swinging over for a tight reaction shot of his opponent.

Instead of looking upset, she had a mild smile on her face and began by praising him for placing a high priority on public accountability, but she didn’t stop there. She went on to laud him for one of the educational reforms he’d advocated, with which she agreed – all while walking over to stand within two feet of him, alternatively facing the reporters and her opponent.

He looked flummoxed. Because of their close proximity, the camera could easily cover both faces — and did. She went on to say she presumed, because he was so conscientious about transparency, that it was the press of his campaign schedule that had prevented him from reviewing the records she’d sent to him in response to “the issues” he’d raised about her. She then walked calmly back to her podium, with the camera following her, then swinging around to pan across the smiling audience.

When you throw mud you get dirty ~ Adlai Stephenson

As you might anticipate, this videoed interchange became the most viewed and discussed part of the debate.

Let’s delve into the anatomy of what happened and how you can turn false or simply heated attacks against you into opportunities to shine—especially in contrast to your attacker.

This phenomenon is akin to product positioning in advertising. In situations where your critic acts badly towards you, provide a side-by-side comparison. Start with your authentic praise of some aspect of their past actions, followed by your vividly specific characterization of your main differentiating benefit stands in sharp contrast to their behavior and attributes.

Warning: When under attack our first instinct is to flee or retaliate, leading to the possibility that oour behavior will also look unbecoming too.

Still many seasoned politicos say negative campaigning and ads, for example, are effective in attracting votes so they are forced to run them. Some are sleazy and real nasty.

Yet, some researchers disagree with this conventional wisdom, and their findings lend support to the notion of genuinely praising an action or admirable character trait of someone right after they have behaved badly towards you or someone else.

Here’s some recent reinforcement for you to praise the part in someone you genuinely admire — especially when you are tempted, in a heated situation, to “go negative.”

In discussing David Meyer’s book, Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, Gretchen Rubin writes in The Happiness Project, of this rule of human behavior, it “gave me another reason to stop being so critical.”  She adds, “In ‘spontaneous trait transference,’ people spontaneously and unintentionally associate what you say about the qualities of other people with the qualities of you yourself. So if I tell Jean that Pat is arrogant or stupid, unconsciously Jean will associate that quality with me. On the other hand, if I say that Pat is brilliant or hilarious, I’ll be linked to those qualities.”

“Ever wondered why people want to kill the messenger who brings bad news? Blame it on trait transference. Conversely, by specifically and vividly praising others’ actions that you admire, you’ll build your own reputation as well as theirs.

Here’s what also happens.

Whatever behavior you most remark upon in someone else is the trait that person is most likely to exhibit when around you.

We tend to act out the behavior that people have shown they expect to see in us, for good and for bad.

Compliment your husband on his planning that weekend trip (never mind that it is only the second time he has done so in years) and he is more likely to plan more.  If he does something that peeves you and you remain silent, rather than commenting, then those irritating behaviors are most likely to dissipate, rather than increase.

Talking or acting against a behavior is akin to underlining a sentence on the page.

You give the thought more energy and memorability. “Underlining” the actions of another with your reactions motivates that person to react to you.    That deepens the rut in the memory road for both of you.  It reinforces a behavioral script you meant to erase.

Such action evokes the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Amy Sutherland wrote about a variation of this effect in her New York Times article, “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage. “ For weeks her article remained the most popular one the newspaper ran, then resulted in a book deal for her.  In conducting research for her book, Kicked Bitten and Scratched, she sat watching exotic animals trainers work with wild birds, dolphins – and Shamu.

A light bulb went on her mind.  Why not try the same successful animal training techniques on her husband?

Wrote Sutherland, “I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.”

She began what trainers call “approximations,” “rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior.” (Parents and teachers have been taught to use it with kids, others to overcome phobias — and one person even suggests it for shaping behavior in church.)

Even more startling, perhaps, two studies conducted at the University of Wisconsin seven years ago found that when women spoke generally and positively about a trait that their husbands had not exhibited, at least recently (“Thank you for being so thought as I go through this stressful time at work”) the husbands began exhibiting caring behavior, often using the words she used in praising him.

“Honey, want to talk about your day and let go of some of that stress?”

Here’s the funny thing.

