How NOT to Respond to Others’ Grief, Loss, and Disappointment
When we train organizational teams in SAVI, we talk about many different types of difficult conversations — from boring meetings to heated arguments. In this post, we’ll focus on one communication challenge that we often don’t get to cover: responding to someone who expresses feelings of grief, loss, or disappointment. While such conversations may not occur frequently in work settings, we all find ourselves engaged in them from time to time, and many of us have great difficulty handling them effectively. In fact, some of the most common attempts to be supportive can easily make the other person feel worse, rather than better. We’ll look at a few of these here, before considering more helpful alternatives.
Common Response #1. Imagining the Positive
Suppose you’ve just lost your job, and you’re devastated. It’s a big blow to your self-esteem and threatens your sense of security for the future. You share this with your friend, and she responds by saying, “I know things will work out well in the end. Within a month you’ll have five job offers.” Or, “This is just temporary. The industry is bound to recover soon.” How does that make you feel?
In all likelihood, the friend in this scenario has only good, altruistic intentions: trying to help you feel better and shift your focus from distressing worries to hopeful possibilities. Nevertheless, these sorts of comments are unlikely to feel truly reassuring. We can use the SAVI framework to understand why.
Using SAVI, we can identify your friend’s statements as Positive predictions — assumptions about the future, stated as if they were facts. Responding to any deeply emotional message with a Positive prediction is inherently problematic. First of all, the prediction avoids the core issue: the person’s feelings (e.g., in this case, feeling hurt, vulnerable, upset, and worried). Instead it focuses on concrete events or circumstances (getting a job offer, improvements in the economy, and so on). It also avoids the present reality (unemployment), focusing instead on what will happen in the future. And since none of us can know the future, Positive predictions are always in some sense misrepresentations. Those five job offers are not real facts about the world; they are just your friend’s projections. It should come as no surprise that imaginary future events thought up by somebody else cannot override the very real feelings you’re experiencing right now.
Common Response #2. Using All the Right Words (As Seen on TV)
Now consider a different scenario. Your father has just died, after a long and debilitating illness, and you’re struggling with grief as you return to work the following week. As your colleagues find out, they offer various expressions of sympathy, such as “I’m sorry for your loss,” “My condolences,” “At least his suffering is over,” and “He’s in a better place now” — all with no feeling in their voice tone. Do you feel comforted? Probably not.
Again, we can apply SAVI to help us understand what’s happening. These remarks are all examples of Ritual communication: predictable, socially determined phrases stated with little or no emotion. We pick up these conventional expressions from our culture, learning the “right thing” to say from movies, books, and television, as well as from direct social interactions. Anyone who enjoys watching police procedurals like Law & Order has probably heard “I’m sorry for your loss” hundreds of times.
Now, just because people respond to you with Rituals, that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care. In our example, it might be that some of your coworkers freeze up and get uncomfortable talking about emotional issues. They might rely on seemingly safe, standard phrases because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and making you more upset. The point is, you simply can’t tell what they’re feeling. At a time when you really need emotional connection, an emotionally flat, automatic response may just add to your distress.
Common Response #3. Delivering the Universal Truth
Have you ever received upsetting health news, and then found the people around you starting to act like medical experts? For instance, maybe you just learned that your child needs surgery, or you’ve been diagnosed with a serious injury or chronic disease. As you’re grappling with the emotional impact of that information, some of your family members jump in to share their unsolicited, dogmatic opinions. Each person conveys a clear impression that he or she knows exactly what you should do: “You need to get a second opinion right away.” “You really ought to join a support group.” “You have to go see this great acupuncturist I know.” “The only way you’ll turn this around is by changing your lifestyle habits.”
Would this advice help to calm or reassure you? While some of the ideas might potentially be helpful, the way they’re presented — as what we call “Oughtitudes” — makes it difficult to use them. SAVI defines an Oughtitude as “[c]omments expressing non-hostile superiority, dogmatic value judgments, rules about life, generalizations that imply universal ‘rightness’ and that the speaker has a direct line to the absolute truth which everybody ‘ought to know…’” These types of communication provide a very strong push in a particular direction, not leaving room for any doubt or opposing opinions. And of course, as with the other responses we looked at, they do nothing to address the emotions involved; instead of acknowledging what’s happening for you right now, they skip ahead to what you ought to be doing.
Common Response #4. Talking You Out of It
Imagine that you’re facing the end of a close relationship, whether it’s a divorce, separation, or break-up. You might experience a wide range of painful thoughts and feelings — from grief and despair to identity issues to fears about how the other person will manage without you. (We’ll leave out anger, resentment, and outrage, as they are less relevant to this discussion and raise other complications.) You talk to your friends, who care about you and so naturally don’t want you to go through this pain. When they hear what you’re thinking and feeling, they try to talk you out of it: “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” “You shouldn’t feel that way.” “There’s nothing to feel guilty about.” Sometimes their comments might be a little more subtle: “I totally understand why it seems that way, but that’s because you’re so upset right now” or “I know she’s having a hard time, but it’s really not your fault.” As the conversation continues, you find yourself shifting from sharing your feelings to having an argument. What’s going on?
When we coach people who report being on the other end of these dialogues — making failed attempts at reassurance — they often can’t understand what went wrong. They were trying so hard to be helpful, and instead of being appreciative, or at least feeling a little better, the other person started fighting with them. Once more we can turn to SAVI for insight. Statements like “You shouldn’t feel that way” or “Don’t be so hard on yourself” are Discounts, denying the value of the thoughts or feelings someone else has expressed. The intention behind a Discount may be kind and supportive, but the message that comes through most clearly is “You’re wrong.” Yes-Buts have a similar effect. The person gives a token agreement (e.g., “I know it seems that way”), followed by a contradictory opinion (“but it’s not true,” “but things will get better in time,” “but you haven’t considered…” etc.). Again, the core message that gets communicated is that this person knows better than you do what you should be thinking or feeling. No matter what the context, that’s a message that’s likely to lead to an argument.
Uncommon Sense
We mentioned earlier that these four types of responses are extremely common. Do you recognize any of them as the kinds of things people have said to you, or that you yourself have a tendency to say? When you’re on the receiving end of such comments, it’s pretty obvious that they aren’t what you need to hear. At best they’re simply not helpful, and at worst they can be downright infuriating. Yet when it’s you who needs to respond to someone experiencing grief or loss, you might find those same infuriating comments coming out of your mouth. That’s certainly happened to both of us. To be able to respond effectively, it’s not enough to know what not to say; we need to have a sense of what alternative responses would be more helpful. While there’s no “right” response, we can recommend several options that have much greater potential for success than Positive predictions, Rituals, Oughtitudes, Discounts, or Yes-Buts. Stay tuned for details in our next post, coming soon!
In the meantime, as 2009 comes to a close, we wish you all peace, health, happiness, and conversations that just get better and better.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Saturday, December 12, 2009
What It Takes to Be an Expert
Lately we’ve been thinking a lot about the question of mastery: what it takes to become an expert — in terms of managing difficult conversations, or any other type of skilled activity. The issue came up last week in a phone seminar with an organizational group that has received a great deal of SAVI training. We spent much of our time discussing a recent meeting where two participants had encountered some difficulty in their roles as meeting facilitators. Together as a group, we analyzed what had gone wrong, how these individuals had responded, and what they might do differently in the future.
At the end of our discussion, one of the other participants expressed concern about the state of meeting facilitation in the organization. Nobody on the staff was an expert, she said. Despite a couple of years of experience, they still sometimes ran into problems they didn’t know how to solve. What could they do about this?
Our answer: Exactly what they had just been doing.
The latest research on mastery gives clear guidance about what it takes to become an expert — whether you’re a meeting facilitator or a ballplayer, violinist, salesperson, or surgeon. Perhaps the most striking finding is what does not separate masters from others in their field: innate talent. In his book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin challenges the concept of the “natural,” the idea that top performers are born with something special that enables them to excel. Scott Miller and colleagues at the Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change came to the same conclusion in their research on outstanding psychotherapists, or “supershrinks.” It turns out that there is wide variation in the effectiveness of clinicians, with some dramatically and consistently outperforming others. However, extensive analyses failed to identify any characteristics — either inherited or acquired — that could account for this difference.
If talent alone doesn’t do the trick, we might think that what matters is experience; maybe the key to excellence is just seeing more clients, attempting more free throws, or running more meetings. In fact, that alone is no guarantee of improvement. Experience does tend to make us feel as though we’ve improved. For instance, as people progress in their careers, their confidence typically continues to grow — even if their rate of success shows no growth at all. That doesn’t mean that experience is not important. Practice is absolutely critical, but not just any practice. The practice must be deliberate.
The term “deliberate practice” comes from psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, whose work inspired both Geoff Colvin and Scott Miller’s group. The keys to deliberate practice are:
Let’s consider how we might apply these principles to develop mastery of meeting facilitation:
Online Resources:
“What It Takes to be Great,” by Geoff Colvin (Fortune Magazine)
“The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” by K. Anders Ericsson et al. (Psychological Review)
“Supershrinks,” by Scott Miller et al. (Psychotherapy Networker)
At the end of our discussion, one of the other participants expressed concern about the state of meeting facilitation in the organization. Nobody on the staff was an expert, she said. Despite a couple of years of experience, they still sometimes ran into problems they didn’t know how to solve. What could they do about this?
Our answer: Exactly what they had just been doing.
The latest research on mastery gives clear guidance about what it takes to become an expert — whether you’re a meeting facilitator or a ballplayer, violinist, salesperson, or surgeon. Perhaps the most striking finding is what does not separate masters from others in their field: innate talent. In his book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin challenges the concept of the “natural,” the idea that top performers are born with something special that enables them to excel. Scott Miller and colleagues at the Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change came to the same conclusion in their research on outstanding psychotherapists, or “supershrinks.” It turns out that there is wide variation in the effectiveness of clinicians, with some dramatically and consistently outperforming others. However, extensive analyses failed to identify any characteristics — either inherited or acquired — that could account for this difference.
If talent alone doesn’t do the trick, we might think that what matters is experience; maybe the key to excellence is just seeing more clients, attempting more free throws, or running more meetings. In fact, that alone is no guarantee of improvement. Experience does tend to make us feel as though we’ve improved. For instance, as people progress in their careers, their confidence typically continues to grow — even if their rate of success shows no growth at all. That doesn’t mean that experience is not important. Practice is absolutely critical, but not just any practice. The practice must be deliberate.
