The Anatomy of PEACE. RESOLVING THE HEART OF CONFLICT. The Arbinger Institute

living with ongoing defeat. She silently called heavenward for help, as she had been taught to do by her churchgoing parents. She wasn't sure there was a heaven or any help to be had, but she broadcast her need all the same.
Avi smiled good-naturedly. "So Lou," he said, "Cory is a problem. That's what you're saying."
"Yes."
"He needs to be fixed in some way—changed, motivated, disciplined, corrected."
14
• THE HEART OF PEACE
"Absolutely."
"And you've tried that?"
"Tried what?"
"Changing him."
"Of course."
"And has it worked? Has he changed?"
"Not yet, but that's why we're here. One day, no matter how hard a skull he has, he's going to get it. One way or the other."
"Maybe," Avi said without conviction.
"You don't think your program will work?" Lou asked, in¬credulously.
"That depends."
"On what?"
"On you."
Lou grunted. "How can the success of your program de¬pend on me when you're the ones who will be working with my son over the coming two months?"
"Because you will be living with him over all the months afterward," Avi answered. "We can help, but if your family envi¬ronment is the same when he gets home as it was when he left, whatever good happens here is unlikely to make much of a dif-ference later. Yusuf and I are only temporary surrogates. You and Carol, all of you with your respective children," he said, motioning to the group, "are the helpers who matter."
Great, Lou thought. A waste of time.
"You said you want Cory to change," came a voice from the back, yanking Lou from his thoughts. It was Yusuf, who had fi¬nally joined the group.
"Yes," Lou answered.
"Don't blame you," Yusuf said. "But if that is what you want, there is something you need to know."
DEEPER MATTERS •
15
"What's that?"
"If you are going to invite change in him, there is some¬thing that first must change in you."
"Oh yeah?" Lou challenged. "And what would that be?"
Yusuf walked to the whiteboard that covered nearly the en¬tire front wall of the room. "Let me draw something for you," he said.
THE CHANGE PYRAMID

"By the end of the day tomorrow," Yusuf said, turning to face the group, "we will have formulated a detailed strategy for helping others to change. That strategy will be illustrated by a diagram we call the Change Pyramid. We aren't yet ready to consider the pyramid in detail, so I've drawn only its basic structure. This overall structure will help us to discover a fun¬damental change that must occur in us if we are going to invite change in others."
16
• THE HEART OF PEACE
"Okay, I'll bite," Lou said. "What fundamental change?"
"Look at the two areas in the pyramid," Yusuf invited. "No¬tice that the largest area by far is what I have labeled 'Helping things go right.' In comparison, the 'Dealing with things that are going wrong' area is tiny."
"Okay," Lou said, wondering what significance this had.
Yusuf continued. "The pyramid suggests that we should spend much more time and effort helping things go right than dealing with things that are going wrong. Unfortunately, how¬ever, these allocations of time and effort are typically reversed. We spend most of our time with others dealing with things that are going wrong. We try fixing our children, changing our spouses, correcting our employees, and disciplining those who aren't acting as we'd like. And when we're not actually doing these things, we're thinking about doing them or worrying about doing them. Am I right?" Yusuf looked around the room for a response.
"For example, Lou," he said, "would it be fair to say that you spend much of your time with Cory criticizing and challenging him?"
Lou thought about it. This was no doubt true in his case, but he didn't want to admit to it so easily.
"Yes, I'd say that's true," Carol admitted for him.
"Thanks," Lou mumbled under his breath. Carol looked straight ahead.
"It's certainly far too true of me as well," Yusuf said, coming to Lou's rescue. "It's only natural when confronting a problem that we try to correct it. Trouble is, when working with people, this hardly ever helps. Further correction rarely helps a child who is pouting, for example, or a spouse who is brooding, or a coworker who is blaming. In other words, most problems in life are not solved merely by correction."
DEEPER MATTERS •
17
"So what do you suggest?" Lou asked. "If your child was into drugs, what would you do, Yusuf? Just ignore it? Are you saying you shouldn't try to change him?"
"Maybe we should begin with a less extreme situation," Yusuf answered.
"Less extreme? That's my life! That's what I'm dealing with."
"Yes, but it's not all that you are dealing with. You and Carol aren't on drugs, but I bet that doesn't mean you're always happy together."
Lou thought back to the silent treatment Carol had given him on the flight the day before. She didn't like how he had handled Cory, and she communicated her displeasure by clam¬ming up. Tears often lay just below the surface of her silence. Lou knew what her silence meant—that he, Lou, wasn't mea¬suring up—and he resented it. He was having enough trouble with his boy; he didn't think he deserved the silent, teary lec¬tures. "We're not perfect," Lou allowed.
"Nor am I with my wife, Lina," Yusuf said. "And you know what I've found? When Lina is upset with me in some way, the least helpful thing I can do is criticize her or try to correct her. When she's mad, she has her reasons. I might think she's wrong and her reasons illegitimate, but I've never once con¬vinced her of that by fighting back." He looked at Lou and Carol. "How about you? Has it helped to try to change each other?"
Lou chewed tentatively on the inside of his cheek as he remembered rows he and Carol had gotten into over her silent treatment. "No, I suppose not," he finally answered. "Not gen¬erally, anyway."
"So for many problems in life," Yusuf said, "solutions will have to be deeper than strategies of discipline or correction."
