Dr. James Hardt (Interview Archive)
When people respond to an item on the mood scales, the numbers sometimes tell a story the person won't. Let me give you an example. We once had the CEO of a billion-dollar company come through a training group of four men. One of the other three happened to be his son, early twenties, and the kid was in open rebellion against his businessman father. Picture it: the father in a three-piece suit, the son in long hair, beads, bell-bottoms, and sandals. On the anger scale the father reported a flat zero. His reading, though, came back at five sigmas. A gap like that leaves only one explanation. The man was furious, whatever he said.
He wanted to go first on Day 1, when we review the mood scales. So I asked him, gently, whether there was anything he felt angry about. He shouted back, 'No!', loud and plainly angry. The irony was sitting right there in the room, but I wasn't trying to make him wrong. I began explaining that emotions can live in us without our knowing it, below the surface. I started talking up women's intuition, how when the stiff brush of logical positivism swept across Western culture it seemed to pass more lightly over women, who held onto that intuition. Where I was heading was a soft, indirect question: what would your wife say if I asked her whether there was anything you were angry about?
He's a sharp man, he runs a billion-dollar company, and he saw it coming before I finished. Again he yelled, 'No!', just as loud and just as angry. At that the other three trainees edged their chairs away from him, because they hadn't yet caught on to where my question was going. We moved through the rest of his scales fast. He was in complete denial and wasn't going to do any inner work.
The other three were different. As each of them worked through his scales, we'd reach a word that had produced a sigma, and he might pause. His lip would tremble a little, and a tear would run down his cheek. I'd ask, okay, what's happening here, what's the issue? From there he'd open up about some trauma in his life. There was usually a perpetrator in the story, and that person would go onto his list for forgiveness.