Building Your Fitness with Yes-Buts

In our last few posts, we've talked a lot about Yes-Buts — the problems they can cause in conversations, when and why people use them, all the different forms they can take, and even how not to deal with them effectively. Now it's time to start looking at strategies that can actually work well. 

Yes-Buts are so common, at least in American culture, that they affect all of us in one way or another. You may not use this type of communication very often, but the odds are you do it at least some of the time. (If you’re convinced that you don’t, try checking that out with a few people who know you well. You may be surprised!) Plus, even if you never Yes-Butted anyone yourself, you’d still have to face plenty of other people doing it to you, which can be extremely challenging.

To avoid getting caught up in polite fights, you need to know both how to change your own Yes-Buts and how to respond effectively when someone Yes-Buts you. We’ll teach you how to do that, and also how you can effectively intervene in other people’s conversations — for instance, what you can do when you’re leading a meeting and the discussion starts turning into a Yes-But debate. For each skill, we’ll follow a basic three-step program for behavior change: first building awareness, then learning new actions to take, and finally using repeated practice to turn those actions into a habit.

Transformation Skill: Controlling Your Own Yes-Butting
If you’re someone who tends to Yes-But a lot, learning how to do it less can make a huge difference in your communication. We’ve seen many people successfully kick the habit using the process that you’re about to learn.

Step 1: Self-awareness
The first step is to build your awareness of what it is that you’re doing. This takes practice. Remember that you can Yes-But without ever saying Yes or But. You may have a more subtle Yes-Butting style. (Be sure to read about “stealth-butting” in our earlier post.) See if you can notice what happens to you when someone gives an opinion or suggestion that you disagree with. Do you start to feel tense or agitated? Do you have trouble fully listening to the other person because your mind is so busy coming up with counter-arguments?

When you’re just starting out, you might not realize that you Yes-Butted someone until a few hours or days after the conversation is over. Over time, you’ll find yourself noticing your Yes-But thinking in the middle of a conversation. Eventually, if all goes well, you’ll be able to prevent a Yes-But argument before the first But comes out of your mouth.

As you develop this awareness, it can be helpful to keep track of the situations where you tend to get triggered. When do you Yes-But the most? Is it when your daughter asks to stay out past her curfew? When you’re talking with your friends about politics? Or when a colleague presents a new proposal that you think is too ambitious? Once you know that, you can make an effort to be particularly attentive in those situations. You might even ask a few people you trust to speak up when they catch you Yes-Butting (so long as they can do it graciously, without being too critical — maybe giving you a subtle nonverbal cue like touching the tip of their nose or some other hand signal). One man we remember had that happen accidentally. After going through a communications training he decided to teach his two sons about Yes-Buts, thinking that this might help them to stop arguing so much with each other. What he didn’t expect was that they’d start noticing how often he Yes-Butted them, which he soon learned was many times per day!

Step 2: Action — Join and Explore
Suppose you notice that you’re about to Yes-But and you manage to catch yourself in time. Now what do you do? Let’s take an example. Your spouse suggests taking a two-week vacation, and you stop yourself from automatically saying, “That would be nice, but my work schedule won’t allow it.” What do you say instead? You could just change the subject or try a noncommittal Uh-huh, but then the important information you have would never get into the conversation. Every Yes-But contains two important messages: 1) an agreement (you think a two-week vacation sounds great) and 2) a new, different or competing idea (you can’t imagine taking that much time off from work). The challenge is finding a way to communicate these ideas that makes it easier for the other person to hear them. The most effective method we’ve found is a strategy we call Join and Explore.

Join
Think of the Join as the Yes part of your Yes-But with more meat on the bones. Instead of saying a superficial, token “Yes” or “Sure” or “That would be nice,” you mention three specific things that you genuinely like or agree with in what you just heard. In our vacation example, you might say, “I’d love to spend two weeks away with you. One week often doesn’t feel like enough time to fully relax. And that way we’d be able to go someplace farther away, without worrying so much about the long flight or jet lag.” 

Once you’ve sincerely joined with someone’s idea, the person is much more likely to be receptive to what you say next. In general, people are more relaxed and open with others who seem to be similar to them or on their side; anyone who comes across as being too different or too antagonistic will tend to provoke a defensive reaction. This is why we recommend joining three times, rather than one or two — it often takes three for people to feel that you honestly hear them, understand them, and can relate to what they’re saying. Just remember that your joins need to be genuine. When people try to fake this strategy, they usually come across as insincere.