The term “deliberate practice” comes from psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, whose work inspired both Geoff Colvin and Scott Miller’s group. The keys to deliberate practice are:
- an explicit intention to improve performance
- aiming for objectives just beyond your level of proficiency
- getting feedback on your results
- repeating the activity with high frequency and high regularity
Let’s consider how we might apply these principles to develop mastery of meeting facilitation:
- Intention to improve: Adjust your mind-set to view each meeting not just as an end in itself, but also as a learning opportunity. Keep an eye out for possible areas of improvement, with the goal of making each meeting better than the last.
- Aim beyond your level of proficiency: Take the initiative to seek new challenges, working on specific behaviors and interventions that are challenging for you. For instance, if you have a difficult time managing time boundaries, stopping people when they go off on tangents, or intervening when someone interrupts or Yes-buts others, set an explicit intention to practice those skills whenever an opportunity arises.
- Getting feedback: End every meeting with a Force field, asking the group for Driving forces (what helped them move toward the goals of the meeting) and Restraining forces (what made it more difficult to reach those goals). Work together to come up with strategies for reducing the Restraining forces over time. If you’re co-facilitating with another colleague, we recommend taking some time to debrief together privately, at a deeper level, after the meeting is over. And if you run into situations you don’t know how to handle, it can be very helpful to get outside coaching (as happened in our phone seminar).
- Repeating the activity: Just keep doing it. Volunteer to facilitate meetings whenever you can — with large groups or small groups, within your team or in other departments. You might also find chances to work with groups in other contexts, such as community meetings or even contentious family discussions.
Online Resources:
“What It Takes to be Great,” by Geoff Colvin (Fortune Magazine)
“The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” by K. Anders Ericsson et al. (Psychological Review)
“Supershrinks,” by Scott Miller et al. (Psychotherapy Networker)
Transforming Opinions to Data
Since nobody so far has taken us up on our challenge, we'll give you our suggestions for transforming some of the opinions in our quiz into related data statements:
1. We have exciting news! (Opinion)
Relevant Fact #1: We're writing to share some news with you.
Fact #2: We're excited to tell you this news.
Fact #3: This news is really exciting to us.
4. The weather where we’re staying will be worse than in Cambridge, but not terribly cold. (Opinion)
Relevant Fact #1: Weather forecasts for the week predict that the average temperature in Stockholm will be 38 degrees, with four days of rain, and the average temperature in Cambridge will be 45 degrees, with two days of rain.
Fact #2: I don't like rain.
Fact #3: I generally feel uncomfortable in temperatures below 50 degrees, and feel downright miserable in temperatures below 30 degrees.
10. Ben has learned a lot of the common phrases that tourists need to know. (Opinion)
Relevant Fact #1: Ben has memorized 22 phrases from the book "100 Swedish Phrases that All Tourists Need to Know."
Fact #2: That is 22 more Swedish phrases than Amy knows.
We hope you will find these helpful. (Fact)
1. We have exciting news! (Opinion)
Relevant Fact #1: We're writing to share some news with you.
Fact #2: We're excited to tell you this news.
Fact #3: This news is really exciting to us.
4. The weather where we’re staying will be worse than in Cambridge, but not terribly cold. (Opinion)
Relevant Fact #1: Weather forecasts for the week predict that the average temperature in Stockholm will be 38 degrees, with four days of rain, and the average temperature in Cambridge will be 45 degrees, with two days of rain.
Fact #2: I don't like rain.
Fact #3: I generally feel uncomfortable in temperatures below 50 degrees, and feel downright miserable in temperatures below 30 degrees.
10. Ben has learned a lot of the common phrases that tourists need to know. (Opinion)
Relevant Fact #1: Ben has memorized 22 phrases from the book "100 Swedish Phrases that All Tourists Need to Know."
Fact #2: That is 22 more Swedish phrases than Amy knows.
We hope you will find these helpful. (Fact)
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
A quick comment on comments
We love them! It’s great to get feedback — whether positive, negative, confused, or enlightened. We’d like this blog to develop into an ongoing, interactive dialogue. We can’t necessarily answer your comments right away, but we always do our best to respond within a few days.
So don’t be shy! If there’s anything we wrote that you’d like to challenge, add to, learn more about, or relate to your own experience, jump right in.
A specific request
In response to our last entry, giving answers to our opinion/data quiz, one reader wrote in that she would like to see answers to our “challenges.” For statements 1, 4, and 7, we challenged you to rephrase opinions into data. Before we offer our suggestions, we invite you all to please take a stab at one or more of these.
Getting started with comments
For those of you not sure how to post comments, here are the basic instructions. (It sounds more complicated than it is. Each of these steps is pretty simple.)
So don’t be shy! If there’s anything we wrote that you’d like to challenge, add to, learn more about, or relate to your own experience, jump right in.
A specific request
In response to our last entry, giving answers to our opinion/data quiz, one reader wrote in that she would like to see answers to our “challenges.” For statements 1, 4, and 7, we challenged you to rephrase opinions into data. Before we offer our suggestions, we invite you all to please take a stab at one or more of these.
Getting started with comments
For those of you not sure how to post comments, here are the basic instructions. (It sounds more complicated than it is. Each of these steps is pretty simple.)
- Scroll down to the bottom of the blog entry to which you would like to add a comment.
- Click on the comment link at the bottom right. (It will say “0 comments” or “2 comments,” etc.)
- Type your comment in the blank box that appears (labeled “Post a comment”).
- In the pull-down menu that says “Select profile…”, choose how you would like to be identified. If you have an account with Google, LiveJournal, or one of the others listed, you can sign in with that username and password. Or you can just post with your name and/or website (via “Name/URL”) or post anonymously. If you post your name and website, your name will appear as a hyperlink that brings people to your website.
- Hit the bottom left button, “Post Comment.” Voila!
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Answers, Revealed!
Not the answers to everything, mind you, but all the answers to the quiz we posted earlier this week.
If you haven’t taken the quiz yet, click here to do that before reading any further.
We’ll be away next week (as you may have gathered), but will return with a new installment in the first week of December. In the meantime, we wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving with good food, close friends and family, and only the most enjoyable communication patterns.
1. We have exciting news!
Opinion — You may agree that it’s exciting, or you may disagree.
(Challenge: how would you rephrase this to make it a data statement?)
2. We (Ben & Amy) are traveling to Sweden for a week, starting this Friday.
Data
3. During that period, we do not expect to post any new blog entries.
Data — a fact about what we’re thinking
4. The weather where we’re staying will be worse than in Cambridge, but not terribly cold.
Opinion — We think most of our readers would agree that more cold and rain qualifies as “worse,” but that’s still a judgment call. And there are plenty of people who see 30-degree weather as “terribly cold.” (Challenge: how would you rephrase this to make it a data statement?)
5. At this time of year, Stockholm receives a little less than nine hours of daylight, and the average temperature is in the high 30s.
Data
6. Learning this came as a relief to Amy, who was not certain that there would be any daylight at all.
Data — These are facts about Amy’s thoughts and experiences.
7. Amy has a very low tolerance for cold, dark weather.
Opinion — It’s a fact that Amy doesn’t like cold, dark weather, but whether her tolerance is low or high is a matter of opinion.
8. Ben is thinking less about the weather than about the social interactions they’ll have.
Data — a fact about Ben’s thinking
9. He is proud to have taught himself the Swedish language over the summer, and looks forward to trying it out.
Data — It happens (unfortunately) not to be true, but it is stated in such a way that its accuracy could be checked.
10. He has learned a lot of the common phrases that tourists need to know.
Opinion — What does “a lot” mean? Five phrases? Ten? One hundred? (Challenge: how would you rephrase this to make it a data statement?)
11. The two of us will be teaching for three days — Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
Data
12. We’re going to enjoy working with our first all-Swedish group.
Opinion — This is a bit of a trick question. It’s an opinion about what is going to happen in the future (which we can’t possibly know), so in SAVI terms, it is technically a Positive prediction. We expect to enjoy the experience, but that's not a guarantee. (Did any of you pick up on this?)
13. And they should all love SAVI, because it’s a wonderfully useful communication system.
Data. (Just kidding. It’s just an opinion we both happen to share.)
So, how did you do? Which of these did you find to be easiest, and which were the most challenging? Let us know!
If you haven’t taken the quiz yet, click here to do that before reading any further.
We’ll be away next week (as you may have gathered), but will return with a new installment in the first week of December. In the meantime, we wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving with good food, close friends and family, and only the most enjoyable communication patterns.
1. We have exciting news!
Opinion — You may agree that it’s exciting, or you may disagree.
(Challenge: how would you rephrase this to make it a data statement?)
2. We (Ben & Amy) are traveling to Sweden for a week, starting this Friday.
Data
3. During that period, we do not expect to post any new blog entries.
Data — a fact about what we’re thinking
4. The weather where we’re staying will be worse than in Cambridge, but not terribly cold.
Opinion — We think most of our readers would agree that more cold and rain qualifies as “worse,” but that’s still a judgment call. And there are plenty of people who see 30-degree weather as “terribly cold.” (Challenge: how would you rephrase this to make it a data statement?)
5. At this time of year, Stockholm receives a little less than nine hours of daylight, and the average temperature is in the high 30s.
Data
6. Learning this came as a relief to Amy, who was not certain that there would be any daylight at all.
Data — These are facts about Amy’s thoughts and experiences.
7. Amy has a very low tolerance for cold, dark weather.
Opinion — It’s a fact that Amy doesn’t like cold, dark weather, but whether her tolerance is low or high is a matter of opinion.
8. Ben is thinking less about the weather than about the social interactions they’ll have.
Data — a fact about Ben’s thinking
9. He is proud to have taught himself the Swedish language over the summer, and looks forward to trying it out.
Data — It happens (unfortunately) not to be true, but it is stated in such a way that its accuracy could be checked.
10. He has learned a lot of the common phrases that tourists need to know.
Opinion — What does “a lot” mean? Five phrases? Ten? One hundred? (Challenge: how would you rephrase this to make it a data statement?)
11. The two of us will be teaching for three days — Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
Data
12. We’re going to enjoy working with our first all-Swedish group.
Opinion — This is a bit of a trick question. It’s an opinion about what is going to happen in the future (which we can’t possibly know), so in SAVI terms, it is technically a Positive prediction. We expect to enjoy the experience, but that's not a guarantee. (Did any of you pick up on this?)
13. And they should all love SAVI, because it’s a wonderfully useful communication system.
Data. (Just kidding. It’s just an opinion we both happen to share.)
So, how did you do? Which of these did you find to be easiest, and which were the most challenging? Let us know!
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Quiz — Can you tell an opinion from a fact?
We've talked a bit in the past few posts about the distinction between opinions and data. To follow up on this topic, we’re going to give you a little quiz. The following are statements about our upcoming work trip. Which ones are data (facts or feelings, either true or false) and which are opinions (judgments, speculations, conclusions, etc.)? Keep track of your guesses, and we’ll post the answers in just a few days, before we leave. Good luck!
