Lend Me Your E.A.R.

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In many of my trainings, people struggle with others who have difficult behaviours.  Whether you are dealing with someone who you’re sure is a “bully” or someone who has “power over” you, believe it or not, the antidote is the same!

This I learned definitively by doing a podcast interview with Bill Eddy and one of his lead trainers, Michael Lomax. Bill started the High Conflict Institute and brings both his social work and legal backgrounds to his work with high conflict personalities.  What Bill has learned over the decades of taming these extreme behaviours, is counter-intuitive.

When faced with someone who has difficult behaviours, you need to pour on the respect and the assertiveness both!  Bill has devised an acronym he calls “EAR” – that stands for:

Empathy. Attention.  Respect.

Those with difficult personality traits need to know you respect them, to keep their attention, and because they are used to either getting their own way, or some can be triggered easily, the empathy, attention and respect is important.

At the same time, creating crystal clear requests and expectations are also important.  That’s where the balance of empathy and assertion comes in.

In my signature course, How to Have Difficult Conversations, these fundamental skills are embedded into the conversational model.  With difficult personalities, you need these skills on steroids.

The challenge is most of us, when faced with behaviours that trigger us, devolve into one of the common reptilian strategies: fleeing, fighting, submitting or freezing.  None of these advance our wants and needs or bring the other person’s into the arena.  My colleague Gordon White and I were approached by a leader recently, wanting to deal with another person they perceived as having inordinate power.  They thought the only option was to “get tough” because the other person displayed such “tough behaviours.”

There’s the trap!  You will not win with the same strategies as that person.  Don’t try to be more aggressive than someone who is using aggression.  Don’t try to be more dominating than someone who tends to dominant.  They are the masters of their strategies, so why would you want to ever try to “beat them”?

What is much more effective is to pour on both your empathy and your assertion.  The EAR strategy serves to start to disarm their more non-cooperative behaviours and your assertion helps you move forward constructively.  Assert, then listen, listen, listen.  Assert again.

If you find this kind of information stimulating and useful, keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks as I’ll be announcing that my How to Have Difficult Conversations course is going to be available in an on-line, 24-7, on demand basis!  Gordon and I have taken both our Difficult Conversation courses, and years of experience in conflict, and made this on-line version together! 

In the meantime, if you want to dive into how to deal with those difficult personalities, I highly recommend the podcast I mentioned, which you can find here.

What’s Getting Along Got to do With It?

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There has certainly been a lot of information, and evidence, pointing to the very dark and gloomy future we have as a species, as a community of animals, as a habitat.

So I appreciate coming across fresh ideas. Daniel Schmachtenberger supplies that in a short video I stumbled across recently.

I was so taken with the eloquence of his expression, I’ve watched a few times and now taken some notes on the highlights. Enjoy!

“We’re operating the same way that has always led to war and environmental destruction and collapse of civilization… So when you start to think about exponential rivalry – rivalrous dynamics that lead to polarization that ends up leading to war…
 
The underlying dynamics… are not different in kind than the ones that we’ve been facing since the beginning of civilization. They are different in magnitude and speed…
 
The leap we need to make in terms of how we operate…
 
The paradigm shift is [for] everything. We need new systems of governance… [as] getting lots of humans to agree on things, we suck at it…. We can’t get everyone to agree… beyond the level of having a conversation together…. Someone puts forward a proposition based on their own limited sense-making – and because that sense-making was not informed with wider sense-making, will always in the process of benefitting, will damage something else …. You just created polarization.
 
We need new systems of governance that are not any system of governance that the world has ever done so far. They are systems of how do we individually and collectively make sense of what’s going on, make sense of what we actually value and how those values can be synergistically satisfied, rather in a series of trade-offs with each other and how do we create design that are optimal synergestic satisfiers.
 
We need totally new systems of economics, we need totally new systems of education, health care, all the way down to, at an individual level, a new bases for identity, values, our own individual sense-making, choice making.
 
As long as I think I am an individual, that is fundamentally separate from you, and the biosphere and everything else, I can think about optimizing my own quality of life independent of, or maybe even at the expense of your quality of life, or the biosphere or anything else.
 
As soon as I get that and I start to say “I’m not that tree, but where would I be without trees? Well I would not exist. There would be no atmosphere if there weren’t plants… so I’m fundamentally not even a meaningful concept without plant. So If think of myself as me, that is not fundamentally interdependent with plants, I’m not even thinking clearly…
 
Then I start to run that, what about soil… it turns out my life depends on the whole thing. So I can be better thought of as an emergent property of this whole thing, not just the biosphere because where would it be without the sun.
 
As long as f I have a sense of I that is separate and maybe even rivalrous, in competition for some scarce status, resource, attention, partner, then we have a fundamental basis for war in a world of exponential increasing technology, which means the war gets to be more and more consequential, that will self-terminate.
 
So, we either figure out anti-rivalry or go extinct. That’s the core thing.  Figuring out anti-rivalry is a psycho spiritual process inside of ourselves – can we even get along with our family members.  Can we even pay attention to our emotions and triggers that highjack us from sovereignty because the moment I am getting pissed and my value system is not to be an angry person, I’m highjacked. 
 
Can I pay attention to that and actually have some sovereignty over my own inner state and how I show up in the world. And can we figure out how to do that collectively as well?”

Reconnect with Yourself – Month 3 of Wellbeing

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We are one quarter through 2021.  And, this is month three for my year of Wellbeing.  There was so much new year hope in January. February rang in still like a possibility, but perhaps distant. March is an island unto itself. 
 
We are just passing through the passageway of spring.  Here in the northern hemisphere, everywhere around us, from the weather to the trees and flowers, we are receiving the message: Grow!  Burst!  Be Free!
 
