The Anatomy of Peace

I recently completed a book titled, The Anatomy of Peace. Although the book is written in an easy to understand prose, it took me a while to get through it as I re-read several passages to make sure that I understood it well enough. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is either going through a difficult patch at work (politics, conflict among co-workers) or even for personal issues.

The theme of the book is simple enough - Everyone has good intentions and a choice to act on that, but ever so often, we betray those intentions and don't follow through. Examples include offering to help your spouse, not concealing things from a co-worker, giving them the benefit of the doubt etc. The four main reasons for not following through are these feelings:

a) Better-Than: This is all about feeling of superiority and causes us to be impatient or disdainful towards others.

b) Worse-Than: We feel that the world is out to get us and we feel jealousy, bitterness, helplessness or depression.

c) Must-Be-Seen-As: We're needy, stressed, have fake relationships with people as we believe that we must be seen in a particular way.

d) I-deserve: we feel that we've been mistreated, we deserve more credit/merit and this causes us to feel entitled, deprived etc.

Any one of the above causes us to treat people like objects and invite more pain in the relationship. Another interesting point the book highlighted was that we spend most of our time dealing with things that are going wrong vs. helping things go right.

While this is just a cursory evaluation of the book, I would highly recommend reading this book to see things from a different perspective and give yourself the chance to try out these simple techniques to solve your problems. I know I will be attempting to do the same and I welcome your experiences with this.