- We have exciting news!
- We (Ben & Amy) are traveling to Sweden for a week, starting this Friday.
- During that period, we do not expect to post any new blog entries.
- The weather where we’re staying will be worse than in Cambridge, but not terribly cold.
- At this time of year, Stockholm receives a little less than nine hours of daylight, and the average temperature is in the high 30s.
- Learning this came as a relief to Amy, who was not certain that there would be any daylight at all.
- Amy has a very low tolerance for cold, dark weather.
- Ben is thinking less about the weather than about the social interactions they’ll have.
- He is proud to have taught himself the Swedish language over the summer, and looks forward to trying it out.
- He has learned a lot of the common phrases that tourists need to know.
- The two of us will be teaching for three days — Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
- We’re going to enjoy working with our first all-Swedish group.
- And they should all love SAVI, because it’s a wonderfully useful communication system.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
You vs. the Curse of Knowledge: How to come out on top
In our last post, we discussed why opinions are usually ineffective at persuading other people to agree with you. Your opinions are end-points of a process, conclusions you’ve come to as a result of all the experiences you’ve had and knowledge you’ve accumulated over time — sometimes over the course of many years. Building on the idea of the Curse of Knowledge, we likened this to a tune playing in your head that other people cannot hear.
What’s the solution?
Here’s one simple answer: make your tune audible. In SAVI terms, this means a switch from orienting (trying to influence the direction of conversation with opinions) to sharing concrete data (giving facts about the world or facts about you, which may include your feelings). Unlike an opinion, a fact is either true or false. Compare “Dante is a much better restaurant than Sorellina” (opinion) to “Dante received a higher Zagat rating than Sorellina” (fact), “I have never been disappointed with a meal at Dante” (personal fact), or “I didn’t feel comfortable at Sorellina, and got really irritated at waiting 45 minutes for a table after we had made a reservation” (feeling).
This is definitely a step in the right direction, and in some cases giving more data may be all you need to do to make your arguments more persuasive. However, there is one complication: even when your tune is audible, that doesn’t mean the other person is listening.
The simple give-more-data strategy can work well when your listener is open and available to hear what you’re saying. In a sense, their mind is quiet and just waiting to be filled by your tune. But when there’s already another, different song playing in the person’s head, that’s a whole other story.
Say you’re sharing your facts with someone who has very strong views on the subject you’re discussing, and those views are directly opposed to your own. At best, the person will be a little distracted, as they attempt to figure out how your information fits in with what they already know and believe. It’s like hearing two clashing sets of notes at the same time. And at worst, your message won’t get through at all. Your listener will just keep hearing their own song, with yours as a mildly irritating hum in the background.
Think about what it’s like when someone expresses an opinion you strongly disagree with, and then continues talking. Does your mind remain fully open and available to hear what comes next? If so, that’s admirable — and highly unusual. For most of us, there’s a tendency to get absorbed in our own thoughts and feelings about the subject. The tune that plays for us may include thoughts like “I’ve heard all this before,” “Yes, but there’s an obvious counterargument,” or “That’s just not true.” If the issue stirs very strong emotions in us, our inner dialogue might sound more like, “How could you believe such a thing?!” “That’s so offensive!” or “I can’t believe I’m listening to this jerk!”
Has this happened to you before? Or, maybe you’ve been on the other end — you lay out what you think is a brilliant argument and then get met by an objection that seems totally out of place or beside the point. Think back to any time you’ve wanted to ask, “Were you even listening to a word I said?” In truth, the person probably wasn’t. And can we really blame them? It’s very challenging for any of us to take in new information that doesn’t fit in easily with what we already believe.
So what’s the alternative? Before you play too much of your own tune, get the other person’s tune to quiet down.
Again, consider the types of thoughts that go through our heads when we’re listening to a point of view we disagree with. Many of these are arguments we want to interject into the conversation. We’re essentially rehearsing them so that as soon as the other person stops talking, we can put in our own ideas. When you’re the one trying to get your message across, the challenge is to minimize this phenomenon in your listener. One effective way to do that is to show that you understand their point of view. That way, there’s no need for them to keep explaining it to you (and to keep rehearsing it in their mind as you’re talking).
Now, for the bad news — the only way to demonstrate that you understand someone else’s perspective is to actually understand that person’s perspective. This takes a bit of work. (Simply saying “I know where you’re coming from” or “I see your point” doesn’t cut it.) To find out what’s going on in your listener’s head, you need to ask them about it. Use broad (open-ended) questions to learn what facts and personal experiences have shaped their own opinion. Then, paraphrase to show that you’ve heard what they said. You don’t need to repeat the exact phrasing they used, and you don’t need to capture every single idea; just reflect back enough to show that you got it. The one essential component is genuine interest. If you ask good questions but have no real interest in the answers you get, you’re likely to come across as insincere or manipulative.
This approach — starting off with questions and paraphrases — also gives you another great advantage. Not only can it help put a listener in a more open frame of mind; it can help you shape a more effective message. Knowing more about the data the other person already has, and where their primary concerns and interests lie, can only be helpful to you. Instead of emphasizing the aspects of your data that are most compelling to you, you can focus on those that are most compatible with the way your listener tends to think and the foundation of knowledge and beliefs they already have. (For instance, are they looking at the question at hand as a moral issue or a practical one? Are they more easily persuaded by personal anecdotes or by research studies? What aspects of the problem have they examined thoroughly, and which ones haven’t they considered?) To return once more to the tune metaphor, you can refine the combination of notes you play so it’s more in harmony with the tune that is already playing.
Of course, communicating in this way is no guarantee that the person you’re talking with will wind up agreeing with you. However, it is likely to help both them and you to shift from a competitive mindset to one that is much more focused on problem-solving. If you do disagree, you can at least get a better sense of how and why you have reached differing conclusions. In the process, you will each learn something from each other — and you may be surprised by the similarities and shared values you manage to discover.
What’s the solution?
Here’s one simple answer: make your tune audible. In SAVI terms, this means a switch from orienting (trying to influence the direction of conversation with opinions) to sharing concrete data (giving facts about the world or facts about you, which may include your feelings). Unlike an opinion, a fact is either true or false. Compare “Dante is a much better restaurant than Sorellina” (opinion) to “Dante received a higher Zagat rating than Sorellina” (fact), “I have never been disappointed with a meal at Dante” (personal fact), or “I didn’t feel comfortable at Sorellina, and got really irritated at waiting 45 minutes for a table after we had made a reservation” (feeling).
This is definitely a step in the right direction, and in some cases giving more data may be all you need to do to make your arguments more persuasive. However, there is one complication: even when your tune is audible, that doesn’t mean the other person is listening.
The simple give-more-data strategy can work well when your listener is open and available to hear what you’re saying. In a sense, their mind is quiet and just waiting to be filled by your tune. But when there’s already another, different song playing in the person’s head, that’s a whole other story.
Say you’re sharing your facts with someone who has very strong views on the subject you’re discussing, and those views are directly opposed to your own. At best, the person will be a little distracted, as they attempt to figure out how your information fits in with what they already know and believe. It’s like hearing two clashing sets of notes at the same time. And at worst, your message won’t get through at all. Your listener will just keep hearing their own song, with yours as a mildly irritating hum in the background.
Think about what it’s like when someone expresses an opinion you strongly disagree with, and then continues talking. Does your mind remain fully open and available to hear what comes next? If so, that’s admirable — and highly unusual. For most of us, there’s a tendency to get absorbed in our own thoughts and feelings about the subject. The tune that plays for us may include thoughts like “I’ve heard all this before,” “Yes, but there’s an obvious counterargument,” or “That’s just not true.” If the issue stirs very strong emotions in us, our inner dialogue might sound more like, “How could you believe such a thing?!” “That’s so offensive!” or “I can’t believe I’m listening to this jerk!”
Has this happened to you before? Or, maybe you’ve been on the other end — you lay out what you think is a brilliant argument and then get met by an objection that seems totally out of place or beside the point. Think back to any time you’ve wanted to ask, “Were you even listening to a word I said?” In truth, the person probably wasn’t. And can we really blame them? It’s very challenging for any of us to take in new information that doesn’t fit in easily with what we already believe.
So what’s the alternative? Before you play too much of your own tune, get the other person’s tune to quiet down.
Again, consider the types of thoughts that go through our heads when we’re listening to a point of view we disagree with. Many of these are arguments we want to interject into the conversation. We’re essentially rehearsing them so that as soon as the other person stops talking, we can put in our own ideas. When you’re the one trying to get your message across, the challenge is to minimize this phenomenon in your listener. One effective way to do that is to show that you understand their point of view. That way, there’s no need for them to keep explaining it to you (and to keep rehearsing it in their mind as you’re talking).
Now, for the bad news — the only way to demonstrate that you understand someone else’s perspective is to actually understand that person’s perspective. This takes a bit of work. (Simply saying “I know where you’re coming from” or “I see your point” doesn’t cut it.) To find out what’s going on in your listener’s head, you need to ask them about it. Use broad (open-ended) questions to learn what facts and personal experiences have shaped their own opinion. Then, paraphrase to show that you’ve heard what they said. You don’t need to repeat the exact phrasing they used, and you don’t need to capture every single idea; just reflect back enough to show that you got it. The one essential component is genuine interest. If you ask good questions but have no real interest in the answers you get, you’re likely to come across as insincere or manipulative.
This approach — starting off with questions and paraphrases — also gives you another great advantage. Not only can it help put a listener in a more open frame of mind; it can help you shape a more effective message. Knowing more about the data the other person already has, and where their primary concerns and interests lie, can only be helpful to you. Instead of emphasizing the aspects of your data that are most compelling to you, you can focus on those that are most compatible with the way your listener tends to think and the foundation of knowledge and beliefs they already have. (For instance, are they looking at the question at hand as a moral issue or a practical one? Are they more easily persuaded by personal anecdotes or by research studies? What aspects of the problem have they examined thoroughly, and which ones haven’t they considered?) To return once more to the tune metaphor, you can refine the combination of notes you play so it’s more in harmony with the tune that is already playing.
Of course, communicating in this way is no guarantee that the person you’re talking with will wind up agreeing with you. However, it is likely to help both them and you to shift from a competitive mindset to one that is much more focused on problem-solving. If you do disagree, you can at least get a better sense of how and why you have reached differing conclusions. In the process, you will each learn something from each other — and you may be surprised by the similarities and shared values you manage to discover.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The Curse of Knowledge
Why the most common mode of persuasion is often doomed to fail
“SAVI is such a useful tool!”
“You have to try these brownies — they’re delicious.”
“Those pants look kind of silly with those loafers.”
