An Awesome Night at Wanzhonglou
Apr 18-2013
- A Dialogue between PT06 Students and Mr. and Mrs. Braff
By KOU Bo
On the evening of April 21st , the students of BiMBA PT 06 invited Professor Braff and his wife Elain Braff to Wanzhonglou, CCER, where they exchanged ideas about inter-personal relations while enjoying delicacies and wine. It was really a nice and joyful night. The meeting is the third of the dialogue series organized by the PT06 class committee.
Before teaching at BiMBA, Professor Braff was already a very successful lawyer. He is now teaching courses on negotiation. His wife Mrs. Elain Braff is an expert in family consultation. Because of their common interest, they have put forward a course on the promotion of family relations. Today they will share their years of wisdom and life experiences.
If you’re asked to list all the necessary qualities that can help you excel in work, you may bring to mind many qualities instantly. However, if you’re asked to list necessary qualities for maintaining sound inter-personal relations, you will probably have to think it over before bringing forth something. Indeed Mr. and Mrs. Braff wanted to remind us that it takes skills to develop and maintain a sound inter-personal relationship. We tend to think more about how to accomplish our work, but neglect how to run our lives well. A sound inter-personal relationship, especially between family members, needs to be fostered carefully just like how you do with your work. And undoubtedly there are some skills that can make better your relationship with other members of your family.
It is a lovely experience to dialogue with Mr. and Mrs. Braff, because they can always give full play to their performing talent and sense of humor, which naturally make it easy to turn passive audiences into active players. They divided the students into several groups and let them play separate roles in a pre-designed setting. Through constant role changes, Mr. and Mrs. Braff enabled the students to experience the four types of personality commonly seen under different pressures. In the performance, you will see many strange yet noisy scenes: a raging wife is scolding her husband; the man, appearing indifferent, reacted coldly, “It’s unreasonable to lose your temper like this. What we should do is to find out the problems and have them solved.”; a little girl by their sides looks helplessly at her mother and asks her not to quarrel any more, and; a boy, seemingly not having been affected by the quarrel at all, is busy inviting his friend in the next door to take part in a party. These people stand for four different types of personality: blamer-type (prone to blaming others), computer-type (mechanical type, good at logical thinking but lack in emotional quotient), placater-type (weak and obedient type), and distracter-type (care-free type). The students were surprised to find that they could fit into one of these types. Thus they began to reflect on themselves as well as people around them. In such a way, they not only understand better of themselves, but also learn to cope with different people accordingly. There was a couple in the class, and the husband was very humorous. When talking about his feelings of the dialogue, he said that he had learned many useful things, especially tips to get along well with his wife.
The key word of the speeches of Mr. and Mrs. Braff is “intimacy”. How could two people maintain an intimate relationship then? Mrs. Braff came up with a solution, which she called “daily temperature reading”. She said that there were five steps for the solution:
(1) Expressing gratitude and appreciation to him/her;
(2) Sharing each other’s new experiences;
(3) Answering questions raised by him/her;
(4) Making constructive suggestions;
(5) Expressing each other’s expectations.
This so-called “temperature reading” enabled people to have an intimate talk with each other, so as to learn better of each other’s expectations. When Mr. and Mrs. Braff was sitting there, pouring each other’s inner feelings face to face and hand in hand, all students were touched by the sincerity and mutual support between the couple. No wonder some students were even moved to tears. There was a mother who was also invited by her daughter to the party. When the mother and her daughter practiced the five steps, they poured out some words which had always been kept in their hearts but had never been uttered. The daughter said that she had never felt so intimate with her mom before. For like most of the Chinese people, they seldom express generously their gratitude and appreciation in front of others, especially between two close people. But the fact is that everyone wants to be appreciated, and thus everyone should learn to put into practice the art of “gratitude and appreciation”.
Near the end of the activity, Mr. and Mrs. Braff answered all kinds of questions, humorous or serious, raised by the students. Professor Braff said that he came to work in BiMBA again mainly because of his former teaching experiences here, especially with the students. “I really enjoyed the time being with students, chatting and sharing with them” he said. And this is what this successful American hopes to experience and is experiencing in China, a country in ever increasing changes. He wishes that he could stay longer with these outstanding young people in BiMBA.