This is also the time when small buds however struggle and push their sharp little edges to come through the cold, fallow earth. 
 
I feel both those pulls: the excitement for new possibilities and a kind of aching dullness at the same time, pushing for renewal.
 
I was so excited in January by the idea of experimenting with wellbeing for a whole year!  Now, with March nearly complete, I am asking myself:

“What was I thinking?”
 
That’s a good question!
 
I was originally inspired by learning of the research Jeffery Martin who has studied “Fundamental Wellbeing” for over a decade and has helped people transition into it.  Having this blog to come back to, month after month for all of 2021, is such a beautiful way to revisit his teachings.
 
Because, Martin has discovered there are certain practices that bring wellbeing about fairly predictably.
 
Firstly, let’s revisit his definition.  “Persistent wellbeing” is an ongoing experience, not a temporary one.  It is not the state a “happy person” would necessarily be in.  Martin defines fundamental wellbeing as something more “peaceful” and “contented.” 
 
Martin tells us that when you look deeply into your core, there is an absence of that common nagging dissatisfaction that “something” is not quite right.  What is there instead, no matter the outer circumstances, is a deep, fundamental sense that everything, at the deepest level, is fine.
 
The transition to fundamental wellbeing can start with an evaporation of that edgy sense of dissatisfaction, including freedom from the endless stream of negative thoughts. 
 
Rating how loud that negative voice is inside of you generally, can be one way to discern where you are on that continuum. To those with fundamental wellbeing, the voices are fairly quiet and most of the time.  These people possess distance and awareness. Or if the voices are present, they don’t have the emotional hooks that can draw the best of us! Instead, things arise and they go.
 
I would say I know that place of strength, but don’t dwell there permanently – yet!  If I focus on my breath and intentionally connect with that stream of goodness inside me, I am there.  I feel my identity expand as I root down into this place of Source Energy and feel the space around my heart start to come alive.  That is the place of fundamental wellbeing! 
 
This dwelling place is known by many names such as the “aware” self or “witness consciousness.”  Michael Singer took a whole book to explain it, and as he says in the Untethered Soul: “There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing you are not the voice of the mind – you are the one who hears it.”
 
Another important aspect of Martin’s research reveals some who live in fundamental wellbeing, can experience non-separation between themselves and other phenomena outside of themselves.  They slip into oneness with the all.  I have these experiences at times, most often when I am in deep meditation, but it can happen in nature, when playing music, when hugging  a favourite tree along my morning walking path!
 
As I sit here typing to you, I am feeling the effects of that small break, focusing on my breathing and finding my still point inside, my connecting with the unified field and that greater sense of self.
 
Can you feel it?
 
A new thought easily arises for me in this spacious space, located at times inside my heart space.  The new thought is – how about an experiment for this month?  Want to?
 
It would involve setting one’s alarm to go off several times a day (you pick how often). I like to set my alarm throughout the day, not every day, but many days. I often choose 4 or 5 times.  The purpose it to remind me to be present. 
 
This month, my alarm will go off, I’m going to intentionally reconnect to that witness self – that larger sense of self.
 
What say you?

Kaizen Conversations

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My conflict colleague Gordon White and I have been busy these last few months creating an online course on How to Have Difficult Conversations.  We started working more closely together last year, around when COVID first hit.  At that time, we held a few online versions of a course he and I had both taught many times:  How to Have Difficult Conversations.
 
Since then, he and I continue to cook up ideas and scheme and dream of sharing more of what we’ve learned from our experiences as mediators, teachers and from those we interact with, our students, our clients, our podcast guests and our colleagues.
 
Our newest project is taking the How to Have Difficult Conversations course and making it available to anyone – night or day – as an online stand-alone course.  We are inspired by the idea of people being able to access this vital information at their convenience and as often as they want.
 
I’ll be telling you more soon as we are almost ready to go public! 
 
In the meantime, I did want to share one way working on the course has impacted me.
 
It’s around the idea of having “pinch conversations.”  Pinch conversations are those conversations which might seem small at the time:  like how someone rolls up their toothpaste or that they leave their cup in the sink or the volume in their voice as they talk on the phone.
 
However, if not shared, pinches can often build up into a “crunch” – where we either over-react to something that seems small to the other person or we check out of the relationship in some way.
 
Since Gordon and I have been working together more closely, it’s been inevitable (as we know so well) that we would have our own fair share of conflicts.  They are all what most people would call “garden variety” – but – as Gordon and I say in our course, it’s those little conversations that feel awkward or uncomfortable, if left unsaid, that build up to more significant conflicts.

So, we’ve both been diligent in bringing up the “pinches.”  Whether it’s something related to seeing the design of one part of the curriculum differently, or how much input one of us has on something we are working on, there is always something to see differently!

As we started to have those ongoing pinch conversations, at a certain point, they started to feel like a lot.  There is something called a “positivity ratio” which states that high performing teams express five positive comments to every negative one.  We both do share a lot of appreciative comments too, yet the word pinch was starting to not work for us.
 
So, we experimented with renaming our pinch conversations to “feather” conversations.  That seemed easier to hear – light, not so serious. That still didn’t’ seem to get to what the dynamic truly was however until we started to call those little conversations “feedback conversations” and “continuous improvement” conversations.
 
That has made a difference.  The principle of kaizen has meant something to me for years – the notion that we can do continuous improvement, that change is a good thing!
 

In that simple shift of phrase, our conversations become ones between allies for each other’s growth and improvement.  We all have areas we are blind to, so having someone who can help you see yourself from the outside is invaluable.
 
What do you think?  Might those awkward conversations seem a bit more possible if you reframed them as continuous improvement ones?
 
“Watch the little things; a small leak will sink a great ship.” ~Benjamin Franklin