“Terminator 2 is a great date movie.”
Many readers who are familiar with SAVI will easily recognize this type of communication: the opinion. You may even recall that it is the single most widely used communication behavior. Opinions are everywhere. We all have them — about ourselves, people we know, politics, sports, religion, popular culture, and any other topic you can think of. All beliefs, speculations, evaluations, interpretations, and judgments are opinions.
A defining feature of an opinion is that it is never true or false. No amount of research can ever prove or disprove the idea that your new shirt looks lovely on you, that Ulysses is a brilliant novel, or that your boss is a boring old drone; these will forever be matters of individual judgment. However, whenever we believe very firmly in a particular opinion, it’s very easy to see it as true — as a fact.
Now, why do we give so many opinions? And why do they fail so miserably in persuading other people to agree with us? One of the most compelling — and certainly the most dramatic-sounding — answers we’ve found is something called The Curse of Knowledge. This concept comes from the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath (which we highly recommend).
They give a beautiful illustration of this phenomenon, with a variation of a “name that tune” sort of challenge. In a 1990 study at Stanford, subjects were split up into pairs consisting of one “tapper” and one “listener.” The tapper’s job was to pick one of 25 well-known songs (such as “Happy Birthday to You” or “The Star Spangled Banner”) and tap out the rhythm of that song for the listener; the listener’s job was to guess what song was being tapped out.
As it turns out, the listener’s job is extremely difficult. Out of 120 songs that got tapped out, listeners guessed only 3 correctly (a success rate of 2.5 percent). What was fascinating, though, was that to the tappers, the task didn’t seem nearly so tough. Before the listeners guessed the song, the tappers were asked how likely it was that the guess would be correct. Their response: 50%. So there’s an enormous discrepancy here: The tappers expected their messages to come through 50% of the time, but they actually got through less than 3% of the time.
What accounts for that difference? Try tapping out a song for yourself, and you can easily see (or, rather, hear) what happened. As you tap out the song, you’ll be aware not only of the song’s rhythm (which you’re indicating through tapping), but also of the tune (which is playing only in your head). In fact, it’s impossible to do this task without hearing the tune. This is what happened to the tappers in the study — and because they could hear the tune, it seemed pretty obvious how all the taps went together. They couldn’t imagine what it was like for the listeners, who were just hearing strings of disconnected taps.
As Chip and Dan Heath explain, “This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.” In their book, they relate this problem to all sorts of difficulties in getting a message across. For instance, when a CEO talks to employees about abstract concepts such as “unlocking shareholder value,” “there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can't hear.”
The same principle can help explain why an opinion that seems obviously true and convincing to one person can be entirely unpersuasive to others. Every opinion is the tip of a much larger intellectual and emotional iceberg. When we state only opinions, we’re expressing the bare-bones conclusions we’ve come to (like isolated taps), without all the depth of knowledge and experiences that led us to those conclusions (the tunes in our head).
For instance, for a person with a strong belief that U.S. healthcare should include a public insurance option, the tune might include any number of personal experiences with insurance and health services, stories from friends and acquaintances, and knowledge gained from articles, television programs, and other media reports on the subject. When this person tells his opinion to others, there’s no guarantee that his listeners are hearing a similar tune. In fact, what often happens is that different people hear conflicting tunes based on completely divergent experiences. (For instance, a personal history and knowledge base that point to the dangers of a public insurance option.) So it should come as no surprise that much of the time, we all end up coming to different conclusions and getting into arguments over our competing opinions.
What’s the solution? Stay tuned for the next post!
(In the meantime, you can read excerpts from Made to Stick at http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/. Search for “tappers” to find the study we’ve been discussing here.)
“SAVI is such a useful tool!”
“You have to try these brownies — they’re delicious.”
“Those pants look kind of silly with those loafers.”
“Terminator 2 is a great date movie.”
Many readers who are familiar with SAVI will easily recognize this type of communication: the opinion. You may even recall that it is the single most widely used communication behavior. Opinions are everywhere. We all have them — about ourselves, people we know, politics, sports, religion, popular culture, and any other topic you can think of. All beliefs, speculations, evaluations, interpretations, and judgments are opinions.
A defining feature of an opinion is that it is never true or false. No amount of research can ever prove or disprove the idea that your new shirt looks lovely on you, that Ulysses is a brilliant novel, or that your boss is a boring old drone; these will forever be matters of individual judgment. However, whenever we believe very firmly in a particular opinion, it’s very easy to see it as true — as a fact.
Now, why do we give so many opinions? And why do they fail so miserably in persuading other people to agree with us? One of the most compelling — and certainly the most dramatic-sounding — answers we’ve found is something called The Curse of Knowledge. This concept comes from the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath (which we highly recommend).
They give a beautiful illustration of this phenomenon, with a variation of a “name that tune” sort of challenge. In a 1990 study at Stanford, subjects were split up into pairs consisting of one “tapper” and one “listener.” The tapper’s job was to pick one of 25 well-known songs (such as “Happy Birthday to You” or “The Star Spangled Banner”) and tap out the rhythm of that song for the listener; the listener’s job was to guess what song was being tapped out.
As it turns out, the listener’s job is extremely difficult. Out of 120 songs that got tapped out, listeners guessed only 3 correctly (a success rate of 2.5 percent). What was fascinating, though, was that to the tappers, the task didn’t seem nearly so tough. Before the listeners guessed the song, the tappers were asked how likely it was that the guess would be correct. Their response: 50%. So there’s an enormous discrepancy here: The tappers expected their messages to come through 50% of the time, but they actually got through less than 3% of the time.
What accounts for that difference? Try tapping out a song for yourself, and you can easily see (or, rather, hear) what happened. As you tap out the song, you’ll be aware not only of the song’s rhythm (which you’re indicating through tapping), but also of the tune (which is playing only in your head). In fact, it’s impossible to do this task without hearing the tune. This is what happened to the tappers in the study — and because they could hear the tune, it seemed pretty obvious how all the taps went together. They couldn’t imagine what it was like for the listeners, who were just hearing strings of disconnected taps.
As Chip and Dan Heath explain, “This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.” In their book, they relate this problem to all sorts of difficulties in getting a message across. For instance, when a CEO talks to employees about abstract concepts such as “unlocking shareholder value,” “there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can't hear.”
The same principle can help explain why an opinion that seems obviously true and convincing to one person can be entirely unpersuasive to others. Every opinion is the tip of a much larger intellectual and emotional iceberg. When we state only opinions, we’re expressing the bare-bones conclusions we’ve come to (like isolated taps), without all the depth of knowledge and experiences that led us to those conclusions (the tunes in our head).
For instance, for a person with a strong belief that U.S. healthcare should include a public insurance option, the tune might include any number of personal experiences with insurance and health services, stories from friends and acquaintances, and knowledge gained from articles, television programs, and other media reports on the subject. When this person tells his opinion to others, there’s no guarantee that his listeners are hearing a similar tune. In fact, what often happens is that different people hear conflicting tunes based on completely divergent experiences. (For instance, a personal history and knowledge base that point to the dangers of a public insurance option.) So it should come as no surprise that much of the time, we all end up coming to different conclusions and getting into arguments over our competing opinions.
What’s the solution? Stay tuned for the next post!
(In the meantime, you can read excerpts from Made to Stick at http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/. Search for “tappers” to find the study we’ve been discussing here.)
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Neuroscience of Conversational Flexibility
Studies of brain functioning provide insight into what drives our habitual communication patterns and what it takes to overcome them
In the past several posts, we’ve been talking about the rigid patterns that develop in our communication and what we recommend as an antidote — conversational flexibility. Developing conversational flexibility involves:
1) being aware of what it is we’re doing that isn’t working, and
2) being able to stop ourselves from doing it, so that we can then
3) have a free choice to do something new instead of automatically reacting in our habitual way.
We explained that this process takes time, practice, and quite a bit of patience. In this post we’ll tell you a little more about why that is — why it is so difficult to make lasting changes in our behavior. The information below draws from the work of Janet Crawford, an executive coach who specializes in applying neuroscience research to leadership development and organizational change. See the end of this post for a link to a chapter from Crawford’s upcoming book, which addresses these issues in greater detail.
The first point to understand: Conscious intentions are overrated.
It’s not that conscious intentions aren’t important. In fact, they’re absolutely crucial in helping us to make any sort of lasting change. However, they don’t play as large or as powerful a role in driving our behavior as we tend to assume they do.
Only a very tiny fraction of the cognitive processing in our brains is conscious (or explicit). The vast majority is unconscious, or implicit. Now, this is not a bad thing. If most of our activities were not automatic and habitual, we’d all be in big trouble! It would take you so much time and energy just to attend to your basic needs (like getting yourself cleaned, clothed, and fed) that you’d never make it out the door in the morning. You’d never get around to doing more interesting things like reading this blog and going to work each day.
However, there is a major downside to the power and pervasiveness of implicit processes — explicit knowledge or motivation isn’t enough to change them. To change an unconscious habit, we need to play by the rules of unconscious habits. This brings us to our next point:
Unconscious habits are stubbornly persistent.
There’s a major conflict between the part of your brain that understands why change is good and the part of the brain where that change actually needs to happen. That first part of your brain is the prefrontal cortex — the seat of your empathy, emotional resiliency, attuned communication, self-control, moral reasoning, and other aspects of emotional intelligence and complex planning and decision making. When you start trying to improve the way you communicate, it’s your prefrontal cortex that says, “It’s really not helpful for me to Yes-but my colleagues so much. I want to stop doing that.”
The problem is, your Yes-butting isn’t driven by your prefrontal cortex. It’s an automatic habit driven by older structures in your brain — particularly the basal ganglia. We can sum up the general attitude of the basal ganglia in two simple principles: 1) stability is good, and 2) change is scary. This part of the brain likes things just fine the way they are, thank you very much. From its perspective, all those implicit patterns that have been shaping your behavior for years are working just fine. The simple proof of that is that you’re still alive; the sum total of all the different patterns you’ve accumulated has been sufficient to help you survive until now. Changing anything that has worked so well for so long is a risky prospect. So when the prefrontal cortex says, “I want to stop Yes-butting” the basal ganglia say something like, “I know you do, but that’s just too bad.”
Now, if you wanted to discourage someone from changing their behavior, how would you do it? The brain has a brilliant strategy for this — making change feel bad. We’re wired in such a way that when we try to change a habitual pattern, it causes anxiety. To enable a new pattern to develop, the prefrontal cortex needs to be strong enough to calm this anxiety. And it needs to do that again and again and again, so the new pattern occurs frequently enough to replace the old one.