Even though most of us human beings long to be understood and loved for who we are we instinctively put up barriers.  We praise and give others what we like in ourselves and would like to be given. That’s the Golden Rule, after all.  Do unto others as you would have done unto you.  Yet the devil’s in the details – because other people are not you.

Consider, instead a Golden Golden Rule: Do unto others as they would have done unto them. Praise the parts of others they most like in themselves and support them in the ways that most matter to them.

Result?

They will go out of their way to compliment and support you. Rarely will they also follow the Golden Golden Rule back with you however.

That’s not instinctual.

Yet their well-intended positive energy towards you is more likely to bring out the happier, higher-performing side in both of you over time.

Simple put, people like people who like them.

And, as you build trust with that person, you can bring up the Golden Golden Rule and describe the traits (temperament and talents) you most like and value in yourself.

Ask for that person’s support in exhibiting those traits. Describe the kind of verbal and behavioral support that you find most helpful and gratifying.

Now that step represents a golden, golden oppportunity for you both to support and enjoy each other more over time.  I’m not promising that this will be a smooth path towards mutual understanding and appreciation.

Yet it seems to be easier and more authentic and rewarding than any other alternative I’ve found thus far.  This approach can reduce the misunderstandings that lead to resentment and reaction against others.

It enables you to bring out others’ best side so they can see and support yours. That’s no small achievement, even if it happens just some of the time.   Consider it one more step towards your Learned Optimism and to Stumbling on Happiness.

And, since opportunity is often inconvenient, why not try one of these approaches at your first opportunity — with the next person you encounter —  and tell us what happens?

Writing of her secret life as a prostitute, a blogger with the pseudonym Belle de Jour had a backstory worthy of a movie script. In fact it was turned into a Showtime TV series. She wanted to have a satisfying next chapter of her life story so she wrote about it. You see she’s “a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology.”

Few of us lead a startling double life yet we may want to play a new part in the next chapter.

To create fresh scenes for your life, view it as a movie story. That’s what Donald Miller did when he wrote A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life.  Screenwriters know that in a movie a Character is What He Does. An Inciting Incident must happen.

If you are restless with your life why not evoke such an incident to turn your next chapter into the kind of adventure story you want for your life? That’s what I’m embarking on, in a halting way. Four friends are on this path with me and it would be great to have you join us.

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it,” wrote Hannah Arendt yet we do define ourselves by the spin we put on the stories we tell.

Here are some steps.

1. Recognize the Story of Your Life So Far

How we cobble together the incidents in our lives and create a narrative thread reflects that spin, revealing our hidden personalities and our tendencies suggests psychologist Dan McAdams, author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. To put it starkly, McAdams believes there are two kinds of people.

There are those who view life-altering experiences as “contaminative episodes.” An emotionally positive event suddenly goes bad and that will be the way they replay future incidents.

Others, like Taylor Mali view events as “redemptive episodes” through which they can eventually redeem bad scenes, turning them into good outcomes over time and becoming better people. I feel like I do some of both. How about you?

2. Choose to Put a Positive Spin on Your Stories and Pull Others Closer

“Emotion serves as a central organizing process within the brain,” writes Mindsight author Daniel Siegel.

How we feel about our past affects how we think about describing it – creating an endless loop of repeating scenes and expectations.  Seeing the patterns in our past incidents, choosing to learn from them and rejoicing in that growth can be done most naturally by shifting the theme of the stories we tell others about ourselves.  Move from contaminative to redemptive.

In this shift you create a life-affirming triple win:

1. You begin living from your strengths more often.

2. Others around you are encouraged by this emotional contagion, thus you are helping friends of your friends’ friends to see their life story in a more resilient light.

3. Reflecting resiliency in your storytelling can pull others closer as they are attracted to positivity.

Positively “integrated personal narratives are an important marker of psychological health,” according to Siegel.

Telling your stories from a resilient mindset also helps anchor that attitude in you – and more.

3. Storytelling Creates Connective Tissue Between Us

1. As you tell you often pull out stories from listeners. Stories tend to build upon each other and draw others in. They spark deeper conversations, begin to establish a common ground and build trust through that sharing.

2. Stories, by their nature, are static, action-driven and in sharing them we can move each other to act, to change.

3. Stories help to cultivate empathy, as PJ Manney points out, encouraging others to understand the perceptions and motivations of others including the storyteller.

