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!