Keeping all this in mind, we can understand the steps required for change in even more detail than what we described earlier. As Janet Crawford explains, lasting change requires people to:
1) recognize the old unwanted pattern
2) have a commitment to change the pattern
3) understand that they’ll feel uncomfortable doing it
4) have a new choice that’s specific enough that they can take action on it in about .2 seconds (otherwise the implicit processing takes over)
5) have a healthy prefrontal cortex that can do that (which is influenced by early nurturing and by lifestyle factors, including sleep, exercise, diet, and others)
6) do this enough times that they consolidate the new pattern
While this may sound daunting, we hope you’ll take a positive message away as well. Often, Crawford points out, “people get frustrated because they know they should change and they haven’t.” It’s easy to take that personally and feel bad about it. We’ve seen this plenty of times in the people we teach. But once we understand the underlying neurological mechanisms of change, it’s easier to see our difficulties for what they really are — “a natural process, not a moral failing.”
We also want to emphasize the benefits of having practical, concrete tools to help in this process. SAVI is particularly useful for steps 1, 4, and 6: helping people to understand and recognize patterns; giving specific strategies; and offering opportunities for the type of practice necessary to consolidate new, more effective ways of communicating.
As time goes on, we expect to return periodically to the topic of neuroscience and how it relates to communication. In the meantime, we recommend Janet Crawford’s book chapter “Brain-Friendly Organization,” available here: http://www.brainfriendlyleader.com/JC/Resources.html. Enjoy!
In the past several posts, we’ve been talking about the rigid patterns that develop in our communication and what we recommend as an antidote — conversational flexibility. Developing conversational flexibility involves:
1) being aware of what it is we’re doing that isn’t working, and
2) being able to stop ourselves from doing it, so that we can then
3) have a free choice to do something new instead of automatically reacting in our habitual way.
We explained that this process takes time, practice, and quite a bit of patience. In this post we’ll tell you a little more about why that is — why it is so difficult to make lasting changes in our behavior. The information below draws from the work of Janet Crawford, an executive coach who specializes in applying neuroscience research to leadership development and organizational change. See the end of this post for a link to a chapter from Crawford’s upcoming book, which addresses these issues in greater detail.
The first point to understand: Conscious intentions are overrated.
It’s not that conscious intentions aren’t important. In fact, they’re absolutely crucial in helping us to make any sort of lasting change. However, they don’t play as large or as powerful a role in driving our behavior as we tend to assume they do.
Only a very tiny fraction of the cognitive processing in our brains is conscious (or explicit). The vast majority is unconscious, or implicit. Now, this is not a bad thing. If most of our activities were not automatic and habitual, we’d all be in big trouble! It would take you so much time and energy just to attend to your basic needs (like getting yourself cleaned, clothed, and fed) that you’d never make it out the door in the morning. You’d never get around to doing more interesting things like reading this blog and going to work each day.
However, there is a major downside to the power and pervasiveness of implicit processes — explicit knowledge or motivation isn’t enough to change them. To change an unconscious habit, we need to play by the rules of unconscious habits. This brings us to our next point:
Unconscious habits are stubbornly persistent.
There’s a major conflict between the part of your brain that understands why change is good and the part of the brain where that change actually needs to happen. That first part of your brain is the prefrontal cortex — the seat of your empathy, emotional resiliency, attuned communication, self-control, moral reasoning, and other aspects of emotional intelligence and complex planning and decision making. When you start trying to improve the way you communicate, it’s your prefrontal cortex that says, “It’s really not helpful for me to Yes-but my colleagues so much. I want to stop doing that.”
The problem is, your Yes-butting isn’t driven by your prefrontal cortex. It’s an automatic habit driven by older structures in your brain — particularly the basal ganglia. We can sum up the general attitude of the basal ganglia in two simple principles: 1) stability is good, and 2) change is scary. This part of the brain likes things just fine the way they are, thank you very much. From its perspective, all those implicit patterns that have been shaping your behavior for years are working just fine. The simple proof of that is that you’re still alive; the sum total of all the different patterns you’ve accumulated has been sufficient to help you survive until now. Changing anything that has worked so well for so long is a risky prospect. So when the prefrontal cortex says, “I want to stop Yes-butting” the basal ganglia say something like, “I know you do, but that’s just too bad.”
Now, if you wanted to discourage someone from changing their behavior, how would you do it? The brain has a brilliant strategy for this — making change feel bad. We’re wired in such a way that when we try to change a habitual pattern, it causes anxiety. To enable a new pattern to develop, the prefrontal cortex needs to be strong enough to calm this anxiety. And it needs to do that again and again and again, so the new pattern occurs frequently enough to replace the old one.
Keeping all this in mind, we can understand the steps required for change in even more detail than what we described earlier. As Janet Crawford explains, lasting change requires people to:
1) recognize the old unwanted pattern
2) have a commitment to change the pattern
3) understand that they’ll feel uncomfortable doing it
4) have a new choice that’s specific enough that they can take action on it in about .2 seconds (otherwise the implicit processing takes over)
5) have a healthy prefrontal cortex that can do that (which is influenced by early nurturing and by lifestyle factors, including sleep, exercise, diet, and others)
6) do this enough times that they consolidate the new pattern
While this may sound daunting, we hope you’ll take a positive message away as well. Often, Crawford points out, “people get frustrated because they know they should change and they haven’t.” It’s easy to take that personally and feel bad about it. We’ve seen this plenty of times in the people we teach. But once we understand the underlying neurological mechanisms of change, it’s easier to see our difficulties for what they really are — “a natural process, not a moral failing.”
We also want to emphasize the benefits of having practical, concrete tools to help in this process. SAVI is particularly useful for steps 1, 4, and 6: helping people to understand and recognize patterns; giving specific strategies; and offering opportunities for the type of practice necessary to consolidate new, more effective ways of communicating.
As time goes on, we expect to return periodically to the topic of neuroscience and how it relates to communication. In the meantime, we recommend Janet Crawford’s book chapter “Brain-Friendly Organization,” available here: http://www.brainfriendlyleader.com/JC/Resources.html. Enjoy!
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
A Timely Article on Complaining
Thanks to Michael Rutter for pointing out a recent article on the hazards of complaining at work, which provides a nice follow-up to our last post:
Soft Skills at Work: Complaining can affect productivity, morale
It gives some good, concrete examples of just how deadly this type of communication can be for morale and productivity — as well as for an individual’s chances of professional advancement.
With an understanding of SAVI, we can make a couple of additional observations.
First: The word “complaint” can mean two completely different things:
Second: Complaints carry very important information.
If complaining is so damaging, the obvious solution is to simply stop doing it — to just (putting it bluntly) “suck it up and deal” with the circumstances you’re facing. While this may help you avoid some of the negative side effects of complaining, it’s only a partial solution. When we complain, there’s a reason for it. Merely stifling our complaints is not only difficult (just try going a whole day, or a whole week without complaining; for many of us this is a superhuman task!); it also fails to address the root cause.
What is the root cause of a complaint? Hidden beneath every complaint is a want. We complain because there is something we want that we aren’t getting, or something we don’t want that we feel stuck with. Often we don’t even know what it is that we want. In many circumstances, we may believe that we can’t get what we want — perhaps because we think that we don’t deserve it, that our workplace is unjust, or that other people are unfair. As a result we don’t take the step to clearly identify our wants, much less actively pursue them.
The solution? The most effective method we’ve found is to shift from passive complaining to more active, problem-solving forms of communication. Since the core issue is an underlying want, you can get to the heart of the matter by asking yourself two simple questions: 1) What do you really want? and 2) What can you do to help make that happen? Ask these questions at least three times, going a little bit deeper each time. Take as long as you need to seriously consider the answers.
The repetition is important; some coaches have their clients repeat the questions dozens of times. Typically the original complaint is just the tip of the iceberg, with deeper needs and concerns lying further under the surface. Consider an example. Say your colleague is complaining about some difficulties she’s having with a particular outdated computer program. Now the questions:
And we could keep on going. Just notice how a seemingly superficial gripe can be tied in to much deeper issues. Also notice the way in which asking questions can help a person who has been stuck in complaining to start moving toward active change.
Now a couple of questions for you: What aspects of your work or life do you tend to complain about the most? Would you consider asking these simple questions instead? You might be surprised by what you’ll discover!
Soft Skills at Work: Complaining can affect productivity, morale
It gives some good, concrete examples of just how deadly this type of communication can be for morale and productivity — as well as for an individual’s chances of professional advancement.
With an understanding of SAVI, we can make a couple of additional observations.
First: The word “complaint” can mean two completely different things:
- Discussing something you don’t like in a particular way — groaning, griping, or grumbling about it. This is the main type of complaining addressed in the “soft skills” article, and also the type of complaining we’re talking about in SAVI. Here’s the official SAVI definition: “Frustrated or whining narratives implying that circumstances or others are unfair or too much, not directly blaming the person being spoken to. Resentful description of the situation one is in.”
Voice tone makes all the difference. It almost doesn’t matter what words you say; if you’re saying them in a whiny tone of voice, they almost certainly qualify as a SAVI complaint. The whine communicates a sense of helplessness and passivity, presenting the situation as a burden to be borne rather than a problem to be solved.
- Simply drawing attention to something that is wrong or not working, without a strong emotional charge. In common usage, the term “customer complaint” often has this second meaning. Departments charged with handling customer complaints don’t focus only on customers who whine. This type of “complaint” is an entirely different form of communication, and its effect on a conversation will tend to be quite different from that of a SAVI complaint.
As the article states, “If there is a problem that needs to be addressed, bringing it to the attention of employers and suggesting possible remedies can be helpful. Using a professional tone while describing the difficulty is essential…” We agree. And when you do that, you’re not really complaining at all. Instead of whining about how bad things are, you’re contributing to the type of problem-solving that can help make things better.
Second: Complaints carry very important information.
If complaining is so damaging, the obvious solution is to simply stop doing it — to just (putting it bluntly) “suck it up and deal” with the circumstances you’re facing. While this may help you avoid some of the negative side effects of complaining, it’s only a partial solution. When we complain, there’s a reason for it. Merely stifling our complaints is not only difficult (just try going a whole day, or a whole week without complaining; for many of us this is a superhuman task!); it also fails to address the root cause.
What is the root cause of a complaint? Hidden beneath every complaint is a want. We complain because there is something we want that we aren’t getting, or something we don’t want that we feel stuck with. Often we don’t even know what it is that we want. In many circumstances, we may believe that we can’t get what we want — perhaps because we think that we don’t deserve it, that our workplace is unjust, or that other people are unfair. As a result we don’t take the step to clearly identify our wants, much less actively pursue them.
