Choice Theory (2 page)

If external control is the source of so much misery, why is it the choice of almost all people, even powerless people who suffer so much from it? The answer is simple: It works. It works for the powerful because it often gets them what they want. It works for the powerless because they experience it working on them and live in hope that they will eventually be able to use it on someone else. The lowest people on the totem pole look up more than they look down. But even more so, the powerless accept it because as miserable as they may be, they believe that they are not free to choose otherwise. They further believe, usually correctly, that to resist would be worse.

So one way or another, most people are doing many things they don’t want to do. For example, many women stay in abusive marriages because they think leaving would be worse. Alone, they fear they would be unable to support themselves, lose their children, might still suffer abuse, and maybe risk their lives. Many continually entertain the hope that if they stick it out, things will
get better. But this book is about much more than why people stay and accept external control. It is about the fact that the belief in and use of external control harms
everyone,
both the controllers and the controlled. For example, the abusive husband also suffers (though not as much as his wife and family). He, too, is a victim of external control psychology. In choosing to do what he does, he loses any chance for happiness. This psychology is a terrible plague that invades every part of our lives. It destroys our happiness, our health, our marriages, our families, our ability to get an education, and our willingness to do high-quality work. It is the cause of most of the violence, crime, drug abuse, and unloving sex that are pervasive in our society.

This book is all about this human toll and how it can be reduced by both learning why external control is so harmful and how a new, pro-relationship theory can replace it. Choice theory is an internal control psychology; it explains why and how we make the choices that determine the course of our lives. Choice theory is a complete change from what has been common sense to what I hope will become, in time, a new common sense. This change is not easy. It can happen only through learning what is wrong with external control psychology and the overwhelming reasons to replace it with choice theory as we deal with the people in our lives. As we attempt to do this, we will continually ask ourselves: Will what I am about to do bring me closer to these people or move us further apart? How we use this basic question and what would be possible if we did are the heart and soul of this book.

What I do in this book is question the basic psychology of the world, and I have no illusions that it is an easy task. To begin to realize the existence of this psychology and how harmful it is to our lives, we need to take a look at some of the misery we suffer because we depend on our common sense even when it becomes apparent that it isn’t working. For example, using the only psychology you know, you punish your teenage son for not doing his schoolwork by grounding him on weekends. But after you ground him, he still doesn’t do his homework, and to make matters worse, you have a sullen teenager hanging around the house all
weekend. After a month, you begin to think: Why am I doing this over and over? There must be a better way.

It may take a while to come to this realization because punishing your son is so much a part of your common sense that it doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels right. It’s what a good parent does in this situation—it’s probably what your parents did to you—and you are supported by everyone you ask. Giving you the benefit of an almost universal common sense, they say,
Punish him. Why are you asking nie this stupid question? Do you want him to grow up to be a bum?
The only problem with this advice is that it rarely succeeds. As you continue to punish your son, he and you stop talking and listening to each other. You are both miserable, you blame each other for how you feel, and he does less schoolwork than before.

Still, for most people, the idea of going against common sense, especially in how they deal with their children, is a new and troubling idea. But assuming you would like to have less misery in your life, you may be open to learning why controlling and allowing yourself to be controlled are so destructive to the relationships you need to be happy. Then you may be willing to try choice theory in some situations in which attempting to control has been ineffective. If it works better—and my twenty years of experience with choice theory argue that it will—you may want to begin the difficult process of discarding external control and replacing it with choice theory. Psychologies, even common sense, ancient psychologies, should be discarded if they damage relationships.

To convince you that we should give up external control psychology, I have included a simple graph that compares two kinds of progress: technical progress and human progress. Such a comparison is unusual because when we think of progress, the progress that comes to mind is technical because, as the graph shows, this progress is so obvious. We rarely think of human progress, which is getting along with each other better than we have in the past, because we haven’t seen or read about enough people getting along that much better with each other to begin to think there has been much progress in this area.

In the past hundred years, there has been considerable technical
progress. We have moved from the first airplane to the supersonic jet to exploring Mars. Communication has gone from the turn-the-crank phone to the internet. The list is endless. Not so with human progress. Except for some improvements in civil rights in the 1960s and some recent movement toward better relationships between managers and workers since quality management surfaced in the 1970s, we are no more able to get along well with each other than we ever were.

Technical progress as compared to human progress.

Can anyone say that there has been any improvement in how husbands and wives get along with each other? Are families in better shape today than years ago? If they are, it’s news to me. I work in schools, and I have yet to hear a teacher say that things are better now than when he or she started teaching. Actually, I hear more of the opposite—that the kids are tougher to teach than ever. And in these days of the sacred bottom line and the heartless downsizing it takes to raise it, no one is making much noise about how much better the workplace is than it was years ago. In fact, even bosses are experiencing less job satisfaction.

