All I ever wanted,
All I ever needed,
is here in my arms,
Words are very unnecessary,
They can only do harm.
- Depeche Mode “Enjoy the Silence”
How often have you felt this way? You know you’ve got all these intense emotions that get brought to the surface, and you end up getting in an argument which isn’t what you want at all. It was until recently that I started to realize my role in all the arguments that I’ve gotten into over the years. I’m one of those sneaky poor communicators. I seem to be really great at communication until you see me in an argument, and I don’t get in arguments all that often, so its rare to see me at my worst. Unfortunately for those closest to me, I really do have issues with communication when I’m passionate about things and I’m trying to communicate.
This book taught me two things, first that I’m not great at communicating when things are stressful for me personally, and two how much better I could become.
Let’s tackle the first issue for all you readers out there that think you’re the cat’s meow at this whole communication thing. Take this self assessment test, and let’s see how you do. Remember you’re taking this test honestly about times when you’re at your worst conversationally.
https://www.vitalsmarts.com/wheredoyoustand.aspx
I took this test, and again I consider myself a fairly easy person to get along with in most situations, and I got a 20 out of 35, which sounds decent, until you realize that 0 is the best, and 35 is the worst. This was an eye opening experience to say the least. Reading the book caused no less of an eye opening experience, as I started to replay so many of the arguments of my adult life (from once getting into it with a client, to arguments with my significant other, to arguments with my parents) over and over again in my mind in the context of my role in the conversations. I was so bull headed that I actually thought the other person was to blame for the vast majority of the arguments. With this book I realized all of the myriad of things I did to help the conversations turn into contentious arguments. If I had better communication skills, and better self awareness, I could have avoided so much strife and pain, all while dealing with the issues that are most important.
Enter Crucial Conversations, an incredible book with techniques for dealing with these tough items. Its a book I’ve now read twice, and I’ve read their follow on book, Crucial Confrontations once. I still learn more each time I read it. It helps to remind me to achieve a greater awareness of self during the times its toughest to do so. I wish I could say that I’ve mastered the skills that are laid out in the book, but I have haven’t as my family and close friends can attest. I have though developed many of the skills in the book, and I’ve also developed a new fearlessness around discussing things openly when I sense myself getting extremely agitated by them. I know that if a conversation goes badly, particularly one in which my emotions or my counterpart’s emotions get out of control, that I can look at the mistakes I made while in the conversation to understand where I can improve.
Here’s a great presentation summarizing the skills and techniques in Crucial Conversations. This presentation was put together by the awesome Saba Long, as a part of the recently completed Alt-MBA program.
Let me put some of the more esoteric slides in context for you.
Starting with the heart, means that you focus on what you really want out of a conversation. For example, I was having a conversation the other day about family possessions and where they might go, as parents were downsizing. I started the conversation not with “I want the table.” I started the conversation with, “I want this family to be closer and to have greater love at the end of this process than we did at the start of the process.” That’s what my true end goal was. It wasn’t that I wanted a table, even though it certainly was something I wanted.
The dual processing slide is another that is simple in its presentation, but profound when put into practice. Being able to think about a conversation, and what is happening to the tone of the conversation at the same time is profoundly difficult when the conversation has become tense or heated. Typically we are too busy trying to win the argument at the point it becomes one, that we lose sight of the fact that we’ve slipped into one, and both sides feel as though they have to win.
Creating Safe Conditions becomes extremely difficult once we’ve descended into the realm of argument. However it is sometimes possible to come back from the abyss. First comes apologizing sincerely. That’s something I’ve gotten really good at. Next is contrasting, which is another thing I’ve become pretty skilled at. The final thing is to create mutual purpose. This is one I struggle remembering to do every time, and when I don’t remember and push on to quickly I often find myself sliding back into contentious arguments.
If there is one thing I could pass on to you from this book, its the concept of the Path to Action. First thing that happens when you get upset, is that you observe something. The next thing your brain does once it observes something is to tell a story about why something happened so that it can make sense of the phenomenon that it observes. Then we have a feeling associated with the implications of the story that we tell ourselves. Finally that feeling then causes us to act out.
This can all be very innocuous, and typically is. For example, if you look outside and notice its raining, you will most likely tell yourself that this is mother nature running its course, which will cause little emotional reaction on your part, and you will reach for your umbrella. However given the same set of circumstances on a day in which you were looking to go sun bathing at the beach, you may think to yourself that its raining because the gods are angry at you, and you might sacrifice a small woodland creature, or just sing “Rain, Rain, go away, come again some other day.” Either way, faced with the same set of facts, we can interpret them in many different ways.
Well what’s true with the weather is doubly true of our interactions with other people. We often will have someone be short with us, and think, “He’s doing that because he’s a jerk” and then feel angry, and then treat him poorly in response. When someone is short with us, there are other possible reasons. Until we acknowledge that we observe a behavior and then develop a story around why that behavior took place, we aren’t able to truly see things from the other person’s point of view. This sounds straight forward, but its implications are quite large.
When is the last time you said “They made me so mad!” Well, in light of the Path to Action model, what they are really doing is some action which we observe, then we tell a story to ourselves to make sense of what they did, and then we react to the story we are telling ourselves about why they did what they did. This means that “They made me so mad!” should really be “They did something that I told myself was really mean to someone and that made me so mad!”