The GOLDEN RULE. The Greatest Principle in Human History J A M E S S K I N N E R M A R K V I C T O R H A N S E N

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1 The GOLDEN RULE The Greatest Principle in Human History J A M E S S K I N N E R M A R K V I C T O R H A N S E N R O I C E K R U E G E R

2 The Greatest Principle in Human History James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger is treating others the way we want to be treated. It will lead you to better relationships and a more satisfying life. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 1

3 The Authors JAMES SKINNER is the founder of two global financial groups that manage billions of dollars of assets. He is also recognized as one of the world s foremost business thinkers and appears regularly on Japanese television. MARK VICTOR HANSEN is the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul empire and is the best-selling nonfiction author of all time. His goal is to make the planet work for all humanity! ROICE KRUEGER co-founded Franklin Covey, the world s largest training company, and has supervised consulting projects for 80 percent of the Fortune 500. NOTE: Ideas That Can Change Your Life is a collaboration of three of the world s most amazing authors, speakers, and thinkers. The first person I may refer to any of the authors. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 2

4 I d like to start off by talking about the Golden Rule as everyone knows it. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It has many variations, such as Do not do unto others what they have not done unto you and the entrepreneurial rule of He or she who has the gold, rules. is so pervasive that it is known the world over and surrounds us everywhere we go. It s a very valuable rule, indeed the most valuable rule of human relationships ever devised. This is why it is called the Golden Rule it is universally good. It is a principal that applies to every case and in every situation. is universally good! 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 3

5 In this book, we will be talking about the most important things that we would like others to do to us so that we will know how we should in turn treat other people. Listen When we think of what we would like others to do to us, one of the things that first comes to mind is that we would like people to be interested in us and actually listen and pay attention when we speak. We all want to be interesting, but you need someone to be interested. You want the other person to listen, and what you want even more is for them to do something called deep listening. Some of us think we need to talk twice as much as we listen. What we really need to do is listen twice as much as we talk. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 4

6 My mother said, You have one mouth and two ears; use them in the same proportion. That is a very valuable rule. The great starting point on the Golden Rule is to listen to the other person first. We need to not just listen but be truly interested, because when we move our hearts from listening to ourselves to listening to others, they feel it and know the difference. Listen to other and you will be well on your way to mastering the Golden Rule. Be Kind The next way to implement the Golden Rule is basic kindness. We want everyone to treat us well. The Dalai Lama had a great line. He said, It is more important to be kind than to be right. Some of us 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 5

7 practically beat each other up trying to be right, when it s much better to be kind than to be right. Pretend that you have written on your hand the question Am I being kind to this person and all people? When you are being kind to yourself, you can be kind to everyone. When you wake up in the morning, meditate, cogitate, and ruminate about being kind. As I travel the world, the societies that I love being in the most are those that are kind to me. Since they are kind to me, I am kind back. It s a feeling that makes you wonder if it is in their DNA. The wonderful people of Thailand or the Polynesians these are people who are kind. The Japanese people with their great courtesy and their great kindness are also good examples. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 6

8 I remember when I first moved to Japan, we d go and visit people in their homes that we had never met before. We would knock on their door; and though they didn t know us and had never met us, they would invite us in to their homes and give us dinner. I was absolutely floored by sitting in somebody s home and having dinner, even though we had never met before. It was a level of kindness to which I had never before been exposed. It caused me to have a great love for the people there. There are so many different ways of being kind: the way we talk to people or do them a little courtesy, such as keeping the elevator door open for them. You can do it so many ways, but it has to flow from your heart. We just came back from the Maldives. In the Maldives everyone is kind to us. The general manager of the resort saw us when we left and grabbed my backpack and started carrying it, and I said, No, I ll carry it. He said, No, no, you can t carry it. I ll carry 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 7

9 it. The same attitude is found throughout his entire organization of 274 people. Everyone goes out of their way to be kind to each other; they are kind to themselves, and they are kind to their guests. Sometimes we think that business isn t kindness. We think, This is business; get to work. Let s get it done. But our fundamental kindness dramatically affects how are business is done. I ve done a lot of work with the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Once I was in the office of the president of the Ritz- Carlton hotel in Asia when one of the courier services brought a delivery. He greeted the deliveryman, and he said, Oh, why don t you sit down? Can I make you some tea? The couriers are absolutely floored by this because they have never been treated like that in any other office. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 8

