Translator: Hui chu Chen
I'd like to introduce you to these five chairs
because they are actually the real protagonists of my talk.
They have a special message to give to all of us,
and the message is about
what behaviors and attitudes we bring into the world in every moment.
Now, to show you what I mean,
I have a story to tell you from my personal life.
And I was trying to build a stronger relationship
with a very important person,
the daughter of my partner, 20-year-old daughter.
To do that, I thought,
"Let's have a great evening out, just the two girls together."
And I chose a special venue,
the Blue Note Jazz Club in Milan.
That night, the Manhattan Transfer, which is my favorite jazz group,
were playing.
So, we meet, atmosphere is fantastic.
We are getting on very well,
and I'm happy.
Being a baby boomer, loving the music,
I thought, "Well, is she liking it as much as I am?"
So in that moment, I just turned to look at her to check.
And what did I see? I saw this.
She was on her iPhone.
Now, how to react?
I had some choices.
First choice.
Excuse me. What is she doing?
She's on her iPhone.
I mean, I spent all this time and money
thinking of a fantastic evening, I bring her here, and what?
After two minutes I take my eyes off her,
and she's on her phone?
I mean, what is wrong with this generation?
I mean, they got the attention span of a fruit fly,
for God's sake.
(Sighing)
Choice number two.
This was a mistake.
(Laughter)
Why did I bring her here?
I mean, she's bored; she's not interested; she doesn't like the music.
What was I thinking? I mean: Why should she like the music?
I mean, this is stuff for baby boomers.
She probably thinks she's spending the evening with a dinosaur.
Oh, God!
Choice number three.
Hold your horses.
Count to ten. Take a deep breath.
Don't jump to conclusions.
You don't know what she is doing on her iPhone.
So just relax.Take it easy.
Have another drink.
(Laughter)
Choice number four.
Now, you know, what's really important for me
is that this evening together is special,
that she feels that after this evening, she can really open up to me;
she can feel safe with me, and that -
I'm always an open door for her, that's what's really important for me.
I just hope it's going to happen -
I just hope.
Choice number five.
What's important for her?
What's going on in her world right now?
What's important for her?
I really would love to connect to her.
What do I need to do that?
(Sighing)
You know, I was having real problems trying to answer that question.
And in that moment, she turned to me and she said,
"Louise, did you know that this is the only Blue Note
in the whole of Europe?
And there's one in New York, and then there's two in Japan,
but this is the only one here in Milan.
That's incredible; the Italians have got it."
And she said, "Oh, and I've looked up the Manhattan Transfer.
Do you know that they've been playing and singing together for 40 years?
That's incredible!"
And she said, "Also, look."
She handed me her iPhone; she'd sent a message out on Facebook;
it said, "In the Blue Note in Milan,
with the Manhattan transfer and Louise, the best!"
Now, that was a close shave.
I mean, I could've really spoiled that.
Because I could have sent her a disapproving look from this chair.
And she could've started telling herself about me, things about me,
like, Louise, she's controlling.
She's difficult.
It's not easy to be around her.
And that was not my intention at all.
And in fact, she was completely engaged.
She was there,
multitasking in her digital way, but she was enhancing our reality.
So, in milliseconds,
I could have destroyed that beautiful moment that we were creating together.
And this is what we are doing all the time,
we are making choices about the behaviors that we bring into the world.
And the choices that we make have a direct impact
on the conversations that we have,
the relationships that we form,
and the quality of our lives in general.
So, what can we do at a practical level
to help us be more conscious about this?
Because they don't train us this in school.
It's not on the school curriculum - how to behave well, really.
So, what can we do?
The idea of the five chairs came to me
when I went and attended a nine-day course in nonviolent communication
with its late founder, Marshall Rosenberg, an extraordinary man,
who did so much for world peace.
And after that, it sort of changed my life.
After that, I decided that it was a message
that I needed to get into our workplaces.
Workplaces where I spend most of my time
being a coach, a facilitator, and the trainer.
And also, where we produce some of our most questionable behaviors,
sometimes toxic behaviors.
So, the idea of the five chairs is to help us slow down
how we are behaving in every moment of our lives
and to analyze what's going on.
So, what I would like to do
is look at the chairs more closely and explain them.
The red chair.
This is the jackal chair.
I mean, jackals are incredibly clever, incredibly opportunistic animals.
They always on the lookout to attack.
And in fact, this chair here is the chair where we misbehave the most.
In this chair we love to blame, to complain, to punish, to gossip;
but our supreme game in this chair is to judge.
And if you don't believe me, I invite you to go on a mental diet;
I invite you to spend one hour with some human beings
and see if you can do it without one single judgment
going through your mind.
I mean, watch ourselves.
Somebody walks in the door, we go: bzzzzzzzzz,
I like, don't like, not really interested.
And we don't know anything about them at all.
So, this chair here
is a judging chair.
There's actually another game that I love in this chair,
it's the "I'm right" game.
And I used to do that all time, all the time
until my brother gave me some feedback.
I used to do it with my mother because my mother likes to exaggerate.
So she would say something like,
"Oh yes, there were 30 people at the family gathering."
And my job was to correct her.
I'm saying, "No, Mom, they weren't 30, they were 13."
So, I was the policewoman of the situation.
My brother touched me on the arm,
and he said, "It doesn't matter," to which I reacted,
"What do you mean it doesn't matter? Of course, it matters. She's wrong.