Lou thought about that for a moment.
18
• THE HEART OF PEACE
"But now for your harder question," Yusuf continued. "What if my child is doing something really harmful, like drugs? What then? Shouldn't I try to change him?"
"Exactly," Lou nodded.
"And the answer to that, of course," Yusuf said, "is yes."
This caught Lou by surprise, and he swallowed the retort he'd been planning.
"But I won't invite my child to change if my interactions with him are primarily in order to get him to change."
Lou got lost in that answer and furrowed his brow. He be¬gan to reload his objection.
"I become an agent of change," Yusuf continued, "only to the degree that I begin to live to help things go right rather than simply to correct things that are going wrong. Rather than sim¬ply correcting, for example, I need to reenergize my teaching, my helping, my listening, my learning. I need to put time and effort into building relationships. And so on. If I don't work the bottom part of the pyramid, I won't be successful at the top.
"Jenny, for example," he continued, "is currently outside on a wall refusing to join the others on the trail."
Still? Lou thought to himself.
"She doesn't want to enter the program," Yusuf continued. "That's understandable, really. What seventeen-year-old young woman is dying to spend sixty days sleeping on the hard ground and living on cornmeal and critters they can capture with home¬made spears?"
"That's what they have to do out there?" Ria asked.
"Well, kind of," Yusuf smiled. "It's not quite that primitive."
"But it's close," Avi interjected with a chuckle.
Ria widened her eyes and rocked backward into her seat, try¬ing to imagine how her boy would do in this environment. By contrast, her husband, Miguel, nodded approvingly.
DEEPER MATTERS •
19
"So what do we do?" Yusuf asked rhetorically. "Any attempt to discipline or to correct her behavior is unlikely to work, wouldn't you agree?"
"Oh, I don't know," Lou said, arguing more out of habit now than conviction. "If it were me, I would have gone over to her and told her to get her backside over to the vehicle."
"Right gentlemanly of you, Lou," Elizabeth quipped.
"And what if she had refused?" Yusuf asked.
Lou looked at Elizabeth. "Then I would have made her go," he said, carefully articulating each word.
"But Camp Moriah is a private organization with no author¬ity of the state," Yusuf responded, "and no desire to create addi¬tional problems by trying to bully people into doing what we want them to do. We do not force children to enroll."
"Then you have a problem," Lou said.
"Yes, we certainly do," Yusuf agreed. "The same problem we each have in our families. And the same problem countries have with one another. We are all surrounded by other autono¬mous people who don't always behave as we'd like."
"So what can you do when that's the case?" Ria asked.
"Get really good at the deeper matters," Yusuf answered, "at helping things to go right."
"And how do you get good at that?" Ria followed up.
"That is exactly what we are here to talk about for the next two days," Yusuf answered. "Let's begin with the deepest matter of all, an issue I would like to introduce by going back some nine hundred years to a time when everything was going wrong."
3 • Peace in Wartime
"In June of 1099," Yusuf began, "Crusaders from the West laid siege to Jerusalem. After forty days, they penetrated the northern wall and flooded into the city. They slaughtered most of the city's Muslim population within two days. The last of the survivors were forced to carry the dead to mass unmarked graves, where they piled the corpses in heaps and set them on fire. These survivors were then either massacred or sold into slavery.
"The Jews, although not so numerous, fared no better. In the Jewish quarter, the inhabitants fled to the main synagogue for refuge. The invaders barricaded the exits and stacked wood around the building. They then torched it, burning all but the few who managed to escape. These people were slaughtered in the narrow streets as they attempted to flee.
"The brutality extended as well to the local Christians who officiated at Christian holy sites. These priests were expelled, tortured, and forced to disclose the location of precious relics, which were then taken from them.
"So began nearly two centuries of strife between invaders from the West and the people of the Middle East. In the minds of many in the Middle East, today's battles are a continuation of this ancient battle for the Holy Land. They view American and European powers as crusading invaders."
"As the lone European in the room," Elizabeth spoke up, "would you mind if I addressed the Crusades for a moment?"
"Not at all," Yusuf said. "Please."
20
PEACE IN WARTIME • 21
"I know a little of this history. To begin with, it's important to understand the history of Jerusalem. It was Jewish through most of ancient times until Rome sacked it in 70 AD. Meanwhile, following the death of Christ, believers began to spread his gospel through the region. Christianity eventually became the official faith of the Roman Empire, and the faith quickly spread through all its territories, including Jerusalem. By 638 AD, the year Muslims captured Jerusalem, it had been a fully Christian city for three hundred years. So when the knights of the First Cru¬sade took Jerusalem, in their minds they were retaking what had been taken from them. They, like the Muslims they were fighting, believed the city was rightfully theirs."
"That doesn't justify the atrocities, though," Pettis inter¬jected.
"No," Elizabeth agreed, "it doesn't."
"Oh, but come on," Lou said, "the Crusaders didn't have a monopoly on atrocity. The Muslims' hands were dirty too."
"Were they?" Pettis asked. "I don't know the history. I'd be interested to hear."
"Lou is right about that," Elizabeth said. "There is ugliness on all sides of this conflict. Yusuf has already given us an exam¬ple of atrocities by Westerners. An early Muslim example would be the massacre of the Banu Qurayza, the last Jewish tribe in Medina. In the earliest days of Islam, Muslim armies beheaded the entire tribe."
"And today t