10 The president of the Ritz-Carlton will actually sit there and serve tea and make them comfortable. The whole organization does likewise. That is one of the ways that they end up with the phenomenal level of service that they give. Praise The next topic is praise. We all want to feel important. We want to feel that the things we are doing are important and that other people have noticed the things we ve done. When I was doing training in my early days, I trained with Mary Kay of Mary Kay Cosmetics, a company that has since become one of the great cosmetic companies of the world. Mary Kay said, You praise them, you drop the p and raise them, and you raise you, and you raise their expectations, and you raise their future. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 9

11 My motivational teacher Cabot Roberts said, You always treat a sergeant like a general and he or she will become a general. You see them as they can be, not as they are. Isn t that what a parent does? I know my mother and my father certainly did this with me. They always recognized the good in what I was doing. They always praised me for what I was doing, regardless of how small it was. I ve always loved the musical Man of La Mancha. The story is that Don Quixote de La Mancha is a crazy old man who goes out into the world and sees everything not as it is but as it should be. So, he praises everything. He finds a barber s shaving bowl, which to him appears to be a great golden helmet. We could all learn from Don Quixote de La Mancha especially since we have become so cynical. We fail to see the beauty in human drama. We have a propensity for going out and finding out what people 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 10

12 are doing wrong. We try to catch people doing wrong. We don t find things that people are doing right; we fail to look through the window of praise. It is so pervasive in the media we are exposed to every day that they no longer love a hero. They constantly attack. Dr. Ken Blanchard has a better idea: Find someone doing something right and praise them instantly. Instant praising gives you instant raisings. In fact, you can organize it. You can purposefully sit down with employees once a day and praise them. Be very specific and they ll love it. I had one client who did this consistently. She went on a trip and wasn t available to the employees to do her customary one-minute praising with them. They called her where she was and said, Weren t we going to talk today? What was it you wanted to praise me for today? They became addicted to having this type of praise. This leads us to the difference between positive and negative addictions. If you don t cultivate positive 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 11

13 praise, you get negative addiction. So, you go up by praising and down by not. Napoleon Bonaparte said that people will die for a blue ribbon, meaning that they will die for praise rather than for financial reward. It s not the money; it s the praise that is missing. We really want other people to recognize us, and help us become better. Coach My next point is that everyone needs coaching. Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, sat on the bench his first two years. Then he got a coach who gave him the number 23 and kept praising him and seeing him for what he could become. The praise raised him so high up that he became the flying Jordan. Probably one of the most important things that any coach can do is say, What are you going to be doing this week? How are you going to measure it? How are we going to report on that? 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 12

14 When they get it done, you praise them for it. Sometimes if they miss, you praise them because of the efforts they made and you recognize they have made progress. You don t have to wait until the end goal is achieved; praise them and coach them step by step until the end goal is met. It is important for us to coach and show people how they can be their best. We can become an outside viewpoint to give them feedback on what specifically they can change and improve to be even better. This coaching never comes from a spirit of criticism, but from a spirit of love and assistance to lift the other person even higher. I have an aunt named Lesta who is a phenomenal therapist. She told me that the coaching she does is 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 13

15 merely that of loving the other person until they come to the point of loving themselves. That is actually what Mother Teresa did. She said, You cannot work in my organization, even though you are volunteering on a full-time basis, unless you come from the spirit of joy, because that is the spirit of spirit. When I think about someone like Mother Teresa or Gandhi, I think we get a great sense of what the Golden Rule is all about. Their spirit of sharing is our next point. Share We want other people to share with us. We start sharing when we are children when we share our toys. It goes on as we grow older. The sharing of things is not always so important, although it can be very meaningful. I felt honored that people have shared their homes and their food with me. But the idea goes beyond that 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 14

