Excerpts on Answering Yes

I’m reading The Answer to How is Yes, by Peter Block (thanks as always to Mary Stacey for providing an excellent influx of books).

First off, I thought this book was useful even before I started reading it, because one day as I was trying to figure something out I looked up from my notebook and there was the answer staring me in the face when I saw the book’s title: the answer to how is yes.

I am only 40 pages in or so, but here are a few things that have caught my eye:

pg. 11: “asking How? is a favorite defense against taking action”

pg.12: “The engineer and economist represent mindsets that dominate the culture. The mindset of the artist is increasingly absent in our workplaces. The mindset and role of the social architect is a way of integrating the gifts of the engineer, the economist, and the artist.”

pg. 20: “The desire to get others to change is alive and well in our personal lives also. If only the other person would learn, grow, be more flexible, express more feeling or less feeling, carry more of the load, or be more vulnerable, then our relationships would improve. Most of us enter therapy complaining about the behaviour of parents, partners, co-workers, children. While we may package our complaint as a desire to help them, we are really expressing our desire to control them.”

pg.23: “We need simply to make the subtle shift from ‘How do you measure this?’ to the question ‘What measurement would have meaning to me?'”

pg.24: “Therapist Pittmann McGehee states that the opposite of love is not hate, but efficiency.”

pg.31: “What is the crossroad at which I find myself at this point in my life/work?… We will find meaning in exploring and understanding this crossroad. Our crossroad represents an as yet unfulfilled desire to change our focus, our purpose, what we want to pursue.”

These little excerpts give just a taste of the book. I’m not sure what my overall impression is yet, but am definitely finding sentences to chew on.