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:

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.

Think of conversational flexibility as the level of freedom we have in choosing the way our conversations turn out. The awareness of what it is we’re doing, together with the ability to stop ourselves from doing it, gives us the free choice to do something new instead of automatically reacting in our habitual way. Without that, we are all at the mercy of our habits.

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.