And she needs to be corrected for her own good."
He touched me on the arm again, and he said,
"Do you want to be in a relationship with your mother,
or do you want to be right?"
Big lesson.
From then on,
I always looked upon my mother's exaggeration as a form of abundance.
So, here in this chair, what we tend to do
is we tend to see what is wrong with other people
rather than what is right.
Mother Teresa reminds us,
"The more we judge people, the less time we have to love them."
The next chair is the hedgehog chair,
the yellow chair.
Now, the hedgehog -
When we behave like hedgehogs, we feel very vulnerable,
and we curl up, we protect ourselves against what we feel is an evil world.
And what we do is we mercilessly judge ourselves in this chair.
So we turn this chair, the red chair, on ourselves.
And we say things like, "I'm not intelligent enough.
I cannot do this. Nobody believes in me."
And we have certain fears,
we have fears of being rejected, fears of disappointing, fears of failing.
And we also play the victim.
So it's, "Nobody cares for me, nobody loves me."
But in fact,
when I use this in companies, and I ask managers, and I say,
"Where do you spend the most of your time?"
Hardly anybody comes and sits here.
Because it's quite difficult to admit our weaknesses sometimes.
We need a lot of courage.
And yet, we all suffer from self-doubt.
But it's really, what do we do with our self-doubt?
Do we give up and give in?
Or do we say no?
I want to find the resources and grow.
And Krishnamurti says something wonderful,
he says, "The highest form of intelligence
is the ability to observe ourselves without judging."
So, next chair.
This is the meerkat chair.
I don't know if you've ever seen a meerkat.
They are not many in Italy, but they are incredible.
When they are on sentinel duty,
they can stay for one hour just like this:
one hour moving their head and only their head.
Incredibly vigilant.
And when we are in this chair, this is what we do.
We're mindful; we're very aware;
we are observant; we stop; we pause.
We take a deep breath, and we're conscious.
This is the WAIT chair. W-A-I-T.
What am I thinking? What am I telling myself?
So here we become very curious.
If somebody is angry, instead of saying, "For God sake: grow up, will you?"
We think, "I wonder why that person is angry?"
And we feel interested.
So this chair here is ...
When I think of Nietzsche,
this is such an important quote for this chair.
He says, "You have your way; I have my way.
As for the right way and the only way, it does not exist."
So here we have a choice.
The red pill or the blue pill?
It's the sliding door chair.
And in this moment when we make the right choice,
we move into this successful living.
Next chair.
Here we go into the world of detect.
Now, why detect?
Detect because we become detective of ourselves,
like Sherlock Holmes of ourselves.
We take a magnifying glass, and we look at our behaviors.
It's a beautiful chair because we become self-aware.
We know who we are. We know what we want.
We know where we're going. We're not afraid to speak our truth.
But we also create our boundaries.
We look after ourselves in this chair.
But we're very very powerful.
We don't give our power away.
Here we give our power away.
So here we grow, we become free.
We come into our full power.
We become assertive, but not aggressive.
Aristotle said, "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."
We can be here for our whole lives.
Why the dolphin?
The dolphin because it's such a wonderful animal.
It's playful; it's intelligent; it communicates beautifully.
When I think of the dolphin,
I think of us at our very best as human beings.
So, next chair.
This is the giraffe chair.
Very beautiful chair,
very difficult.
I don't know if you know,
but the giraffe has the biggest heart of all land animals;
it's that size.
And not only does it have the biggest heart,
it also has the longest neck.
So it has incredible vision.
So when we are in this chair,
we are displaying empathy, compassion, and understanding.
And in this chair, we put our egos on the back burner,
and we listen to people.
We hold people in our presence, and we care for them.
Stepping into somebody else's shoes and understanding them
is a great act of generosity.
Abraham Lincoln once said,
"I don't like that man. I must get to know him better."
So in this chair, it's an invitation
to look at other perspectives,
to embrace other realities,
to embrace diversity,
and to become tolerant.
And the most important question in this chair is what is important
for him or her in front of me?
And the intention in this chair is to stay connected whatever happens.
So these are the chairs.
How do we translate this into daily life?
Well, you can imagine, if you go to work,
maybe you can go, and you give a presentation,
and it goes really well.
So you are here, thinking, "Great, fantastic!"
Then, maybe you have a meeting and things go badly,
and we sink into these chairs.
Now our challenge every day is to understand how to find the balance
between sitting here and sitting here.
Because if we're sitting here, life is not that happy.
But if we're sitting here, in these chairs,
we're more rational; we're more open;
we're more intelligent; we're more thoughtful.
Something that really moved me very very deeply when I first read it
was this: Viktor Frankl, in his book Man's Search for Meaning,
said, "Everything can be taken from man but one thing.
The last of human freedoms -
to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances."
This is so powerful.
So when you next want to snap at your children,
or argue with your partner,
or punish someone at work,
try and come into this chair here and think.
And if by chance, you end up in this chair -
which very often happens -
can we find the courage to say "I'm sorry"
and make everything right again?
So, my invitation to you is to take these chairs home with you.
Play with them. Make them your own.
Teach them to your kids; they get this immediately.
Put five of them in the boardroom at work
and watch how your meetings will improve.
And the next time somebody presses one of your red buttons,
just think: five chairs, five choices.
Can we all commit to making our homes,
our workplaces, and this world a better place?
One behavior at a time.
Thank you.
(Applause)