Clearing your head of distractions in order to notice and understand the people you are with can feel inefficient - there are so many other people and issues to think about. But being present makes you effective.
There's been such a pushback against political correctness, and I think that's due to the discomfort people feel talking about other people's issues that they don't fully understand.
I don't understand how people can make such a fuss about people that are happy and in love, when there's people dying of hunger and war and they don't even notice that. I really don't understand that. That makes me so angry!
I think the songs I was writing after Aeroplane were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about.
I think that language matters. I think that people who are in public life have an opportunity to help the public understand issues and understand the urgency of issues. And to that extent, I think it is important how issues are talked about.
I think life is a little more basic here in Australia. There aren't so many distractions. People seem to feel they can be kinder with each other here, I think, to a greater extent than in the States.
One of the best ways to see how critical being present is to effective leadership is to notice what being absent, distracted, hiding something, and/or agenda-driven does to people's ability to trust, respect, and have confidence in you.
People gossip. People are insecure, so they talk about other people so that they won't be talked about. They point out flaws in other people to make them feel good about themselves. I think at any age or any social class, that's present.
I feel threatened, and sometimes it makes me angry because I can't do anything about that, there's just too many issues. But in a way I think my work is meant to get people out of that.
You can understand other people only as much as you understand yourself and only on the level of your own being. This means you can judge other people's knowledge but you cannot judge their being. You can see in them only as much as you have in yourself. But people always make the mistake of thinking they can judge other people's being. In reality, if they wish to meet and understand people of a higher development than themselves they must work with the aim of changing their being.
The next time you need to win someone over to your way of thinking, try nodding your head as you speak. People unconsciously mirror the body language of those around them in order to better understand what other people are feeling.
One of the best ways of becoming an effective parent—or, for that matter, an effective human being—is to understand the perceptions of other people, to be able to “get into their world.
Everybody has many people inside of them; I think we tend to present the one we feel is most appropriate at first, in order to gain acceptance or achieve what we want. It gets really interesting when this technique fails, and other levels are revealed.
People always slow down for a train wreck. It's like junk food. If you don't feel good about yourself, you want to read crap about other people, like gossip in high school. You don't understand why it's there, but somehow it makes a lot of people feel better.
You really have to be careful about what you do and think about other people around you, as human beings who feel things, and you have to learn to be empathetic and notice the signs of people who are going through trouble.
I've always had problems with my brain, so a lot of the songs are about issues I have with paranoia or freak-outs. 'When My Head Explodes' is about being on stage, having people look at you and expecting you to perform, then literally your head explodes.
People are so fearful about opening themselves up. All you want to do is to be able to connect with other people. When you connect with other people, you connect with something in yourself. It makes you feel happy. And yet it's so scary, it makes people feel vulnerable and unsafe.