Explore
So far, so good. You’ve fleshed out your Yes with three sincere, specific joins. Now comes the tricky part: expressing your concern — in this case, your worry about taking so much time off from work — without phrasing it as a “But.” In our experience, the best way to do that is to incorporate your concern into an open-ended question. In this case, you might ask, “Do you have any ideas about how I could fit a two-week trip around my work schedule?” 

Consider what a difference this simple change can make in your communication. In a Yes-But conversation, there are two fixed sides. All your energy goes into arguing over which side is right: yes vs. no, two-week vacation vs. no two-week vacation. By asking an open question, you redirect that energy into constructive problem-solving. Instead of deciding “We can’t do that,” you start exploring, “How can we?” This helps both you and the other person to stay curious about new possibilities that you haven’t considered before. For example, you and your spouse might end up brainstorming some creative solution to your vacation dilemma. Maybe you’ll think of a way to combine leisure travel with a work-related trip; do some work remotely while you’re away; reassign one of your time-consuming projects; or fit in a few hours of overtime each week in the months before you leave. Not only will you avoid a fight, but you’ll also increase the chances of getting what you both want — a nice long vacation that doesn’t conflict with your work responsibilities.

Joining and Exploring on a Charged Political Issue
While many Yes-But arguments deal with practical decisions (planning a vacation, meeting, or party, hiring a new employee, or making budget cuts), some of the most heated debates involve larger legal or political issues. Topics such as abortion, gay marriage, gun control, and defense policy challenge people’s core beliefs and values. When you hear an opposing viewpoint on one of those issues, the temptation to argue can be almost irresistible. At a minimum these sorts of conflicts can be very frustrating. In worse cases they can seriously damage relationships, leaving colleagues, friends, or family members feeling alienated from one another.

The Join and Explore strategy gives us a more productive alternative. We’ll demonstrate this by applying it to a controversial issue that often gets discussed in polarized, black-and-white terms: the tension between national security and human rights. In the following dialogue, Ruth is in favor of prioritizing national security, and Charles is in favor of prioritizing human rights.

Ruth: National security concerns should take priority over individual human rights. (Opinion)

Charles: Yes, national security concerns are important, but that doesn’t make it okay to abandon our basic fundamental protections for individual human life and dignity. (Yes-But)

Ruth: Sure, those are great ideals. However, when we’re face-to-face with terrorist threats, that kind of idealism can put thousands or even millions of lives at risk. (Yes-But)

Charles: It’s easy to say that, but then you could use that argument to justify terrible human rights abuses! (Yes-But)


(And from here, the argument could continue on indefinitely.)

Now let’s back up to the start of the conversation and see how it could go a little differently. Imagine that as Ruth makes her first comment, Charles notices his reaction and realizes he is about to Yes-But. At that point he might be able to shift his focus from what he doesn’t like about Ruth’s opinion to what he can genuinely agree with (his joins):

Ruth: National security concerns should take precedence over individual human rights. (Opinion)

Charles: I agree that national security needs to be one of the country’s top priorities. (Join #1)
Attacks by terrorists can claim hundreds or thousands of lives. (Join #2)
Clearly, whatever security or intelligence measures were in place before the September 11th attacks weren’t sufficient to prevent those tragedies. (Join #3)

Charles’s next step would be to ask an open-ended question that addresses his concern, while still leaving room for Ruth to give her opinion freely. This is tricky. It would probably be much simpler for him to think of Leading questions that back Ruth into a corner, like: Don’t you think that sometimes the focus on security goes too far? Don’t we also have a responsibility to take human rights into account? Here are a few examples of genuine open questions Charles could ask:

Are there any cases where you think human rights need to come first? Or any particular human rights that you think should never be violated?

What are the limits? How would we know if we’d gone too far in infringing on individual rights?

Can you think of any ways in which protecting human rights might be compatible with promoting national security?

What steps can we take to promote national security that don’t infringe on individual rights — or that actually enhance those rights?

There’s no way to predict how will Ruth answer this type of question. Nothing Charles can do will guarantee a constructive response. But because he started out by joining with Ruth’s opinion, she’s more likely to be receptive and give his question some serious thought.

We wouldn’t expect that Ruth and Charles would end up in perfect agreement with each other. However, so long as neither person has radically extreme views — for instance, believing that anyone who disagrees with our government’s policies should be put in jail, or that there should be no security at airports because it violates the right to privacy — there will be some areas of common ground. Exploring those together will give them a good shot at developing a certain level of mutual understanding and respect. They may even discover that they can learn something from each other.

Step 3: Practice
Over the next few weeks, in between our regular posts, we’ll teach you a variety of different exercises you can try on your own to build your Yes-But fitness.

As for our regular posts, our next topic will be response skills — what to do when you get Yes-Butted by somebody else. Stay tuned!