2030s: One-thirds, Two-thirds Rules in New Psych

#101 of a series of pieces from a text in progress. Collaborator and publisher inquiries welcome.

Starting 2030 a topic in some Summer Conferences began attracting attention thru new books, talks and interviews, the One-thirds, Two-thirds Rules.

Where could they be presented in college curriculum? Where should they be presented? They ended up in the two year Junior-Senior program for an intern certificate for Compassionate (nonviolent) Communication (NVC). Learners with a major in:

- any psych field,

- K-college education field,

- biz consulting.

The intern certificate was almost always required to be hired in these fields, whether the individual amassed intern hours toward NVC licensure, now, later or never.

Making college relevant to women?

The above also made sense in how 80% to 90% of college students were female in the 2030s. So making college attractive to them was practical marketing.

From time to time discussion occurred whether the 2/3 rules mostly applied primarily to women. It was suggested for men, the fraction is much lower, perhaps ranging as low as 25% for certain males and certain MBTI personality preferences. The women of 2120 recognized this was possible and dovetailed nicely with John Gray’s Mars~Venus contrasting gender characterizations.

The One-thirds Rule in psychology is one-third of your waking human experience is with yourself.

After puberty, especially after high school, any relationship with another person or group, consuming more than two-thirds of your time and attention, may be fun, may be wonderful. However, it is not likely to be sustainable indefinitely.

The exception? Physical sports — not chess. Personal hobbies are a gray area. Hobbies may be towards deepening self-connection, i.e. drawing, painting, poetry. Or they may be distractions from healthy self-connection: internet projects, social media, romance novels, porn.

For waking adults, the first one-third of every relationship, is with your self. If you make another relationship more meaningful and significant than the one you have with yourself, over time, you are headed towards imbalance.

Words on a page don’t sound like much. That’s why in New Psych the above is taught experientially thru live group processes, dyads, triads, Tribe formations and games.

The One-third Rule is also stated this way, take care of yourself FIRST, last and always, within boundaries appropriate for you and all concerned.

The presence or absence of healthy self-connection is most visible in our practical choices and behaviors around diet, food, sleep and lifestyle.

Two phrases came up again and again re the One-third Rule: “self-connection” and “inner-cooperation.” You also hear students reminding each other around campuses, “Self-connection — don’t leave home without it.”

The above emphasis made a college Health 101 course redundant; except for, those wishing to teach in Middle and High school.

The Two-thirds Rule in psychology

The other two-thirds of our waking human experience? About 2/3 of everything in our waking experience, is relationships. Relationships — of all kinds — are the big give-and-take of our waking experience.

Do you work with or around other people? Then our Chooser Self spends about 2/3 of its waking time:

- acknowledging other people,

- listening talking, responding to other people,

- ignoring other people,

- cooperating with one or more other persons; or,

- competing with one or more other persons.

Therefore, measured individually, roughly two-thirds of each person’s psychology concerns relationships.

Relating to plants, animals, children

- If you work in agriculture, you are relating with and to plants, fungi and weather,

- If you work in animal husbandry, you relate with creatures,

- If you work in K-12, you relates with kids and parents.

Students were asked to carry a stop-watch and record amounts of time spent each day on the following activities:

Please add up the time you spend each day on:

- relating physically with room-mates, other students, spouses, children, co-workers: ____/hrs/day

- relating physically with plants, animals, children: ____/hrs/day

- relating in your own mind with spouses, children, co-workers: ____/hrs/day

- reacting in your own mind with absent relations, loved ones no longer in your life: ____/hrs/day

- relating in your own mind with hoped-for, wished-for relations: ____/hrs/day

Please add up the above time estimates. For married persons and most single persons, the consensus was all these added up to about two-thirds of each waking day. Women were likely to estimate more than 2/3 of each day was attending to and with others.

Q: Isn’t this similar to saying “2/3 of our waking life is taken up with communication”?

A: “Communication” is more narrow than “relationships” and yes, a big part of “R” is “Comm.”

Then we can ask, “After self-connection, what do successful relationships often involve?”