4. A good storyteller can reduce a complex situation to its essence while cloaking it in emotionally memorable details. In so doing, stories focus our attention.

For example, if you choose to turn the page of your life story to a fresh chapter, a new adventure, you are setting yourself out on a quest. In describing this quest as a story to others, you may pull them into launching their own quest.

Stories are vital to build shared understanding. They help us make sense out of ourselves, each other and the kind of story we want co-create together as we grow our relationship.  Stories are where we create meaning in our days to endure loss and failures to have a redemptive narrative, to savor our life –with others.

See stories as oxygen in your life.

4. Follow Yourself into the Brighter Next Chapter of Your Life Story

A fun way to recognize how to tell your own interesting story is to get interested in exactly what it is about. Take one or two of Russell Davies’ suggestions to recognize what most  interests you. I’ve modified some of them to appeal to my lazy side and perhaps yours.

1. Take at one photo everyday and post it on Flickr or other place you can see your growing collection.

2. Start a daily one-sentence journal.

3. Keep a casual scrapbook – pasting in things you collect and captioning them.

4. Read at least part of a magazine, book or newspaper that outside your usual realm of interest.

5.  Interview someone for 20 minutes and observe the direction of your questions.

6. Collect something

7. Each week sit in a café or other public place for 30 minutes or an hour and listen to other people’s conversations. Take notes.

8. Each week write 50 words about something that stuck in your mind – a movie, building, sculpture, song, etc.

9. Make something and put it where you can see it or give it to the right person.

Holidays are times of great loving and loneliness and we often don’t know who is experiencing which. For many it is a bit of both.

For us all this can be a prime time for kindness, sometimes by sharing what we have.

And kindness is often unspoken. “An eye can threaten like a loaded and leveled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. At another time, Emerson wrote, “You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”

“You may be sorry that you spoke, sorry you stayed or went, sorry you won or lost, sorry so much was spent. But as you go through life, you’ll find—you’re never sorry that you were kind,” said Herbert Prochnow. There’s a French proverb on the wall of my study, “Write injuries in sand, kindnesses in marble.”

Authentic praise is an extension of kindness. Whatever we praise we encourage to flourish. Whatever we criticize or “simply” snub goes deeper and lasts longer.

Each moment we choose our emotional response. We choose where to put our attention, emotion, and intention. Emotions are energy. So, look to someone’s positive intent, especially when it appears she may have none.

Even though after his death his wife probably disagreed with how he displayed some of his “kindness” on the road, Charles Kuralt wrote, “The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.”

“Keep what is worth keeping. And with the breath of kindness blow the rest away,” suggests English novelist, Dinah Mulock Craik. Here’s to making more opportunities to play, laugh, celebrate, and act together in cultivating kindness as life’s genuine “keeper.”

Life contains few absolutes, and one of those few is that kindness usually cultivates connection, something we yearn for in a time-pressed, ear-to-the- cell-phone, relationship-diminished culture. After all, the heart can be our strongest muscle if we exercise it regularly. Yet being kind is not a guarantee of safety from hurt — nothing offers that fail-safe comfort.

“Kindness and intelligence don’t always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships,” wrote Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in an article for McCall’s magazine way back in 1975.

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares,” wrote Henri Nouwen in Out of Solitude.

Years ago from my college classmate, Alasi Perdanan, I heard a Persian proverb, “With a sweet tongue of kindness, you can drag an elephant by a hair.”

“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate,” wrote Albert Schweitzer. “He who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love,” wrote the Greek religious leader, Saint Basil.

“Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom,” wrote Theodore Isaac Rubin in “One to One.”

“Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness and small obligations win and preserve the heart” said English chemist Humphrey Davy.

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop that makes it run over.

So in a series of kindness there is, at last, one which makes the heart run over,” once wrote the Scottish lawyer and biographer, James Boswell.

“We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck . . . But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness,” wrote columnist Ellen Goodman.

From an artist’s perspective, ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov once said, “The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.”

Willa Cather believed that “When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason has left them.”

“Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution, “Kahlil Gibran reminds us.

Ultimately, “kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not,” noted Dr. Samuel Johnson. Albeit unevenly, this holiday, I am attempting to practice giving what may be the most nourishing and priceless present and by now you can probably guess what that is.

Your thoughts on this?