16 to sharing your time, your experience, or your knowledge. It is very easy to share your money. It is a simple transaction. Sometimes you might feel that it is hard to part with the money; but once the decision is made, the act of sharing is simple. Sharing your very valuable time, experiences, and knowledge, however, is not a matter of a simple transaction. It takes more effort. People love to learn; they want to have things shared with them and want to create an environment of sharing. Knowledge that is shared from the first mind to a second mind can become much greater in the second mind than in the first. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, The greatest gift is not that of presents but that of presence. Gifts of our time are among the most precious we can make. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 15

17 I want to share my own example with you of how someone s sharing of time and knowledge literally transformed my life. I was bankrupt, and my life had turned upside down. It was 33 years ago in New York. I had listened to a tape 287 times by the Dean of Speakers, Cabot Robert. He was starting a new organization called the National Speakers Association. I wrote him a letter, and he wrote me a personal letter back that said to come down and join them. I didn t know there were only going to be 17 people and that I was going to be a charter member of the group. He had two guys sponsor me by charging their credit cards to get me there me, who s broke. He stood up on the stage and said, If you can t write your own book right now to sell from a platform, then do a multi-opted book. I leaned over to the guy next to me and asked, Do you want to do a book with me? and then we did it. The book was called Stand Up Speak Out, and in that year I sold 20,000 copies at $10 each. The books cost me a buck each, so I grossed $200,000. It was heaven to 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 16

18 me because I wanted to be able to share one-on-one, and the beautiful thing about working as a speaker and author is that you get to help a lot of people. Often sharing an idea or opportunity is greater than sharing money or resources. A friend of mine was at a seminar in Hawaii when an individual approached and asked, Can you loan me $5,000? This was very bold, so my friend asked, What do you need the $5,000 for? The man responded, I ve managed to get enough money to arrive here, but I don t have enough money to get into the door to hear the seminar, and I know I need to be here to learn how to change my life. Can you help me out? My friend responded, You don t need more money, you need a better strategy. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 17

19 There were about 2,500 other people at the event, and many were couples. My friend then asked, Do you think any of those couples might have children? and the guy said, Yes, some of them probably do. My friend then asked, Do you think that any of them might want their children to have access to the information in this seminar? And the guy said, Yeah, there probably are. So my friend recommended that the man approach some couples, tell them that if they sponsored him to attend the program, that he would teach their children for 30 days what was taught at the seminar. Ten minutes later the man came back with $5,000! There are two lessons in this story: 1) The man became a better student because he had to turn around and teach the information, and 2) Sharing creates more sharing it encourages people to teach others. This particular incident illustrates our next point. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 18

20 Champion We all need someone to champion us and lead our cause forward. There is nothing like having someone moves you farther down the road of life, who builds you and takes away the roadblocks that stand in your way. Looking back at the people who have championed me, I realize that one of the most important things they did for me was to champion me to other people. They told other people that I had certain characteristics and talents that might go unnoticed. They would also point out that I might be able to do certain things for them and that I was a special person. That is called edification. You can t edify yourself, because that is self-aggrandizement; you start beating on your chest. But if I say This person can do this, this, and this and others will believe me, then you get credibility from what I say and you see yourself as you can be. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 19

21 We just had a good example of that when we were in the Maldives. We brought in a very talented musician, but the virtuoso was burdened by stress in his life, including concern for his wife, who had been in an auto accident. While the man s stress had slowed him down, the three of us sped him up by saying, This is what you can do and how you can do it. Each one of us gave him a new reason to feel positive. As a result, his eyes lit up. We then agreed to champion him to other people that we know who can take his musical talents to a broader audience. Once in a while it is important to have someone eavesdrop and hear something good about themselves. My mother would always say, I ve got the best boys on the block! Now whether we were the best boys on the block or not, I got goose bumps just the same. My brothers and I heard her comments about us and tried to live up to her expectations. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 20

22 Look for opportunities to champion others. There is so much unrecognized talent in the world. Be Loyal The next principle of the Golden Rule is to loyal to other people. The greatest compliment my father ever gave me was when he handed me a little book and said, Roice, your greatest attribute is being loyal. On another occasion I was completing an ecclesiastical assignment. The president of the organization wrote to me in a letter, Roice, your greatest attribute is being loyal. It meant a lot to me to get the same compliment from two people I respected. Loyalty is when you take on a cause and stick with it through thick and thin. When you take on the friendship of a person, or when you take on a task or a job, you stay with it. When people know that you are loyal to them, this creates a strong and lasting bond. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 21