The solution? The most effective method we’ve found is to shift from passive complaining to more active, problem-solving forms of communication. Since the core issue is an underlying want, you can get to the heart of the matter by asking yourself two simple questions: 1) What do you really want? and 2) What can you do to help make that happen? Ask these questions at least three times, going a little bit deeper each time. Take as long as you need to seriously consider the answers.
The repetition is important; some coaches have their clients repeat the questions dozens of times. Typically the original complaint is just the tip of the iceberg, with deeper needs and concerns lying further under the surface. Consider an example. Say your colleague is complaining about some difficulties she’s having with a particular outdated computer program. Now the questions:
- What does she want? Different, more updated software.
What would help make that happen? Researching other software options and presenting a proposal to her boss for ordering something better.
- What does she really want? To have all the technology she uses for work be reliable, so she can do her job efficiently.
What would help make that happen? Setting a time to periodically review how well all the technology is working, and whether upgrades make sense.
- Underneath that, what does she want? The freedom to order new technology when she needs it.
What would help make that happen? Having a discussion with her boss about gaining that ability.
- And underneath that, what does she want? Greater autonomy and responsibility in her job.
What would help make that happen? Making a list of additional responsibilities she would like to take on, and discussing it at her annual performance review.
- Is there anything even deeper that she wants? Knowledge that she is trusted and respected as a competent, reliable professional.
What would help make that happen? Scheduling regular meetings with her boss outside the annual review to evaluate her performance and consider opportunities for future growth.
Now a couple of questions for you: What aspects of your work or life do you tend to complain about the most? Would you consider asking these simple questions instead? You might be surprised by what you’ll discover!
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
People and Patterns
Why do you do that? Or: Why does that happen?
In the last post, we talked about the fact that in any long-term relationship (from marriages to business partnerships), there’s a tendency for rigid communication patterns to form. All too often these patterns are unproductive; there are cycles of attacking and defending, complaining and proposing, yes-butting and counter-yes-butting, and so on. We know that this happens, but it may not be obvious why it tends to happen — so we want to take a moment here to look at that question.
Consider a specific example. Imagine that there’s a friend you’ve known for some time. Let’s call her Pat. You like Pat, but it’s often frustrating to spend time with her because inevitably, no matter how the conversation starts out, she winds up complaining. Say you ask her about her job; before long you’ll hear about how her colleagues aren’t pulling their weight, and she never gets the support she needs. Ask her about her husband, and she’ll complain about all the annoying things he’s done in the past two weeks. And the complaints never seem to end. As the conversation goes on, it feels like you’re getting pulled deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit of “alas” and “if only” and “woe is me.” You try to stay positive and give Pat useful advice on her situation, but nothing seems to help. When you finally say goodbye to her, you find yourself either feeling down or feeling exasperated, or a little of both.
Have you ever known someone like Pat? Many of you probably have. In fact, a lot of us, at some point in our lives, in one relationship or another, have been Pat.
Now, from a SAVI point of view, we can understand what’s happening here as a recurring complaint-proposal cycle. For instance:
“Everything always falls on me to do.” (complaint)
“Why don’t you talk to your boss and try to get some help?” (proposal)
“He never backs me up. I’m all on my own.” (complaint)
“How about just cutting back and doing less?” (proposal)
“Oh, then the job doesn’t get done adequately, and that’s even worse.” (complaint)
and so on, and on and on and on and on
Why does this keep happening? There are many possible answers. Part of the reason for this is that there are many possible questions — many different ways to look at the problem. To a large extent, the type of question we ask will determine the type of answer we come up with. Here we’ll look at just two sorts of questions: people questions and pattern questions.
1. People questions ask about what motivates a particular individual’s behavior. Why does Pat keep complaining? Why do you feel compelled to give proposals? Why doesn’t Pat take your suggestions?
In answering these sorts of questions, we can explain the pattern in terms of people’s personalities or emotional states: Pat complains because she is pessimistic or depressed, or tends to take the role of victim. You give proposals because you have a problem-solving mentality, or because you tend to take the role of helper. We could also refer to motivations or intentions, either conscious or unconscious: Pat craves attention or sympathy, or wants to prove to you how difficult her life is. In trying to solve her problems, maybe your real motivation is to make her stop complaining or make yourself feel better.
These are questions that you (or Pat) might examine in individual psychotherapy. You might find the answers helpful in understanding how you react in a variety of different situations in your lives. With regard to your rigid communication pattern with Pat, you can see this as a reflection of your consistent, unchanging psychological and emotional characteristics.
2. Pattern questions take a different approach, leaving individual differences and personality traits out of the equation. We might ask, Why is the complaint-proposal pattern so enduring? Why are all the complaints getting followed by proposals, and all the proposals getting followed by complaints?
In answering these questions, we don’t need to know anything about Pat, or about you. We can just look at the behaviors themselves. Complaints give two different type of information at the same time:
a) information about the situation, which the speaker wishes would change (e.g., Pat’s situation at work), and
b) information about the speaker’s emotional/psychological state, which is passive or helpless (e.g., Pat’s feeling helpless to change her situation)
Why do proposals tend to follow complaints? They’re a natural response to hearing that first type of information: a situation that somebody wants to change. Why do those proposals tend to invite more complaining? Because they don’t take into account the second, more emotional piece of information. In fact, by offering an outside solution to a person’s problem, proposals can reinforce that person’s sense of helplessness — which then fuels more complaints.
A proposal is a perfect answer to the question, “What do you think I can do to change this situation?” What we need to remember is that when a person is complaining, they’re not asking that question. There’s a world of difference between the complaint, “This situation is miserable” and the question, “What can I do to change it?” As an answer to a request for help, a proposal may often be effective. As a response to a complaint, the same proposal is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
These pattern-based answers can help you to understand any complaint-proposal cycle — whether you’re the one complaining, the one proposing, or just an observer. You can view the situation with Pat as just one instance of this all-too-common, self-perpetuating pattern of communication.
You may have guessed by now that SAVI tends to give explanations based on patterns, rather than people. This doesn’t mean that pattern-based explanations are necessarily better. They’re just different — serving a different purpose, answering different questions, and potentially offering different sorts of solutions.
You might ask yourself, in which situations do you find it useful to focus on the people? When might it be useful to focus on patterns instead?
(By the way: For those of you who would like to learn a better way of responding to complaints, instead of giving proposals, stay tuned!)
In the last post, we talked about the fact that in any long-term relationship (from marriages to business partnerships), there’s a tendency for rigid communication patterns to form. All too often these patterns are unproductive; there are cycles of attacking and defending, complaining and proposing, yes-butting and counter-yes-butting, and so on. We know that this happens, but it may not be obvious why it tends to happen — so we want to take a moment here to look at that question.
Consider a specific example. Imagine that there’s a friend you’ve known for some time. Let’s call her Pat. You like Pat, but it’s often frustrating to spend time with her because inevitably, no matter how the conversation starts out, she winds up complaining. Say you ask her about her job; before long you’ll hear about how her colleagues aren’t pulling their weight, and she never gets the support she needs. Ask her about her husband, and she’ll complain about all the annoying things he’s done in the past two weeks. And the complaints never seem to end. As the conversation goes on, it feels like you’re getting pulled deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit of “alas” and “if only” and “woe is me.” You try to stay positive and give Pat useful advice on her situation, but nothing seems to help. When you finally say goodbye to her, you find yourself either feeling down or feeling exasperated, or a little of both.
Have you ever known someone like Pat? Many of you probably have. In fact, a lot of us, at some point in our lives, in one relationship or another, have been Pat.
Now, from a SAVI point of view, we can understand what’s happening here as a recurring complaint-proposal cycle. For instance:
“Everything always falls on me to do.” (complaint)
“Why don’t you talk to your boss and try to get some help?” (proposal)
“He never backs me up. I’m all on my own.” (complaint)
“How about just cutting back and doing less?” (proposal)
“Oh, then the job doesn’t get done adequately, and that’s even worse.” (complaint)
and so on, and on and on and on and on
Why does this keep happening? There are many possible answers. Part of the reason for this is that there are many possible questions — many different ways to look at the problem. To a large extent, the type of question we ask will determine the type of answer we come up with. Here we’ll look at just two sorts of questions: people questions and pattern questions.
1. People questions ask about what motivates a particular individual’s behavior. Why does Pat keep complaining? Why do you feel compelled to give proposals? Why doesn’t Pat take your suggestions?
In answering these sorts of questions, we can explain the pattern in terms of people’s personalities or emotional states: Pat complains because she is pessimistic or depressed, or tends to take the role of victim. You give proposals because you have a problem-solving mentality, or because you tend to take the role of helper. We could also refer to motivations or intentions, either conscious or unconscious: Pat craves attention or sympathy, or wants to prove to you how difficult her life is. In trying to solve her problems, maybe your real motivation is to make her stop complaining or make yourself feel better.
These are questions that you (or Pat) might examine in individual psychotherapy. You might find the answers helpful in understanding how you react in a variety of different situations in your lives. With regard to your rigid communication pattern with Pat, you can see this as a reflection of your consistent, unchanging psychological and emotional characteristics.
2. Pattern questions take a different approach, leaving individual differences and personality traits out of the equation. We might ask, Why is the complaint-proposal pattern so enduring? Why are all the complaints getting followed by proposals, and all the proposals getting followed by complaints?
In answering these questions, we don’t need to know anything about Pat, or about you. We can just look at the behaviors themselves. Complaints give two different type of information at the same time:
a) information about the situation, which the speaker wishes would change (e.g., Pat’s situation at work), and
b) information about the speaker’s emotional/psychological state, which is passive or helpless (e.g., Pat’s feeling helpless to change her situation)
Why do proposals tend to follow complaints? They’re a natural response to hearing that first type of information: a situation that somebody wants to change. Why do those proposals tend to invite more complaining? Because they don’t take into account the second, more emotional piece of information. In fact, by offering an outside solution to a person’s problem, proposals can reinforce that person’s sense of helplessness — which then fuels more complaints.
A proposal is a perfect answer to the question, “What do you think I can do to change this situation?” What we need to remember is that when a person is complaining, they’re not asking that question. There’s a world of difference between the complaint, “This situation is miserable” and the question, “What can I do to change it?” As an answer to a request for help, a proposal may often be effective. As a response to a complaint, the same proposal is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
These pattern-based answers can help you to understand any complaint-proposal cycle — whether you’re the one complaining, the one proposing, or just an observer. You can view the situation with Pat as just one instance of this all-too-common, self-perpetuating pattern of communication.
You may have guessed by now that SAVI tends to give explanations based on patterns, rather than people. This doesn’t mean that pattern-based explanations are necessarily better. They’re just different — serving a different purpose, answering different questions, and potentially offering different sorts of solutions.
You might ask yourself, in which situations do you find it useful to focus on the people? When might it be useful to focus on patterns instead?