After a priest moved to a new parish he approached his superior one afternoon to ask, “Would you mind if I smoked while praying?” and was, not surprisingly, turned down.

Yet how one makes a request has a huge impact on whether it will be  granted. For example, the priest might have said, “Would you mind if I pray while I am smoking?”

Setting the context with your initial comments is akin to dressing in the fashion that the people you are going to be around will approve or even admire, while still being true to yourself.

Why?

Because people like people who are like them.  Like all animals, we are most comfortable with those who act and look right – like us.  In fact, the more you look familiar to me, the earlier in the conversation I will literally hear your words, absorb their meaning and be more able to accept them, and you.

The more you look and act different than me, the more my peripheral vision narrows initially.  Further my skin temperature goes down and my heart beat goes up in anticipation of the face of the unfamiliar.

That is because the primitive triune part of our brains has not changed. We are forever hardwired to respond to new, unfamiliar situations with the “fight or flight” syndrome.  Our vital signs literally shut down when we are first around a person, setting or situation that is radically different, unfamiliar thus initially potentially dangerous, until we have decided how we feel about our situation.

You can pull people closer, and bring out their better side so they can see and appreciate yours. In fact, this is probably the most meaningful gift you can give someone else, other than the present of your warm presence.

Continuously praise others’ specific actions you admire, however small they may seem to you. People eventually warm up to your evident warmth. Authentically praise to inspire happier, high-performing behavior in others and yourself.

1. Praise  them directly. Whatever you praise you want to flourish. The more specific your words, the more memorable your message.  Describe the actual act in as much rich detail so you honor the person in acknowledging how vividly it affected you.

2. Even more powerfully, compliment the person to one or more people who are very important to them.  My client, the CFO of a Berlin-based maker of wireless portal equipment named Punjabi, has had a rugged and quite successful third year of operation where everyone has worked long hours.

Instead of handing out the ten top team awards in the traditional way, at a company event, the CEO took the time to find a significant group related to each of the winners.  For those winners the groups included a place of worship, a rugby club, a college alumnae organization and an antique car association.

With the permission of these organizations, the CEO arranged to give the award and an eight-minute speech, describing both the winner’s accomplishments at Punjabi and a specific incident where the winner exemplified the heroic character of a true team player.  Thus each (surprised) winner got to bask in the spotlight in front of valued people in her or his non-world world.

The CEO’s greater effort also put his company in a genuinely positive light in many new places.  Although it did not appear that any of the people who saw their friends receive the award were immediate, potential customers of Punjabi, they were sufficiently inspired to stir some positive word-of-mouth buzz about the awards ceremonies.

A month after these ceremonies a feature writer for the equivalent of the “lifestyle” section of the main Berlin paper heard the story through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who was a rugby player with her husband.  Not one to be interested in business stories, she was nevertheless touched by the way the ceremonies had rippled out to surround the winners’ lives.

She tracked down the CEO and interviewed him, thus affording him another chance to speak glowingly about specific examples of his winners’ dedication and ingenuity.  As he praised each person, the glow of the values he admired reflected back on him and his company.  The reporter also interviewed the winners and several of the people at the organizations where the awards events occurred and then wrote a human interest story that appeared, with photos, in a Sunday edition.

The article generated several glowing letters to the editor by people who witnessed the ceremonies, the winners and others who were also moved by the story. Mr. John Sunui, vice president of sales for Singapore-based construction management company happened to read some of the letters in the paper while eating his breakfast in a hotel while in Berlin on business.

Sunui emailed the reporter to request a copy of the original article that the reporter emailed back the next day and he received when he returned to Singapore.

That December holiday in Singapore — and 14 other countries where Sunui’s company has offices, both the office director and one person in each office who has done an outstanding job at their work, as voted by their co-workers, will be happily surprised when they walk in the door at some place that is special to them to be greeted by a company representative who will give them a present and tell a story about another side of the winner that their friends in that organization may not know about.

How can you give a lasting and perhaps the most widely-known gift that ten people you admire can receive?   For each person think of the specific incident where that person has exemplified the quality that you most admire or cherish.  Re-play the situation in your mind so you can describe it in all its story-building, touching detail.

Practice saying the story, then notice how you now feel about the person. Begin with the specific details before you end with the general statement that summarizes your admiration.  That way, you make the story, and the person, more vividly memorable to others who read or hear it.

