How Not to Suck at Communication
Most all of us have had the experience of having what we believe will be a simple conversation and suddenly realizing we’ve said something about the other person’s “motha”, slammed down the lid of our laptop and are now sitting alone feeling shame at how we behaved.
Why does this happen?
First and foremost it happens not because we are bad but because we are human. The common denominator in these situations is that our sense of self suddenly feels under attack.
Back in the day when we had to protect ourselves and our families from predators and physical harm, these reactions helped us stay alive when under attack. Now, in the modern world, we rarely feel that we are physically at risk.
Now what feels most vulnerable are things related to our psyche like our reputation, our sense of being good enough, feeling loved and respected, feeling connected to others, the ability to make a living and our commitment to our values.
When your amygdala senses that any of those things are risk, it activates the most primitive parts of your brain to react with fight or flight. Even when the most evolved and empowering next step would be to seek understanding.
If you want to not suck at difficult communication, the solution is to develop a practice that allows you to manage yourself and become adept at hacking the primitive reaction.
It can be done
There is a simple four-stage process that helps you to use the skill of self-coaching to understand the warning signals that your physical body delivers when it is going into your ego is feeling attacked. It is called Navigating Challenging Dialogue®.
Once you learn to recognize simple physical warning signals that you are starting down the pathway to reaction versus response, you become empowered to hack your amygdala automated process.
What if you don’t?
If you don’t hack your system, then your emotional reaction takes you off to the races. You begin reacting from fear. And that’s when things get said, relationships get damaged, blame gets places and the shame and regret cycle kicks into place. And that is a lot of drama and emotional burden that is exhausting and wastes valuable time.
Once you’ve started down that path, you have two choices, either circle back and repair things or stand your ground risking loss of relationship. Neither of these are evolved solutions and both take up the precious resources of energy and time that can be better used elsewhere.
Grace in the Space
Once you notice that you are getting emotionally triggered, you are able to hack the process through a a series of questions that you can ask yourself. Many times our thoughts are simply thinking errors that are based on our past experiences and fears of the future. The Navigating Challenging Dialogue questions help you to sort out your thoughts and get back to what is fact.
In essence you increase your ability to choose if you are in reaction mode or response mode during a tough conversation or conflict. We call this putting grace in the space.
The Only Person I Can Manage is Myself
One of the key self-coaching questions in the process is “What do I believe the other person should feel, think or do?”
It’s our unspoken assumptions or expectations of others that lead to our own disappointment, frustration or misplaced resentment.
In the Navigating Challenging Dialogue process, you learn to coach yourself to get clean and clear on any unspokens you are harboring so that both you and the other person(s) are able to come to agreement.
The tricky bit here is that the only person you can ever manage or change is yourself. It is when we get caught up in thinking that our words and actions can force, manipulate or persuade others to do what we believe they should do that we get off track from clean and clear communication.
A Beast that Never Gets Satisfied
You can perhaps temporarily get someone to move in a specific direction or take a specific action. But getting someone to do or believe something we think they should but don’t takes a lot of energy. And, it doesn’t build trust.
It simply reinforces our own ego’s unattainable and false need to feel validated by others. That is a beast that never gets satisfied. And that is where the whole challenge began. When our ego feels threatened by others.
Creating Ease for Yourself
People who experience and practice the Navigating Challenging Dialogue process indicate that they experience significantly less emotional burden and angst. They are able to communicate even the most difficult information with clarity.
Because they show up to potentially difficult dialogue their own emotional energy balanced, they are modeling a way for others to do the same.
Ready to Shift?
If you are ready to let go of the drama, chaos and burden of emotionally challenging dialogue gone bad, you can learn the Navigating Challenging Dialogue process at no cost in about 18 minutes with the online Primer Seminar.
Ready to let go of drama and chaos?
Navigating Challenging Dialogue is a movement that is spreading through companies, government agencies and nonprofits. We hope you’ll join the movement!
Join the discussion with others who are bringing Navigating Challenging Dialogue into their work and their lives in our Facebook Community.