Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

Explore Their Story and Yours

Listen to their story. Empathize. Share your story. Explore how you each perceive the same situation differently. Reframe the stories from one of blame and accusation to one of learning about how each contributes to the situation and the emotions involved.

Problem Solve

Invent solutions that meet each side’s most important concerns and interests. Find ways to continue keeping communications open and taking care of each other’s interests.

Insights and Exercise for Difficult Conversations

Happily, if you have been working hard on all the practices in Search Inside Yourself , you have already acquired most of the skills you need to conduct difficult conversations. The only thing you need is to acquire two key insights.

The first key insight is that impact is not the intention. For example, if we feel hurt by something somebody said, we may automatically assume that the person intended to hurt us. In other words, we assume that the impact is the intention. Usually, we judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by the impact of their behavior because we do not really know their intentions, so we subconsciously infer their intentions based on the impact of their behavior. In many situations, however, the impact is not the intention. For example, when Henry’s wife told him to stop and ask for directions, he felt belittled, but she honestly did not set out intending to belittle his sense of manhood; she merely intended to arrive at the party on time. Her impact was not her intention. Let her know the impact on you, Henry, but do not start a fight with her. She meant no harm. (True story, though the name has been changed to protect every husband in the world, except Henry.)

The second key insight is that beyond the content and emotions in every difficult conversation, there are, more importantly, issues of identity. Very often the identity issues are the most hidden and left unsaid, but they are usually the most dominant. For example, if my manager wants to talk to me about the slow progress of my project, the thing that will bother me most is not the content of that conversation, or my feelings of anxiety, but my self-doubt concerning my own competence. In other words, the thing that will most bother me is the identity issue of “Am I competent?” Recognizing this, a skillful communicator makes sure she is aware of the identity issues and addresses them when appropriate. For example, being the skillful communicator that she is, my manager may begin the conversation by assuring me that she has full confidence in my competence; the thing she really wants to understand is what additional resources I may need. By addressing my identity issue skillfully right at the beginning, the entire quality of the conversation changes.

These two key insights are most relevant for Step 1 of the difficult conversation framework: prepare by walking through the “three conversations.” If you have been doing your Search Inside Yourself practices, you should already be quite comfortable with all the other steps. Hence, we only need to pay extra attention to Step 1.

The best way to prepare for a difficult conversation is to talk to other people. That is because having people to talk to gives you the opportunity to verbalize and rehearse key parts of the difficult conversation beforehand. The best people to talk to are those you can trust, such as a best friend, a mentor, or a trusted peer at work. If you prefer to work alone, you may do it as a writing exercise instead.

PREPARING FOR A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION

You may do this as either a writing exercise or a speaking exercise. If you do this as a speaking exercise, you may speak to a friend. Instructions

1. Think of a difficult conversation you had in the past, or one that you intend to have in the near future, or one that you should have had but did not.

2. Either in writing or spoken in a monologue, describe the “three conversations” from your own point of view. The three conversations are: the content conversation (“What happened?”), the feelings conversation (“What emotions are involved?”), and the identity conversation (“What does this say about me?”). The identity conversation almost always involves one of these three questions:

• Am I competent?

• Am I a good person?

• Am I worthy of love?

3. Now, pretend that you are the other person and describe the three conversations from his or her point of view to the best of your abilities.

If you did this as a speaking exercise with a friend, discuss what it felt like for you in a free-flow conversation.

“How about now? Is now a good time to do the Difficult Conversations exercise?”

Mindful E-Mailing

The good news about modern communications is we do not have to do it face-to-face—we can use e-mail. The bad news is we do not do it face-to-face—we use e-mail. Yes, the good news is that we can, and the bad news is that we do.

The biggest problem with e-mail is that the emotional context is often miscommunicated, sometimes with disastrous results. When we talk to another person face-to-face, most of the emotions we communicate with each other are done nonverbally, usually with our facial expressions, tone of voice, postures, and gestures. In other words, our brains get to send and receive enough nonverbal information to do an “emotional tango” (see Chapter 7) that lets us communicate to each other what we are feeling. Most of that communication happens unconsciously. When we communicate via e-mail, however, we lose that entire mechanism for communicating feelings. When brains can’t dance together, feelings don’t get to tether.

But wait, it gets worse. When the brain receives insufficient data about others’ feelings, it just makes stuff up. The brain makes assumptions about the emotional context of the message and then fabricates the missing information accordingly. It does not just fabricate information, however. It also automatically believes those fabrications to be true. Worse still, those fabrications usually have a strong negative bias—we usually assume people to have more negative intentions than they actually do.

For example, when Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, saw me in the hallway, he wagged his finger at me mischievously and said with a big smile, “You, troublemaker.” Since my brain was able to receive all the nonverbal cues, I knew he was just teasing me, so I never worried that he was going to fire me. However, if I had received those same words from him via e-mail, I might already be packing my stuff at the office and waiting for the lady at HR to come, err … discuss an important matter with me. That is true even if Eric had used a smiley in his e-mail.

That is why there is so much miscommunication over e-mail. We frequently get offended or frightened by e-mails that were never intended to offend or frighten. If we are emotionally unskillful, then we react with offense or fear, and then all hell breaks loose. I am not sure if the devil invented e-mail, but I am sure it made his job easier.

This is the key insight necessary for effective e-mail communications: because e-mails seldom contain sufficient information for the brain to recognize the emotional context of the sender, the brain fabricates the missing information, often with a negative bias, and then unconsciously assumes its own fabrication to be the truth.

Fortunately, mindfulness can help vastly improve the quality of your e-mail communications. The original Pali word that gets translated into “mindfulness” is sati . Sati also has an alternative translation: recollection (or reflection). That means that mindfulness is not just a mind of calmness, but it also has a strong quality of remembering and reflecting on insights.