I'm not sure if there is one specific person this phrase can be attributed to, but I have heard it regularly through-out my training in Japanese martial arts. When I first heard it, I believed this phrase to be a quaint, kind of aspirational thing about how we should all be nice to one and other. I never really gave it any deep thought. As I have continued to work as a public defender, I've come to believe that it goes a lot deeper than a simple aspiration.
Recently, I told a massage therapist, "I envy you. Everyone is happy to get a massage. No exceptions. You deal pretty uniformly with happy people."
He chuckled about that, because he knows that my situation is different. I do indigent criminal defense work. Whether you are guilty or innocent, you've come to know me because the government wants to take away your freedom. Meeting me is not a happy occasion. I always come to know my clients in the middle of a crisis.
This makes for more than a few angry people. When I first started doing this work, I would get angry right back at them. I would use my education to alienate them, confuse them, and ultimately (and unsuccessfully, I might add) try and camouflage how green I was at my job. Somehow, I inevitably got drawn into their web of anger. Things weren't terribly productive.
Similar frustration ensued with my mentally ill clients. Lacking the training in dealing with the mentally ill, I tried to force them into my very limited understanding of the attorney-client relationship. I appealed to them with logic and reason, and expected them to conform to social norms.
They didn't.
As a result, I would get frustrated. Then I would get angry. Then they would get angry. And again, I wasted a lot of precious hours getting pissed off at people when I could have been helping them.
I have been fortunate enough since those beginning times to get a lot of professional training on how to deal with the angry and the mentally ill, and that training has been reinforced by many, many hours of practical experience in the trenches. I have had to apply this experience when failure meant violence towards me and the people I work with.
Having considered all this things, do you know what works best on these clients? It ain't arm-locks or a rattle-snake glare.
It is respect. Plain and simple respect.
I get a client who comes in unwashed, under the influence, and angry, and I sit him down. I start asking him about the weather and his trip my office. Suddenly I am asking a lot of practical questions - his contact information, his prior record, any issues he might have with probation. Before he knows it, he is sipping coffee like a civilized person and calmly answering questions when asked... all the while looking at me with a confused look on his face, like the world just turned upside-down. Somehow, I can tell that my behavior has short-circuited his brain, which was looking for a target for his anger and now cannot find one.
There is a very particular way to do this. I learned it through getting it wrong many, many times.
Many people seem to confuse manners and respect with submission. I see this as a big mistake. In my experience, when there were little signs of fear or uncertainty in my manners, clients would sense those flaws with their "gut perception" and some of them would turn those little cracks into big chasms and things got out of control.
I only got effective once I was able to be polite without appearing weak.
There is a real art form to being polite without "flavoring" it with fear (scared sixteen year-old working retail) or falseness (bored police officer who is only as polite as he "has" to be). I had to find this balance where I was committed to never being brash, short, or arrogant with my clients (i.e. - really caring about them and respecting them as people with rights)... but having total willingness to introduce their face to the floor if they tried to get violent with me or my co-workers.
I try for "opaquely polite". Neither aggressive nor submissive... just there.
Having been able to do this with clients somewhat consistently for about a year now, I can tell you that the result is this weird kind of "conflict that never is". This type of tempered respect seems to head off 99% of the potential conflicts that could happen with clients.
And while I can't scientifically prove this, I can tell you with the certainty of my gut that I would not be able to do this strange thing if I had not undergone a training regimen specifically designed to push those "fear and uncertainty" buttons in my psyche, as it relates to other people. What's more, I have seen other budo practitioners who can do this same thing. In fact, I can name a number of people who do it way better than me. (I call more than one of these folks "Sensei" because I desperately want to get better at this.)
When you consider the drastic amount that this type of thing can reduce violence potential, I think it becomes one of the most relied upon "workhorses" in a real budo person's arsenal. So now, when I hear the phrase "budo begins and ends with respect", I know this isn't just a trite phrase that looks good in a brochure.
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