If you want to improve your communication skills, here is one practical idea suggested by the authors of “Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High”: “one good way to increase your self-awareness is to explore your Style Under Stress.”
This is critically important, because when our sense of safety in communication is threatened, our perception becomes distorted. We begin to react inappropriately and excessively, and we often say things we later regret. This applies both to ordinary everyday conversations, when the other person unexpectedly hits a nerve, and to truly important conversations, where much depends on the outcome.
According to the authors of this book, there are two typical communication responses under stress – silence and violence. Although they are opposite, they are equally destructive in their capacity to kill dialogue. The trigger that sets both of them in motion is the same: when we feel threatened, we feel fear. And when there is fear, we respond either through defence (we withdraw, go silent, hide, avoid) or through attack (verbal and even physical aggression, criticism, insults, labelling).
Silence and violence are expressions of the “fight-or-flight response” discovered by Walter Bradford Cannon in his research on how living organisms react to real or perceived threat. When we are threatened, “the animal within us” responds first. Before we even become aware of how we feel, our bloodstream is flooded with hormones that alter basic physiological processes in the body. The body reacts to danger before the mind has time to reflect, and this bodily reaction then begins to shape our thoughts and actions. Many of our communication breakdowns arise precisely from this primal mode of response, especially when we fail to switch in time to a higher level of reasoning.
Even though I have been working on my communication skills for years, I still sometimes walk away from a conversation disappointed in how I reacted. When I reflect on what went wrong, I almost always arrive at the same conclusion: I missed the moment when my emotions flipped into “fight-or-flight” mode, and before I realized it, my reactions had spiralled out of control. Once you are swept up in Baba Yaga’s energy, there is no way to speak in a manner that keeps the door open for genuine dialogue.
“When conversations turn from routine to crucial, we’re often in trouble. That’s because emotions don’t exactly prepare us to converse effectively. Countless generations of genetic shaping drive humans to handle crucial conversations with flying fists and fleet feet, not intelligent persuasion and gentle attentiveness.
For instance, consider a typical crucial conversation. Someone says something you disagree with about a topic that matters a great deal to you and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The hairs you can handle. Unfortunately, your body does more. Two tiny organs sitting neatly atop your kidneys pump adrenaline into your bloodstream. You don’t choose to do this. Your adrenal glands do it, and then you have to live with it.
And that’s not all. Your brain then diverts blood from activities it deems nonessential to high-priority tasks such as hitting and running. Unfortunately, as the large muscles of the arms and legs get more blood, the higher-level reasoning sections of your brain get less. As a result, you end up facing challenging conversations with the same intellectual equipment available to a rhesus monkey.”
The core message of this brilliant book is that when “stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong,” it is essential to notice these emotions early and prevent the conversation from spiralling into an adrenaline-driven clash.
Our ability to share perspectives and truly understand one another despite our differences is a deeply human capacity – one that sets us apart from the animal world. And for this to be possible, we must rely on the very quality that distinguishes us as human: our capacity to observe and reflect on ourselves.
Kameliya