As much as we haven’t been able to make any improvement in the way we get along with each other to nudge the graph upward, there are enough situations in which we do that there is no doubt that we could do so if more of us learned how. Here and there, we find marvelous schools, in which all the teachers and students care for each other and everyone is learning and happy. All of us know happily married couples, solid families, and people who are well satisfied with their jobs. But when asked to explain their happiness, many hesitate. They aren’t sure. Some say,
We work hard to get along with each other,
but others shrug and say,
Maybe luck has a lot to do with it.
What they never say is,
We have given up trying to control each other.
They don’t realize that they may be following a different theory, that inadvertently they have discovered choice theory.

When asked about technical progress, people occasionally talk about getting along better with each other. Many do see that there is a correlation between the two in some cases. But few people attribute major technical progress to luck. Technology has progressed in this area because we are willing to or have embraced a new theory or a new way to use an old one.

In almost all attempts to improve human progress, for example, to improve marriages, families, schools, or work, there has been no operational change in theory. External control is so firmly in the saddle that even when we make a little progress, we are blind to the fact that we have given up external control psychology and are starting to use what is, in essence, choice theory. What I am addressing is our need to become aware that there is another psychology.

I do not claim that there are no other psychologies that are similar to choice theory. Albert Ellis’s
^*
rational emotive behavior therapy is certainly one of them. In the area of work, W. Edwards Deming
^†
has shown that high-quality work is dependent on driving out the
fear that prevents people from getting along well with each other. He likens the manager in the workplace to the leader of a symphony orchestra in which everyone willingly follows the leader and contributes to the performance. No one is forced to make a contribution; they do so because they see that it is to their benefit.

Even though he is probably not aware of it, Herb Kelleher, the extremely successful CEO of Southwest Airlines, is practicing choice theory in how he runs his company. In a recent book,
Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Business Recipe for Both Business and Personal Success,
^*
Kelleher said this about leadership: “It really signifies getting people, through both example and persuasion, to happily join together in pursuit of a worthwhile common cause.” On downsizing, which he called a corporate blunder, he stated, “We haven’t had any furloughs at Southwest, although obviously during the recession we could have made more money if we had. The disaffection it engenders, the angst. Once you do it [workers] don’t forget about it for a long time.” The people, not the bottom line, are sacred at Southwest.

But Southwest is an exception. If Kelleher sells out or retires, it is almost certain that the people who take over will downsize and become coercive to try to improve profits. And in the short run, they may be successful. Without Kelleher, however, the new owners are likely to revert to external control and fail in the long run.

We also do not see how widespread misery really is because, again guided by common sense, a lot of us think that misery is caused mainly by poverty, laziness, or how the powerful treat the powerless. But in the affluent Western world, there is no shortage of miserable people who are well off, hardworking, and powerful. I have noticed that there is a high rate of divorce among successful academics, with successful professionals and business leaders close behind. The failure of children and parents to get along well may be more extreme among the poor and powerless, but it is hardly exclusive to that group.

Although more students in poverty areas refuse to make the effort to learn than do students in affluent areas, this failure is related much more to how teachers and students get along with each other than to the fortunes of those who attend. Students from prosperous families, in which education is the main reason for the prosperity, are usually more motivated to learn than are students from families who have not been helped by education. Teachers appreciate this motivation and tend to make a greater effort to get along with the former students, which is another reason they learn more. But if teachers were offered choice theory and found how useful it was in their marriages and families, they could also begin to use it to get along better with students who seem to be unmotivated. This effort could go a long way to make up for the lack of support for education at home, and the previously unmotivated students would learn a lot more than they do now.

In chapter 10, on education, I explain how choice theory was used in a minority school that my wife and I worked in for a year. This is an area I know something about. The
common sense
that poor or minority students can’t or won’t learn is totally wrong. When they get along well with their teachers, they may learn more slowly because they start further back, but, in the end, they learn as well as any other students. Productive, high-quality work is assured in any organization in which workers and managers get along well together.

The name for what we usually do when we deal with each other is called
the system.
In an external control world, the system is naturally coercive. When it fails, as it is failing in marriages, families, schools, and workplaces, we use more coercion and focus on fixing the people. Many therapists stress the systems approach to counseling, in which they do not attempt to fix individuals as much as to help them figure out a way to make the family system work better for all involved. What I suggest is that we try to change to a choice theory system, which teaches everyone, not just unhappy people, how to get along better with each other. What makes external control doubly harmful is that not
only does our belief in it create the problems we are trying to solve, but it is also used to deal with the problems. When punishment doesn’t work, invariably we punish harder. It’s no wonder there has been so little progress.

So far only a tiny fraction of the money spent to reduce misery has been spent on prevention, on teaching people how to get along better with each other before they get into the hard-core, adversarial relationships that are the result of too many attempts to control or manipulate. If we want to move the flat line of human progress up, prevention, which means changing from an external control to a choice theory system, is a way we can do so. Once any human problem occurs, for example, when marriages begin to fail, the couples rarely get back together. No matter how skilled the counselor, it is often impossible to save a marriage or a failing student. The answer lies in preventing these failures, not in looking for better ways to fix the people who are failing.