(By the way: For those of you who would like to learn a better way of responding to complaints, instead of giving proposals, stay tuned!)
Friday, September 25, 2009
Moving from Rigid Patterns to Conversational Flexibility
Reflections on the perils of long-term relationships and the value of doing something different
One of the participants in a training we gave on Wednesday made a funny comment that helped to illustrate a rather serious point about communication. Ben and I had been having a mock argument that went something like this (you’ll have to imagine our voice tones, which were hostile and defensive, respectively):
Amy: You made it so hot in here, Ben!
Ben: I was just feeling really cold.
Amy: You could have put on a sweater instead of freezing everyone else out!
Ben: I guess I just wasn’t thinking.
Amy: Well, you should have been thinking!
I pointed out that if the two of us had these sorts of conversations every day, people might start to draw conclusions about our personalities. I asked the group what assumptions they might make, expecting one of the typical answers we tend to get — that I was mean, domineering, or abusive, or that Ben was defensive or weak. The response we got instead: “I’d assume you two were married!”
Readers who are familiar with SAVI will recognize this comment as a perfect example of a Work joke. It got the whole group (including us) laughing. It also raised an interesting point. What made the joke so funny was that we all recognized a kernel of truth in it: married couples often do get caught up in just this sort of communication pattern. Whether it’s attack/self-defend or another ineffective pattern — like Yes-but/Yes-but or complaint-proposal — people in long-term relationships tend to have the same sorts of bad conversations over and over again, day after day. In the words of psychologist Gay Hendricks, “Most couples have not had hundreds of arguments; they’ve had the same argument hundreds of times.”
This phenomenon isn’t limited to romantic couples. You see the same thing with business partners, children and parents, long-time friends or colleagues, and even whole groups of people. Have you ever been in a meeting and had a dreadful sense of déjà vu? It can feel as though you’re having the same old frustrating debate or tedious discussion you’ve had countless times before. And in a very real sense, that’s true. Even if some aspects of the meeting change from time to time — you discuss different topics, and a few new people join the discussion, while others drop out — the group as a whole can stay rigidly locked in the same unproductive communication pattern for weeks, months, or years on end.
There are two interesting questions we could consider here. First, why and how do these persistent patterns develop? There are many possible answers. In a later post, we’ll propose one powerful, yet often counterintuitive explanation. For now, we’ll stick to the second, more practical question: How do you break out of these patterns?
The answer is simple: Do something different. An attack/self-defend cycle lasts only so long as someone keeps attacking and someone else keeps defending. Once either person changes his or her behavior, you automatically have a different conversation. Similarly, in a Yes-but/Yes-but debate, as soon as one person stops “butting,” there’s an opportunity for something different to happen.
Now, we’ve said our answer is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. On the contrary: breaking out of a long-standing, deeply ingrained pattern of communication is extraordinarily difficult. It takes time, practice, and a great deal of patience. Remember that improving your communication is more like learning a sport than like learning an idea. Say you’ve been playing tennis for 20 years, and one day you decide you want to improve your serve. You need to practice many, many times to override your natural tendency to do it the old way. Only gradually does it become automatic. Likewise, only gradually can you gain the capacity to refrain from responding to attacks with self-defense (or with Yes-buts, or counter-attacks, or whatever else you typically do that isn’t effective). You have a lifetime of experience doing it the old way, and overriding that habit takes time.
So, is it really worth all that time and effort, just to change one bad communication pattern? In our humble opinion: Without a doubt! Here are just two reasons why:
DO try this at home:
We encourage you to try this out. Think of something you do that isn’t very useful, something that tends to lead to an unproductive or frustrating conversation — it could be the way you respond to your colleague’s new ideas, your child’s requests for candy, or your partner’s complaints about money. If you can’t think of anything, ask the people around you. They’re likely to have plenty of good examples!
Then start to build your awareness. Notice when you tend to react in this unhelpful way. At first, you probably won’t realize what you’ve done until after the conversation is over. Gradually, you can start to pick up on it earlier and earlier, within the conversation — until the point where you can catch yourself right before you speak. That’s your opportunity: Go ahead and try doing something different. Ask a question. Give a paraphrase. Agree with some piece of what the other person said. If you tend to stay silent, say something — anything. If you tend to fill every quiet moment with chatter, try saying nothing for a few moments. And notice what happens.
Of course, we’re not suggesting that different is always better. Just because you usually respond to your husband’s complaints by making proposals, that doesn’t mean you’ll have better luck by telling him to shut up and stop whining. Even if you avoid inherently problematic types of communication like attacks and leading questions (in SAVI lingo, Red light behaviors), doing something different is no guarantee that the conversation will turn out just as you want it to — or even that it will turn out better than it would have if you reacted habitually. However, simply by enhancing your flexibility, you’re doing something very important. Remember that the first step in any change is to break free from your old habits. Once you’ve done that, you can keep experimenting until you discover a new communication pattern that works for you.
One of the participants in a training we gave on Wednesday made a funny comment that helped to illustrate a rather serious point about communication. Ben and I had been having a mock argument that went something like this (you’ll have to imagine our voice tones, which were hostile and defensive, respectively):
Amy: You made it so hot in here, Ben!
Ben: I was just feeling really cold.
Amy: You could have put on a sweater instead of freezing everyone else out!
Ben: I guess I just wasn’t thinking.
Amy: Well, you should have been thinking!
I pointed out that if the two of us had these sorts of conversations every day, people might start to draw conclusions about our personalities. I asked the group what assumptions they might make, expecting one of the typical answers we tend to get — that I was mean, domineering, or abusive, or that Ben was defensive or weak. The response we got instead: “I’d assume you two were married!”
Readers who are familiar with SAVI will recognize this comment as a perfect example of a Work joke. It got the whole group (including us) laughing. It also raised an interesting point. What made the joke so funny was that we all recognized a kernel of truth in it: married couples often do get caught up in just this sort of communication pattern. Whether it’s attack/self-defend or another ineffective pattern — like Yes-but/Yes-but or complaint-proposal — people in long-term relationships tend to have the same sorts of bad conversations over and over again, day after day. In the words of psychologist Gay Hendricks, “Most couples have not had hundreds of arguments; they’ve had the same argument hundreds of times.”
This phenomenon isn’t limited to romantic couples. You see the same thing with business partners, children and parents, long-time friends or colleagues, and even whole groups of people. Have you ever been in a meeting and had a dreadful sense of déjà vu? It can feel as though you’re having the same old frustrating debate or tedious discussion you’ve had countless times before. And in a very real sense, that’s true. Even if some aspects of the meeting change from time to time — you discuss different topics, and a few new people join the discussion, while others drop out — the group as a whole can stay rigidly locked in the same unproductive communication pattern for weeks, months, or years on end.
There are two interesting questions we could consider here. First, why and how do these persistent patterns develop? There are many possible answers. In a later post, we’ll propose one powerful, yet often counterintuitive explanation. For now, we’ll stick to the second, more practical question: How do you break out of these patterns?
The answer is simple: Do something different. An attack/self-defend cycle lasts only so long as someone keeps attacking and someone else keeps defending. Once either person changes his or her behavior, you automatically have a different conversation. Similarly, in a Yes-but/Yes-but debate, as soon as one person stops “butting,” there’s an opportunity for something different to happen.
Now, we’ve said our answer is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. On the contrary: breaking out of a long-standing, deeply ingrained pattern of communication is extraordinarily difficult. It takes time, practice, and a great deal of patience. Remember that improving your communication is more like learning a sport than like learning an idea. Say you’ve been playing tennis for 20 years, and one day you decide you want to improve your serve. You need to practice many, many times to override your natural tendency to do it the old way. Only gradually does it become automatic. Likewise, only gradually can you gain the capacity to refrain from responding to attacks with self-defense (or with Yes-buts, or counter-attacks, or whatever else you typically do that isn’t effective). You have a lifetime of experience doing it the old way, and overriding that habit takes time.
So, is it really worth all that time and effort, just to change one bad communication pattern? In our humble opinion: Without a doubt! Here are just two reasons why:
- One bad pattern goes a long way. Think about it — if you are essentially getting stuck in the same argument hundreds of times, mastering that one argument can help you transform hundreds of separate conversations. Once you become more aware of a particular pattern, you may be surprised to discover all the different places in your life where it shows up. If you tend to get caught up in Yes-but debates in your meetings, the odds are that at least some of the time, you also Yes-but at the dinner table, in your casual conversations with friends, and in many other situations. By changing a single behavior, you may be able to simultaneously improve your job performance, marriage, and social life. If you ask us, that’s a pretty impressive return on investment.
- Making one change now will help you make other changes later. When you first start out trying to change your communication, it can feel like an uphill battle. For most people, conversational self-awareness — noticing how you’re talking, while you’re talking — is a completely new experience. The good news is, the more you do this the easier it gets. Over time it starts to feel much more natural and take a lot less work. Plus, every time you acquire specific new communication skills, you’re also increasing your overall conversational flexibility. Suppose that you start off by learning how to respond differently to complaints; this will make it a little easier to learn new responses to interruptions and Yes-buts and eventually (often the biggest challenge) personal attacks.
DO try this at home:
We encourage you to try this out. Think of something you do that isn’t very useful, something that tends to lead to an unproductive or frustrating conversation — it could be the way you respond to your colleague’s new ideas, your child’s requests for candy, or your partner’s complaints about money. If you can’t think of anything, ask the people around you. They’re likely to have plenty of good examples!
Then start to build your awareness. Notice when you tend to react in this unhelpful way. At first, you probably won’t realize what you’ve done until after the conversation is over. Gradually, you can start to pick up on it earlier and earlier, within the conversation — until the point where you can catch yourself right before you speak. That’s your opportunity: Go ahead and try doing something different. Ask a question. Give a paraphrase. Agree with some piece of what the other person said. If you tend to stay silent, say something — anything. If you tend to fill every quiet moment with chatter, try saying nothing for a few moments. And notice what happens.
Of course, we’re not suggesting that different is always better. Just because you usually respond to your husband’s complaints by making proposals, that doesn’t mean you’ll have better luck by telling him to shut up and stop whining. Even if you avoid inherently problematic types of communication like attacks and leading questions (in SAVI lingo, Red light behaviors), doing something different is no guarantee that the conversation will turn out just as you want it to — or even that it will turn out better than it would have if you reacted habitually. However, simply by enhancing your flexibility, you’re doing something very important. Remember that the first step in any change is to break free from your old habits. Once you’ve done that, you can keep experimenting until you discover a new communication pattern that works for you.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Learning Ideas vs. Developing Skills
Do bright ideas going into your ear actually affect what comes out of your mouth?