Listen in case they can come to it on their own. Lead them to: two-thirds of any healthy, sustainable relationship is likely characterized by exercise of healthy listening, compassion and empathy.

Why? Listening, compassion and empathy are the main methods we all use to modulate a live, face-to-face connection.

Further, if we wish to initiate a new “R,” facilitate a new “R,” what methods work best? Listening, compassion and empathy.

Even more: Listening, compassion and empathy are the most common solvents for interpersonal conflict.

If you like the above, consider this:

If two-thirds of psychology is relationships, interpersonal relationships , for most of us, and

Two-thirds of relationships is healthy listening, compassion and empathy; then

We might say two-thirds of Best Practices in psychology is healthy listening, compassion and empathy.

If we then wonder, what Best Practices are available to learn and practice healthy listening, compassion and empathy? This takes us directly to NVC.

If you know a better knowledge-base for healthy listening, compassion and empathy than NVC, please let me know.

NVC vs. Buddhism?

Many diverse schools of Buddhism exist. For sure, some Buddhist teachings resemble the above. The intention here is to describe a Western conception of Best Practices and acknowledge how it incorporates some classic useful Buddhist ideas and values.

The above was a culminating idea of the didactic part of the two-year NVC training in junior-senior college years.

More time was spent on group processes designed for learners to examine their own beliefs and values in the area. You get the most loyalty to your ideas by giving the most freedom to learners to think for themselves.

Unexpected, beneficial side-effect? Oh yeah. The above teaching went a long way to replacing unconscious macho male stereotypes and tropes with healthy values closer to feminine intelligence, closer to 50–50 male~female.

Since most K-college teacher took the two recommended NVC elective years, in 20 years an entire generation of teachers had pretty clear ideas of how this could replace macho-macho-man culture, win~lose, culture and Brett Kavanaugh Mafia Mentality.

By 2070 these ideas had a depth of acceptance in literature, academic and professional circles, difficult to imagine in 2019.

NVC comes in here

Then a transition to NVC. Did you know almost 100% of NVC is methods of listening, compassion, appreciation, gratitude and empathy?

This is how best women counselors thought to introduce NVC to college learners in an elective course.

One conclusion went something like this: In NVC we learn and practice methods, skills and techniques, useful for reducing conflict and satisfying the needs of any any two opposing parties.

Q: Did women want to equate NVC with empathy-training?

A: This was tried. It proved less sustainable — more rigid — than was useful. Such bald equations as “NVC = empathy” were discouraged in college teaching. The hope was always our students would excel beyond the teachers. For this they require head-space, room to move.

Another wisdom the above approach embodied was avoiding making NVC too bound to its own jargon. The more NVC became a surprising set of interactive experiments and exercises, the less able it was to ossify-calcify into one version of jargon or another

You also heard this: “Empathy is the practical part of relationships.” We’re still wondering about this one in 2120.

Another logical outcome which kept popping up was: What if 2/3 of Psych is Best Practices for reducing and minimizing interpersonal conflict?

No one could decide if this made sense or not — but it sounded good.

Finally you heard: What if healthy expressions of empathy are part of every successful interpersonal encounter?

No one was sure if this was true or not — yet it sounded like a good experiment for college learners to chew on.

By 2120 women had published 300-plus peer-reviewed papers on how empathy was the crucial ingredient in healthy interpersonal competency.

Research also proved the converse true. Lack of empathy was present in the vast majority of:

- incidents of inter-personal conflict,

- failed relationships,

- failed projects, and

- tribal conflicts.

In this way, empathy gradually became more and more central to Psych by 2100.

There is clearly more to communication and psychology, than empathy alone. Why? Empathy is a form of right-brain genius, not yet integrated with left-brain intelligence in many instances. Engaging intelligences from both sides of our brain is what we want. No more one-sided thinking; no more one-sided psychology.

How reasonable does this sound to you in 2019?

Male objections to empathy

In the 2020s-2030s, when a few old-school males were still about, old school male psychologists complained bitterly, “Empathy is more a spiritual attribute, a quality, an exercise. It’s not part of the science of psychology.”