23 It is very important that you know that there are always people who are going to be there for you. Can you imagine what life would be like without the feeling that someone would be there for you through thick and thin? Sometimes you are loyal even though you know the person has weaknesses. You know it, but you are still loyal to them and try to help them through their weaknesses. You see the greater strength and beauty within them. Loyalty is not about reciprocating; it is about giving without expecting. It s invisible; and, in fact, 99 percent of reality is not ordinarily visible to us. The food you digest for breakfast is not visible to you but turns into hair, tissue, and skin. Loyalty is invisible, yet it is the bond that strengthens you and makes you feel good. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 22

24 Stephen Covey taught us that loyalty is always to the person who is absent. It is not speaking ill of the person who is absent and not in the room to hear what is being said. That is a very powerful concept, because it creates trust with everybody. They know that when they are not in the room, they will get the same treatment. Our loyalty spreads to everyone around us; they see that when we are loyal to someone else, they believe that we will be loyal to them. Be There When we are down in life, we all hope that someone will be there for us. Invest the time to be there. When you are with a person, be there and not somewhere else. This means that you have to be engaged and actively listening. One of the greatest compliments we can give a person when we are with them is to turn off our cell phone. A cell phone is a distraction that quickly communicates I am not available. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 23

25 One of the things that Dr. Jack Canfield taught me early on was that in a relationship, especially with your spouse or children, you should sit knee to knee, maybe once a week, at least once a month, and ask, On a scale of one to ten, where ten is high, how is our relationship going? For a response less than a seven, ask, Then what is it going to take to get it back? To get beyond a seven is going to take being there. Are you really with that person, not only in physical proximity but also emotionally and spiritually? One of my great mentors, Hyrum Smith, taught me something very interesting. He said, Get everything off your desk. So I tried it: I cleared my desk. I even took the phone off the desk so that when people came to my office, we would sit across the desk from one another and there wouldn t be anything between us except for our relationship. It was a very powerful tool for building relationships with other people. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 24

26 It also works with children. Just get down on the floor with them on their level, seeing the world through their eyes. Play the games they want to play, and not the games you want to play. Then you start to giggle and bond. With no barriers between you, there s nothing in the way of sharing the true love in life. Inspire: Be a Model We all need somebody to inspire us and be a model for us. How many inspirational people have you had in your life? Have you ever added it up? Oh, so many. I can name at least 44 so far. Inspiration is the first thing that God gave us. In the beginning, he inspired Adam, breathed life into him. He inspired Adam to live. When something inspires you, you take life in, and you want to take in something that is going to keep 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 25

27 making you bigger, grander, greater, nobler, and most important a superior contributor. You can t inspire or model unless you build characteristics that other people admire. This is the Golden Rule. To gain those admirable characteristics, you have to look for models in your own life and start modeling what they are doing. Who are your first models? Of course, parents are the very first models. Next, for me, were my brothers. I had a younger brother and an older one. They were great models. Then I had my aunts and uncles. The family creates great models for us. Once we get old enough, we start going to school and our models become our coaches and teachers. Then we start discovering the truly great people of the world, like Mahatma Gandhi. It s important that we realize that we live in a phenomenal time in history, because we can be inspired 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 26

28 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We have access to so immediate information about all the great models of the world, both contemporary and historical. I have two Gandhi stories to share. Once, when Gandhi was on a train, his sandal fell off the moving train. When asked what he would do, Gandhi removed the other sandal and threw it out to be with the first. Why did you do that? he was asked. If I have one and someone finds the other, then it does neither one of us any good. If he has two sandals, it will do him a lot of good. Another time, a woman came to Gandhi and said, Oh, Mahatma, my son eats sugar, and he is diabetic and he must not eat sugar. Gandhi said, Bring him back in two weeks. The woman replied, That s it? And Gandhi said, You are released. So the woman came back with her son in two weeks. The son approached Gandhi, and Gandhi coached him not to eat sugar. Gandhi was being there for the mother and the son and said, Don t ever eat any sugar, and the boy went out and he didn t eat any sugar. The mother asked, 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 27

