What are best-practice communication techniques to let a work colleague know that you’re not happy with how they’re speaking or acting?
Here’s what ChatGPT came up with:
Be Specific: Clearly describe the behavior that’s bothering you. Avoid vague statements and focus on concrete examples.
Stay Calm and Respectful: Keep your emotions in check and approach the conversation with respect. This helps to prevent defensiveness and keeps the discussion productive.
Focus on Solutions: After addressing the issue, discuss possible solutions or changes in behavior. This shows that you're interested in resolving the problem constructively.
If the words “Simple But Not Easy” are flashing through your head right now, we’re on the same wavelength.
When I’m angry or frustrated or anxious, my brain tends to disconnect from my mouth. It’s easy for me to end up the poster child for “I am immediately going to regret my words.”
So how can we get ourselves back into a physical and emotional state that’s congruent with specificity, calmness, respect, and positivity?
The most effective method I’ve come across involves two surprising steps.
Empathize with myself
Remind myself of their secret history
Empathize with Myself
I’ve covered this extensively in my book, You Can Change Other People. Right now, suffice to say that you are deserving of compassion, even (perhaps especially) for your anger, frustration, or anxiety.
Giving yourself a metaphorical hug and thinking, “This is really hard for me right now” can take your nervous system down a notch. This prepares it for Step 2, which is the topic of this newsletter.
Remind Myself of Their Secret History
The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is cited as saying, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
This statement flies in the face of one of humanities favorite cognitive biases, known as the fundamental attribution error. Simply put, this bias says that when others behave badly it’s because they’re assholes, and when we behave badly it’s because we’re having a bad day or something beyond our control triggered us.
Longfellow’s saying that other people’s behavior will make sense to us, to the point that we can extend to them the same generosity we typically reserve for ourselves.
Someone’s a bully? Bet they were bullied as a kid.
And if you could watch that movie, of how they were on the receiving end of the same abuse they’re now dishing out, your anger would just drain away. (Or more probably, get transferred to their abuser, so you could start the process all over again. Blame, in this framework, is a moving target that never sticks.)
You don’t need access to the home movies of your colleague’s worst days.
Nor will you engage in an intimate conversation with them about their childhood.
All you need to do is remind herself that this person, like everyone else, has a secret history. And that secret history contains sorrow and suffering.
Please understand: that secret history does not excuse their behavior in any way.
Rather, it enables you to deal with it from a more resourced and strategic place.
The Takeaway
Step 1: Practice
Get in the habit of looking for coherence — sense-making — in the behaviors of people you don’t know personally. The badly behaving Hollywood star. The sleazy Supreme Court justice. The incendiary podcast host.
Step 2: Apply Pre-Conflict
Look for coherence in the behaviors of people you interact with on a regular basis: prickly colleagues, gossipy neighbors, ornery cashiers. Play a game in which you imagine the “secret histories” of sorrow and suffering that fully explain — and, again, in NO WAY EXCUSE — what they say and do.
Step 3: “Pre-hearse” Conflicts
If you have a “nemesis” in your life, visualize the next time they’re likely to do something to intimidate or anger you. Imagine the scene in as much sensory detail as you can: the lighting in the room, the aroma of coffee and stale AC exhaust, the hum of the projector fan, the feel of your bum on the fake Aeron chair.
Watch them do their thing and notice how it makes you feel. Pay attention to your thoughts, your feelings, and your body sensations. Notice any physical urges — balling your hands in fists, or holding your breath, or jumping up and running away. Just do this for a couple of seconds — enough to get into your body but not enough to be totally hijacked by that state.
As soon as you notice your sensory response, say (ideally out loud), “They has a secret history of sorrow and suffering, and this behavior has been their way of surviving it.”
Notice what happens to your body, to your feelings, to your thoughts. See how your urges shift.
Finally, feel compassion for yourself — you also have a secret history, and their behavior has triggering your own means of survival — fighting back, cowering, shutting down, appeasing, going stone-faced, whatever. You also operate coherently.
Step 4: Take this Practice into Real-Time Conflicts
Once you’ve practiced at various levels of challenge, look for moments when you can deploy the Secret History technique in real time. Rather than brace yourself and dread them, you may find that you actually look forward to the clarity, peace, and — most of all — POWER you have when you keep your body’s stress response to pull the strings.
Looking for support in building emotionally smart teams that embrace good conflict to get stuff done and have a ball together? Find me at askHowie.com and let me know what you’re looking to create.