It’s easy to get a bad impression of communication training. If you’ve spent enough time working in a business environment, you’ve probably attended at least one or two communications seminars that didn’t accomplish anything at all. We hear this from many people we talk to.
This doesn’t mean the trainings are bad; sometimes they’re a lot of fun. Often people learn a few interesting ideas that they can share with their friends, and maybe pick up some new terminology. (For instance, they’re able to understand their difficult boss as a “steamroller” personality type, or they realize that their compassionate friend must be practicing “active listening.”) But just hearing about these ideas doesn’t help people make substantial changes in their own conversations, and a few days or weeks or months later, they forget most everything they learned.
Sometimes, of course, the situation is even worse. There are plenty of courses that don’t accomplish anything and also aren’t in the least bit fun. We see the result of this in disgruntled employees whose supervisors have to drag them kicking and screaming into our courses. The thought of a communications seminar evokes horrifying images of either monotonous, droning lectures or a touchy-feely hand-holding session where everyone has to say only nice, friendly things to one another.
Now, a confession: Some of those trainings have been taught by us. Not the terribly boring or hand-holding ones, but seminars that have effected no lasting change. Why? There wasn’t enough time to have people practice anything, so instead we just talked. The truth is, no matter how skilled you are as a teacher, it is impossible to teach people to communicate differently simply by talking about it.
In talking about conversational fitness, we want to encourage you to think less about abstract ideas or principles and more about concrete actions. Good communication isn’t something that you know; it’s something that you do. Understanding just isn’t enough. To succeed, what you need is skill.
For this reason, effective communication courses need to function more like sports training than academic classes — at least in certain ways. The key is practice. Imagine trying to become skilled at basketball just by being told what to do and watching experienced players do it. Not a good idea. To gain those skills, you’d need to get out on the court, get the ball in your hands, and try doing those things for yourself. When you failed at certain types of moves (as you would inevitably do, just starting out), you’d need coaching to help you adjust and refine your techniques to get a better result.
With communication, we find that there are often very large gaps between knowledge and skill. A person can fully understand and believe in a principle (such as the importance of open inquiry, or of collaborating rather than competing) and yet consistently be unable to put it into practice. What matters most is that you can use what you know when it counts — right in the midst of the heated confrontation with your boss, the tedious staff meeting, or the same old fruitless argument you keep having with your friend or colleague.
It should come as no surprise that this type of capacity isn’t something you can’t suddenly grasp in a two-hour seminar. We have yet to meet the person who has independently, without assistance, mastered the full range of communication skills needed to make their conversations work well. (This includes us of course!) In the last post we listed five of those skills for you to consider. Here now are five more. Again, ask yourself, which can you do easily, and which are more of a challenge? Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is very little skill, and 10 is an ideal level of skill.
6. Bringing in new ideas in a constructive way
When you come up with a new plan or suggestion, are you able to express it in a way that is relatively easy for other people to hear, understand, and potentially agree with? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___
7. Bringing out new ideas from others and using them creatively
Are you skilled at eliciting the best, most creative ideas from those around you, and then building on them to generate innovative solutions? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___
8. Bringing focus and resolution
If you see a discussion going nowhere, with lots of people talking past one another, are you able to refocus the conversation and help the group reach a decision or some other type of resolution? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___
9. Using humor effectively
Are you able to use humor in a way that builds morale and adds fun to a conversation, without distracting from serious topics? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___
10. Giving useful feedback
When things aren’t working well, do you give clear, constructive feedback and then follow through to be sure that it leads to lasting change? And, when things are working well, do you give sincere, positive feedback that helps others to feel respected and appreciated? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___
It’s easy to get a bad impression of communication training. If you’ve spent enough time working in a business environment, you’ve probably attended at least one or two communications seminars that didn’t accomplish anything at all. We hear this from many people we talk to.
This doesn’t mean the trainings are bad; sometimes they’re a lot of fun. Often people learn a few interesting ideas that they can share with their friends, and maybe pick up some new terminology. (For instance, they’re able to understand their difficult boss as a “steamroller” personality type, or they realize that their compassionate friend must be practicing “active listening.”) But just hearing about these ideas doesn’t help people make substantial changes in their own conversations, and a few days or weeks or months later, they forget most everything they learned.
Sometimes, of course, the situation is even worse. There are plenty of courses that don’t accomplish anything and also aren’t in the least bit fun. We see the result of this in disgruntled employees whose supervisors have to drag them kicking and screaming into our courses. The thought of a communications seminar evokes horrifying images of either monotonous, droning lectures or a touchy-feely hand-holding session where everyone has to say only nice, friendly things to one another.
Now, a confession: Some of those trainings have been taught by us. Not the terribly boring or hand-holding ones, but seminars that have effected no lasting change. Why? There wasn’t enough time to have people practice anything, so instead we just talked. The truth is, no matter how skilled you are as a teacher, it is impossible to teach people to communicate differently simply by talking about it.
In talking about conversational fitness, we want to encourage you to think less about abstract ideas or principles and more about concrete actions. Good communication isn’t something that you know; it’s something that you do. Understanding just isn’t enough. To succeed, what you need is skill.
For this reason, effective communication courses need to function more like sports training than academic classes — at least in certain ways. The key is practice. Imagine trying to become skilled at basketball just by being told what to do and watching experienced players do it. Not a good idea. To gain those skills, you’d need to get out on the court, get the ball in your hands, and try doing those things for yourself. When you failed at certain types of moves (as you would inevitably do, just starting out), you’d need coaching to help you adjust and refine your techniques to get a better result.
With communication, we find that there are often very large gaps between knowledge and skill. A person can fully understand and believe in a principle (such as the importance of open inquiry, or of collaborating rather than competing) and yet consistently be unable to put it into practice. What matters most is that you can use what you know when it counts — right in the midst of the heated confrontation with your boss, the tedious staff meeting, or the same old fruitless argument you keep having with your friend or colleague.
It should come as no surprise that this type of capacity isn’t something you can’t suddenly grasp in a two-hour seminar. We have yet to meet the person who has independently, without assistance, mastered the full range of communication skills needed to make their conversations work well. (This includes us of course!) In the last post we listed five of those skills for you to consider. Here now are five more. Again, ask yourself, which can you do easily, and which are more of a challenge? Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is very little skill, and 10 is an ideal level of skill.
6. Bringing in new ideas in a constructive way
When you come up with a new plan or suggestion, are you able to express it in a way that is relatively easy for other people to hear, understand, and potentially agree with? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___
7. Bringing out new ideas from others and using them creatively
Are you skilled at eliciting the best, most creative ideas from those around you, and then building on them to generate innovative solutions? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___
8. Bringing focus and resolution
If you see a discussion going nowhere, with lots of people talking past one another, are you able to refocus the conversation and help the group reach a decision or some other type of resolution? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___
9. Using humor effectively
Are you able to use humor in a way that builds morale and adds fun to a conversation, without distracting from serious topics? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___
10. Giving useful feedback
When things aren’t working well, do you give clear, constructive feedback and then follow through to be sure that it leads to lasting change? And, when things are working well, do you give sincere, positive feedback that helps others to feel respected and appreciated? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Conversational Fitness
A new metaphor for communication: Conversational Fitness
When it comes to communication, are you fit or flabby?
What do we mean by conversational fitness? Think about what it means to be physically fit. Fitness isn’t a single, isolated thing — it includes a wide range of skills and capacities, and there are many different ways you could measure it. For instance:
Conversational fitness works in much the same way. There’s no one skill or personality trait that makes someone an effective communicator, and we all have a few weak spots. While some aspects of communication might come naturally to you, there are likely to be others that take a lot more effort. Some may be so challenging that you do your best to avoid them altogether. To increase your level of fitness, you need to identify the areas in which your performance isn’t quite up to snuff and come up with strategies to improve it. In physical terms, that means devoting a certain amount of time and energy to the types of activities that will build your strength, flexibility, agility, stamina, or whatever else it is that you need to work on. With communication, boosting your fitness requires a different type of practice — developing greater skill and flexibility in the way you express yourself and respond to what other people say. Below is a list of 5 basic communication skills that you can develop using SAVI. (There are many others; we’ll keep posting more over time.) Take a minute to read through them and ask yourself, which of the following can you do easily? Which are more of a challenge? Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is very little skill, and 10 is an ideal level of skill. If any of these topics are of particular interest to you, let us know! We’re happy to answer any specific questions you might have.
When it comes to communication, are you fit or flabby?
What do we mean by conversational fitness? Think about what it means to be physically fit. Fitness isn’t a single, isolated thing — it includes a wide range of skills and capacities, and there are many different ways you could measure it. For instance:
- How quickly can you run (or jog, or walk) a mile?
- How long can you run (or walk, or hike, or bike) without getting fatigued?
- How many pounds can you lift with each of your major arm muscles?
- Can you touch your knees, or touch your toes, or put your palms on the floor?
Conversational fitness works in much the same way. There’s no one skill or personality trait that makes someone an effective communicator, and we all have a few weak spots. While some aspects of communication might come naturally to you, there are likely to be others that take a lot more effort. Some may be so challenging that you do your best to avoid them altogether. To increase your level of fitness, you need to identify the areas in which your performance isn’t quite up to snuff and come up with strategies to improve it. In physical terms, that means devoting a certain amount of time and energy to the types of activities that will build your strength, flexibility, agility, stamina, or whatever else it is that you need to work on. With communication, boosting your fitness requires a different type of practice — developing greater skill and flexibility in the way you express yourself and respond to what other people say. Below is a list of 5 basic communication skills that you can develop using SAVI. (There are many others; we’ll keep posting more over time.) Take a minute to read through them and ask yourself, which of the following can you do easily? Which are more of a challenge? Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is very little skill, and 10 is an ideal level of skill. If any of these topics are of particular interest to you, let us know! We’re happy to answer any specific questions you might have.
- Expressing feelings directly
When you’re feeling frustrated or upset, can you communicate that clearly, without complaining or blaming other people for your problems? Rate yourself from 1 to 10: ___ - Responding effectively to others’ strong feelings
When other people express sadness, disappointment, or anger, can you help them to feel heard and understood — even if those emotions are directed at you? Rate yourself from 1 to 10: ___
- Setting clear boundaries
Are you able to say No and set limits firmly, with no irritation or hostility? Rate yourself from 1 to 10: ___ - Giving and asking for data
Do you effectively test your ideas against reality? If you see other people getting caught up in overly optimistic schemes or overly pessimistic worrying, can you steer the conversation back to a more level-headed focus on the facts? Rate yourself from 1 to 10: ___ - Resolving conflicts collaboratively
If you disagree with someone else’s opinions, do you have strategies for reaching a mutual understanding and finding areas of common ground? Rate yourself from 1 to 10: ___
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