29 Mahatma, it is a long walk; it takes 24 hours to get here. Why couldn t you have told my son two weeks ago? And he said, Two weeks ago, I was eating sugar. the world. We must become the change that we seek in Forgive We all make mistakes, and we all have our problems and weaknesses. We all desire that other people will forgive us when we are weak. Forgiveness has two aspects. One is givingness, which all of us are pretty good at, and the other is forgivingness. And the person it is hardest to forgive is oneself. That is why Jesus said we must forgive 70 times 7; that is, 490 times. Your homework assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to write down I forgive myself. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 28

30 Do it 490 times and it will bring back to the surface all those actions that you have not forgiven yourself for in the past, things that you don t even remember because they have been hidden inside your 18 billion brain cells. Then do it: I, [your name], forgive myself. The next person you forgive is your mother, then your father. If you really want to do this, then it peels the onion at every level because the only work we are really here to do is to work on ourselves. If we don t release ourselves from our mistakes, they bind us. It is a bondage that we place ourselves in. We have got to let go of it and do the same thing for other people. We need to release them from any of their mistakes, challenges, and problems that could have offended us. Do we forgive people if they make a mistake? Do we forgive those who are not quite measuring up to meeting that goal? 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 29

31 Do we allow them to move on to the next level by letting go of that previous mistake? In the South Sea Islands they have monkeys, and the locals have developed traps for them by carving out small holes into trees and placing nuts inside. The monkeys like nuts and reach inside and grab the nuts. The hole in the tree is large enough to fit the monkey s paw inside, but small enough that the paw cannot exit while forming a fist (or holding nuts). The monkeys will not let go of the nuts and are caught and killed. The lesson for us is this: So many people get caught up with somebody else did this to me, or he didn t do this for me, and then we hold on and make a fist. We go to war in our hearts and choose not to forgive, and so we trap ourselves. It is time for everyone to let go and be at peace. I met with Gandhi s grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, and asked him how accurate the movie Gandhi was in 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 30

32 showing Gandhi s real life. He said, It is. Oh, they took a little bit of liberty here and there on one or two items, but it is accurate. In the movie, Gandhi gets shot and he falls down, and the first and last thing that he says is, I forgive you. Now that is a high state of being. I m going to borrow a story from Warren Miller, a contributor to Chicken Soup for the Soul. Late one Saturday night, a Catholic priest had just finished writing his sermon and was ready to go to bed. All of a sudden, the phone rang and a guy said, Father, you ve got to come to the hospital right now! A man is dying, and you ve got to give him last rites. The priest put on his clothes and went to the hospital. It was a blisteringly cold night in Minnesota, with black ice on the highways. Trees were down, and what should have taken him a half hour to get to the hospital took him two and a half hours. Just as he got into the hospital, a nurse came running out and said, Father, Father, we must hurry! 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 31

33 The man s vital signs are really going. He walked in and began doing everything he could. He tried to build rapport, and he said, I was in the neighborhood and thought I would come and visit. The man said, Look, Father, cut the crap. I asked you to come over and give me last rites, and I would like you to give them to me and get out. The priest said, I think we should talk. The man replied, Look, what I did was so awful, so terrible, so ugly, so vile, so mean and rancid, that you aren t going to forgive me. God hasn t forgiven me, and I haven t been able to forgive me. As a matter of fact, it happened 22 years, two months, two hours, and two minutes ago. The priest said, Look, by your vital signs, you ve got two minutes left; I ve been in this situation a lot, so Tom, if you are ever going to fess up, now is the time. 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 32

34 Tom said, I ll tell you what happened. I m a railroad switcher. I drink too much; I m an alcoholic. I took a train from the right track to the wrong track because I was drunk. The train went right into a car. Terrible. It killed a mother, a father, and two daughters instantly. I told you, you can t forgive me, God can t forgive me, and I can t forgive me. The priest took his hand and said, I can forgive you. It was my mother, my father, and my two older sisters. I forgive you. That is what forgiveness means to forget. Forgiveness is to put it permanently behind us and then move forward. I have no doubt that the Golden Rule can change lives, both yours and those of everyone around you. With best wishes, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, Roice Krueger 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger. All rights reserved. 33