Male skeptics went so far as to say empathy was more of a spiritual law now, as the educator John-Roger suggested, not any kind of psychological law, rule or foundation.

The women listened to these male objections. Their counter was to remind men these objections arise whenever and wherever academics remain unaware of Goethean Holistic Psychology.

Such objections arise whenever and wherever academics remain unaware of how psychology is Primarily:

- a First Order phenomena,

- secondarily a Third Order phenomena (values, morals, ethics);

- only last, a Second Order phenomena, equally true for all people, at all times, at all places, regardless of subjective orientation.

Women encouraged Old School male academics to catch-up and learn Goethean Holistic Science, the Three Sciences We Use Everyday.

Once someone grasps psychology as Three Coherent Orders, you see where empathy fits and how large is the “territory” it’s relevant to.

Self-connection, self-empathy; and, empathy between people, are easiest to talk about and modulate in the domain of First Order Psychology. If you want to do research on empathy expressed among demographic populations, this is Second Order Science.

We move out of First Order Psychology, towards Second Order Sci, when we posit, research and conclude on Best Practices in Psych. Best Practices are equally true for all people, at all times, at all places, regardless of subjective orientation. Due to the wide application, their scope and content is necessarily smaller.

Crucial Conversations

Another practical angle on the above is Crucial Conversations. by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler (2002 first ed). Like most Humanistic Psychology of the 1950s, 1960s, this was created by men, yet women were more able to hear the message and the uplift.

If we gauge the impact and effectiveness of Crucial Conversations by how much the topic appeared in mainstream media, college and universities, the impact was significant (215,000 Google pages in 2019) but still subterranean — until women took over.

Where Emotional Intelligence (EQ) was reportage on research pro-EQ, Crucial Conversations re-defined relationships as:

- “What do I want for me in this relationship?”

- “What do I want for my partner(s)?”

- “What future do I intend or imagine for this relationship?”

Much of the “playing field” of relationships has just been summed.

Crucial Conversations more or less supports the idea, in the human experience, creating, maintaining, sustaining and responding in relationships, occupies about two-thirds of our waking day.

dg-2/3 of psy as relationships

NVC as Best Practices in Interpersonal Competency

A way forward was found to continue the above:

If 2/3 of Psych is relationships…

And 2/3 of relationships is listening, compassion, appreciation, gratitude, empathy,

What if, these are 2/3 or more of Best Practices in interpersonal competency?

Conversely what if 2/3 or more of interpersonal competency is simply practicing healthy listening, compassion, appreciation, gratitude and empathy?

Reginald Denny, hero

In 1991 in the South LA riot, truckdriver Reginald Denny famously asked, “Can’t we just all get along?” Males could not address this question effectively (without examining their own failure and communication roadblocks).

Denny’s question directly expressed willingness to heal. Men hated “willingness to heal.” Why? Because then men had to expose their underlying values which were usually corrupt, Mafioso values of some kind. Women like to talk about and examine their values. Men feared, “What if they see on the level of values, I’m naked?” So when and where simple worked, they embraced the process.

Starting in 2030, in the re-making of college and college culture, Women In Congress, involved themselves expressly in addressing Denny’s question. If creating healthy mainstream culture was possible, women were going to learn how to do it and do it. For SpaceShip Earth to thrive, dithering and half measures were no longer an option. “How we get along” was too meaningful to be left where old, failed male culture had left things.

The intention to do away with cultural norms leading to diverse, people, classes and races NOT getting along. The intention was to replace them with culture and norms where diverse, people, classes and races DO GET ALONG. This changed everything.

Women made sure defining “relationships” included both:

- How people get along together, and

- How people do not get along together.

The above made orgs of all kinds:

- more woman-friendly,

- more permeable to women’s values, and

- more permeable to female leadership talent.

In 2035 a bronze statue of Reginald Denny — with his question — was unveiled at USC college campus. Some other colleges asked permission to make copies.

In speeches, the women asked rhetorically, “What do we want? We want more trouble-free relationships and less relationships where conflict predominates. We’re not hopin’ for this. We’re not askin’ for this. We are actively re-making college and college culture — and anything else we have to, towards this goal.”