Next step: for each person envision what group to which they are affiliated (family, religious organization, hobby or other interest or professional group, etc.) would be most significant for that person if you were to praise them among the members. You have several ways to pass along your praise about the person you love or admire.

Call, email or write to someone in that person’s valued affinity group and share your story of praise.  Or you may, like the people in the story above, ask for permission to confer a gift on the person at a gathering of their group.  In advertising this method is called a “third party endorsement.”

For example, when customers praise a product in an advertisement they are providing a credible third party endorsement.  Because we are all instinctive voyeurs, naturally interested in the stories of each other’s lives we are more drawn to third party endorsements than to advertisements.  Further, when we hear a positive story about someone, told by another person we find it more credible and compelling than if the person was to “boast” about it in telling it himself.

Here are other ways to offer heartfelt, long-lasting third party endorsement gifts to those you hold dear:

• Donate money or another gift to a charity or cause in which that person is active, and ask that your story about them be included in any acknowledgement of the gift.

• Seek out places that person frequent and see if you might buy a needed piece of equipment or repair one in that person’s name.

In our Sausalito church, for example, you can pay for a hymnal and dedicate it with a related phrase, to someone you love. So every Sunday, someone at my church opens up a hymnal with this hand calligraphic message on the inside front, dedicated to my mother who loves piano music, “To Lestelle whose piano playing washes away the dust of everyday life.”

• On an object that person might uses frequently (coffee mug, bath towel, key holder) imprint or monogram a positive nickname or one phrase characterization of the “hero’s” action.

To my English rugby-playing friend, Richard, we’re giving a glass beer stein with these words etched on the bottom, “Great giver of bone-crushing hugs.”

• Make a large, colorful postcard on which you write a description of the positive incident involving your hero, then ask your colleagues who agree to join in signing it before sending it to that person’s home.  Give a gift to the person’s partner in work or personal life, as an acknowledgement of your admiration.

• Create a banner or poster, with a celebratory sentence and an enlarged and flattering image of the hero and hang it in a prominent place (wall or door of the person’s office, home or event). Find a place the person frequents (dry cleaner, golf club) and offer the business manager at that site your credit card number with a set dollar limit. Ask the manager to pay the next bill of your hero, fax you a copy of the bill, and hand the manager a gift card with your inscription on it to be given to the hero at their next visit.  You’ll create your own variation of this method, I’ll bet.

Two years ago I learned that Janice, a skilled meeting planner who had hired me to speak at her association several times over the years, and who was exceptionally gracious and generous with me, had contracted leukemia. I learned this from her assistant who called to confirm some details regarding my next presentation at their annual meeting.

On a long plane flight back from another speaking engagement, I looked out the window, thinking of Janice, and conjured up this idea for a third party endorsement of the Hawaiian-born meeting planner which would reflect one of her most passionate interests, gardening. I called the association’s executive director to share my idea and he immediately agreed.

Two months later, just after I was introduced to speak at that association’s convention’s opening breakfast, I moved to the center of the raised stage, signaling the 500 attendees to also rise from their seats as the board president caught the elbow of our surprised meeting planner, Jana, who at the bottom of the stage steps, still focused on making sure the room lighting would be alright for my speech.

He guided her up the steps as I stepped back to the side of the stage and the first person in the audience, roving mike in his hand told a vignette of how Jana had guided him at the beginning of his career.  As Jana reached the center of the stage, in front of the people she had served for 14 years, eight other people in various parts of the room lifted their mike and told their brief story about her.

Then a tenor saxaphone player stepped out from the side of the stage to serenade Janice with a fragment of her favorite Kenny G song as the screen on the stage was filled with purple words on an emerald green (her favorite colors) background, “Jana is a special flower” followed by a swift changing set of images of Janice in several situations.

As the song ended, on cue, all 500 people pulled from out of their pockets and purses the fragrant Hawaiian-grown white flowers, the gardenias, tuber roses and pikaki and held them aloft towards Jana.  The board president handed Jana a bouquet of the flowers and asked Jana to speak, which she did, briefly, through her tears.

Even several of the hotel waiters were standing still, crying by then.  My speech had, of course, been moved to the luncheon so people could drop by Jana’s table to say their warm greetings through the ensuing breakfast.