BOOK REVIEW: What’s keeping you awake at night?

What’s keeping you awake at night? At the moment for me it’s the fact just as I’m starting to sleep a mosquito starts to buzz near my ear. But at other times it’s been financial worries, relationship issues and of course as a mother- my kids. David Bogan has written a great book on the stresses that can stop you from sleeping at three in the morning- and kindly agreed to be interviewed by Ask Rachel.

I think we’ve made our lives too complicated and got too far away from the basics – and we’ve become too reliant on other people doing things for us, which flows on into our everyday lives. We can cope – we were hardwired for it – we just need to practice our listening and verbal skills – and place a much greater reliance on our intuitive processes.

Do you think honesty is an undervalued attribute now? That people prefer to just not cause waves, which lead to bigger ones?

Exactly – we adopt the cause of least resistance – and we follow the symbolism of our national emblem which gets along with both its head and its tail facing the ground compliantly at the same time – or to use a farming analogy, we can be just like sheep and follow each other.

Do you think that people give up on relationships too easily now? Do you think we should expect conflict at some point?

Yes, and this is the whole point of my book – confrontation is the lifeblood of normality, it is at that point where we can then choose to respond or react and it is our decision as to whether or not it is dealt with or if we choose to turn it into a conflict – we just have to understand the process – as Professor Luis Diaz says, ‘There is no life without co-existence, and there is no co-existence without confrontation,’ – we cannot, and do not live in isolation. We do however have a choice as to whether or not any confrontation (a facing off at a boundary) gets dealt with at that level or escalates into conflict.

What would be the most common sticking points that one or both people in the relationship argue and stress about?

Being right, ‘the reason people fight – is because they’re both right’ – it then becomes all heat and no light, and neither party listens to the other – they simply continue to defend or reinforce their position.

What about you? What has kept you up in the night in the past? Have you found some of the tools you work through in this book particualrly useful yourself?

Many things have kept me awake at night, and funnily enough, when I have been reading the manuscript for the book – or the various edits, I have thought – that’s really clever, did I say that? I must try it, and have found it works amazingly well.

What works best of all is knowing that confrontation is the primary inescapable reality, but, and it is the big but, whether or not it leads on to conflict is entirely up to me.

David’s experience includes 20 years in banking including a  range of senior roles such as Chief Manager Corporate Centre – CM Legal and Recoveries, and CM Retail Services for NAB NZ – then have been mediating privately for 18 years – mainly in NZ and Aust – (further details can be found on his website www.davidbogan.com . He has also spent about 18 years with various roles in organisations involving Lifeline where he have also spent over ten years on the phones as a crisis counsellor.