When we choose to commit to a compassionate way to express our needs, we encounter this last of the four questions on the handout: "What actions would I like to be taken to make happen that I now would like to have happen?" Getting our requests to ourselves and others expressed in action language takes more effort than we might think. When we think about the way adults generally speak to children, they often make requests, actually demands, in negatives: "No," "Stop," "Don't do that," "Bad girl," Bad boy," and the like. Negative instructions don't tell us much about how to proceed. They just tell us to stop. They tell us all about a world full of "No," but they say little or nothing about the very much more open and becoming world of "Yes."
After a first class in English at a community college, a student came to the office I worked in and asked very softly to talk to me. I agreed gratefully, and she came in and sat down. She sat quite straight and kept her arms straight and her hands grasped tightly in her lap. She asked me about what we talked about in class. When she asked if I meant that she would have all the freedom to write what she chose, be as creative as she could, and that she couldn't really do anything wrong. I agreed that sounded like a good summary of what we discussed.
She said that she couldn't do any of that. She would happily fill out any sort of workbook, memorize what I asked her to memorize, or ask her to take any test no matter how hard, but she couldn't write in the way I asked. I asked her why that was the case. After some hesitation, she answered that her father always told her that she shouldn't do anything unless she knew it was the right thing. He told her in no uncertain terms that he was the only one who had the right to define right from wrong, so anything she did on her own was probably the wrong thing. She couldn't write freely or creatively without her father agreeing, and she couldn't ask him to do that. He wasn't very happy about her attending college in the first place. We talked for a while after that, and I hoped we came to see that she had the right to set her own way of seeing and writing. In fact, the expression of herself worked as the right thing to do, at least in our shared classroom. She had the ability and the right to set her own standards and let them grow and change through new experiences. She had the right to say "Yes" to adventure and discovery. Our talk and my hope did not help at that point, and she not only left our class, she just left. The "No" meaning perspectives that we learn when young and can continue to learn through the vicissitudes of life, can freeze us nearly solid, transfix us in the past with little or no idea of the actions, the "Yes," that will bring us into the present and take us into the future.
When we make our requests known as actions, the recipient of that request can act or not as matter of her/his choice. If we don't accept either a "No" or a "Yes" with equanimity, we didn't make a request. We made a demand. When the telephone rings, and we ask someone else to answer for us, and that person says, "No," that's that person's choice. If we respond by saying, "Alright, be that way "or" Why are you so selfish?" we have made our original compassionate request into a demand.