From Way-of-Being Change to Mindset Change

In The Anatomy of Peace, we describe two completely different life experiences—a conflict-riddled heart-at-war experience (“in the box”) and an open and collaborative heart-at-peace experience (“out of the box”). From reading the book, you know that one of the key differences in these two very different experiences of life is the way we see and experience other people: when we are in the box, we experience others not as people with their own lives but as objects within our lives. Experiencing others in these different ways, we experience ourselves differently as well. The choice to see another as either a person or as an object is as well a choice of how we will see and experience ourselves; it is a choice between whether we will see and experience ourselves and others truthfully or erroneously.

One’s experience of oneself and others is so radically different between these two ways that philosophers call them different “ways of being.” The choice to live in or out of the box amounts to a radical shift in one’s way of being in the world. Which is to say that this choice doesn’t merely change one’s behavior; it changes one’s entire being.

In the years since The Anatomy of Peace was first published, our work with clients has caused us to continue to refine the terms we use to make a rigorously logical philosophical work into an equally powerful practical one. We have discovered that clients are able to understand and apply the concepts we teach more easily if we characterize our work in terms of mindset change rather than way-of-being change. Perhaps this is because the term way of being, while accurately communicating the foundational depth of the issue we are taking on, also communicates a kind of gravity that seems difficult to change. The term mindset, while also carrying the idea of foundational change, sounds and feels inherently changeable. Which it is.

As part of this developmental process, a number of years ago we began talking in terms of changing mindset rather than changing way of being. Specifically, we began talking about helping individuals, teams, and organizations shift from inward-mindset (i.e., in-the-box) orientations to outward-mindset (i.e., out-of-the-box) orientations. We soon learned how helpful it was to our clients to characterize the change we are seeking in this way.

The ideas we share in this book still hold true, nearly fifteen years after the book was originally published. Terms like in the box and out of the box have entered the public lexicon and helped hundreds of thousands—even millions—of people. The book’s continued and increasing popularity—early on as a word-of-mouth phenomenon and now as one of the bestselling conflict resolution books of all time—proves the timeless power of the ideas. As you encounter Arbinger’s work in its most recent book, The Outward Mindset, the connections between the books will remain clear as you remember that the in-the-box way of being is what we now often call an inward mindset, and the out-of-the-box way of being is what we call an outward mindset.

Our mission is to turn the world outward—one person, team, and organization at a time.