Valuing difference is a big job. It takes more than a department or a sermon or a march to embed it. We live in cultures; and cultures resist difference. They are set up to draw a circle around sameness and close it with a secret handshake.

I am not like you. I am just like you.

How can both be true at once? They just can. They just are. Life is like that: maddeningly and mercifully paradoxical. In fact, nested inside this paradox is another one: we are the same, but difference is all there is. We are different inside our sameness. The strong and deadly pull, though, is to think we see difference in our humanity when all we are seeing is difference in our experience. When we give in to this societal pull to dehumanize, we pull away from each other, judging, condemning, ostracizing. This we can stop.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.”

“This brings into focus one of the basic flaws of the Personality Ethic. To try to change outward attitudes and behaviors does very little good in the long run if we fail to examine the basic paradigms from which those attitudes and behaviors flow. This perception demonstration also shows how powerfully our paradigms affect the way we interact with other people. As clearly and objectively as we think we see things, we begin to realize that others see them differently from their own apparently equally clear and objective point of view. “Where we stand depends on where we sit.

In order to see our son differently, Sandra and I had to be differently. Our new paradigm was created as we invested in the growth and development of our own character. Paradigms are inseparable from character. Being is seeing in the human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what we are. We can’t go very far to change our seeing without simultaneously changing our being, and vice versa. Even in my apparently instantaneous paradigm-shifting experience that morning on the subway, my change of vision was a result of—and limited by—my basic character.

Insecure people think that all reality should be amenable to their paradigms. They have a high need to clone others, to mold them over into their own thinking. They don’t realize that the very strength of the relationship is in having another point of view. Sameness is not oneness; uniformity is not unity. Unity, or oneness, is complementariness, not sameness. Sameness is uncreative ... and boring. The essence of synergy is to value the differences. I’ve come to believe that the key to interpersonal synergy is intrapersonal synergy, that is synergy within ourselves. The heart of intrapersonal synergy is embodied in the principles in the first three habits, which give the internal security sufficient to handle the risks of being open and vulnerable.