finding smoother air

I don’t like to fly. It’s the turbulence. Bouncing around in a tin can at 30,000 feet is pretty much no one’s idea of fun. Fortunately pilots know this, so when things start to get bumpy they change altitude in search of smoother air. If things get really bad they’ll even alter their route a little bit. Later, when weather conditions improve, they’ll go back to their optimal flight plan.

We can take the same approach to difficult conversations. When things get bumpy, we can look for smoother air. For example, we can change the topic to something less contentious or, better, more enjoyable, as a way of establishing a more positive connection.

I did that just the other day. I asked someone a question that, for some reason, he didn’t want to answer, and it made him a little grumpy. Rather than persisting, I quickly changed the subject to one I knew he’d enjoy talking about — a fun experience he’d had recently — and soon the tension subsided. We’d found smoother air. Later, when it seemed the time was right, I came back to my initial question, and he was ready to engage.

This idea of “finding smoother air” in a difficult conversation is an example of the first of three “new survival strategies” I talk about in my book and workshop: Prioritize the relationship over being right. Sometimes it’s necessary to set aside our agenda so that we can create better conditions for a more productive conversation. We’ll still get to where we want to go, but everyone will arrive there happier, less rattled and more willing to join us on the next leg of the journey.

Prioritizing the relationship over being right is a strategy that makes sense to many, but not to everyone. For some it can seem like a recipe for self-subjugation — treating oneself as less important than the other person — or even a betrayal of one’s values. This makes sense when we think of a conversation as being between two separate individuals. But I’d like to propose a different way of looking at it.

A conversation occurs within the context of a relationship. So rather than thinking of a conversation as having two distinct centers of gravity — mine and yours — with each of us acting from our own point of view and interests, think of it as having only one center of gravity — the relationship itself — with each us acting with its interests primarily in mind:

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When we think in terms of the relationship being the center of gravity, it’s easier to see that actions taken to smooth the air are not one-sided sacrifices or appeasements of “the other.” They’re creative strategies to strengthen and balance the relationship as a whole, which by definition includes both parties. In other words, when the relationship is at the center, every action helps — or hurts — everyone.

In a difficult conversation, thinking in terms of the relationship can also help us take things less personally, and be more creative in the moment. A quick story from my business career might help illustrate:

I was meeting for the first time with the company CEO. I was a middle manager, well down the corporate ladder, and was there to justify my department’s budget. Needless to say, I was a little nervous.

As I started to speak, something odd happened. The CEO almost immediately started to fidget in his seat, clear his throat loudly and repeatedly, and look in every direction other than mine. Clearly I did not have his attention and I had no idea why. But I did know that if something didn’t change, this meeting was going to be a disaster.

Had this happened earlier in my career, I probably would have muddled through my presentation feeling self-conscious and diminished until the CEO, having heard nothing I said, finally cut me off (and my budget down). By this time in my career, however, I knew better. I knew that if I wanted his attention, we needed a different relationship. He needed to acknowledge me and why we both were there. So I stopped my presentation and simply asked: “Bill, did I say something to upset you?”

The question — which was my acknowledgement to him that I realized I didn’t have his attention — caught him totally off guard. He sat bolt upright, stopped fidgeting, ceased clearing his throat, looked at me as if noticing me for the first time, and in a somewhat humbled and surprised voice said, “No, no! Not at all!” And for the rest of the meeting he was fully engaged.

Now I’m sure he had bigger things on his plate than my small budget, which likely explained his distraction. But framing the problem in terms of our relationship — rather than feeling personally diminished or making him out to be an arrogant jerk who never listens to anyone — allowed me to take a more creative approach. By stopping my presentation and asking if I’d done something to upset him, I put our relationship in the center of the conversation, and an odd encounter became a respectful and productive meeting.

Did he still cut my budget? A little. But on the upside, from that day on we had a great relationship that proved very helpful to my career as the years went by.

There's another important reason for prioritizing the relationship over being right: It can literally put our brains on the same wavelength, which is where real creative problem solving happens. I'll talk more about that next week.

It’s okay to talk to them.

Back in the day, when I was just starting to give talks on the power of conversation to change hearts and minds, I used to end my presentation with a slide that said:

Talk is cheap.
So do more of it.

It would always get a laugh, but the goal of course was to counter the popular notion that talking is of little value — it’s action that matters. And for sure, talk that’s intended to avoid or replace action isn’t worth much. But talk as the action can change lives and outcomes. One dramatic example: Just think of the Moscow–Washington hotline put into place at the height of the Cold War. Those conversations helped avert nuclear catastrophe. (They also call into question the wisdom of waiting until the absolute last minute to actually speak to our adversary.)

So no, talk is not cheap, and that’s something a lot of us seem to have forgotten, or perhaps have lost faith in. At least that’s the perspective of my most recent podcast guest, Douglas Stone — a mediation expert, former associate director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, and co-author of the New York Times best sellers, Difficult Conversations, How to Discuss What Matters Most, and Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well.

In our conversation, he put it this way (edited for clarity):

“It feels like it's gotten harder to persuade people that talking to each other is a good thing. We not only understand each other less well, we’re less interested in understanding each other. In fact, it's almost as if talking to people on the other side makes you one of the bad people...you’re collaborating with the enemy.”

Doug pointed out that a huge part of the problem, of course, is the polarizing influence of the media and social media: “If you don't feel outraged after you’ve watched whatever your news show of preference is, then they didn't really do their job. And if they did do their job, and you do feel outraged, then you're sitting around going, ‘Well, I feel outraged... what do I do? I have to go complain, I have to hate all the people who are my neighbors who might see this differently.’ And it just pushes people further and further away from each other.”

As outrage grows, talking to each other seems to make less and less sense. We’ve overheated our brain’s fight/flee/freeze survival drive, which operates on the principle that you can’t negotiate with a hungry tiger. But as I mentioned last week, ideas are thoughts, not tigers. They can’t be killed and they easily slip through any cage. 

So what can we do? Doug suggests we reconnect with the benefits of conversation. “Talking does tend to increase trust, it does tend to enhance relationships. And it's your best shot at changing other people's attitudes in the way that you hope they will change.”

Of course, not any conversation will do that. It takes a special kind, one rooted in a meaningful relationship. To drive that point home, Doug shared a story about how the simple process of getting to know each other helped end one of the world’s longest standing international border disputes:

"We had about 10 representatives from both sides. And these were politicians and generals. And the first thing we did, much to their consternation — they just wanted to get into negotiating the border  — was an exercise that would help them to get to know each other. And it turned out that two of the generals, who were on opposite sides, each had children with special needs. And there was no national identity either of them had that was more important to them than that. 

“And by the end of that first day, they had a lifelong connection. It completely transformed how they saw each other and how they saw the dispute, and they ended up reaching an agreement on what, at the time, was the longest ongoing border dispute in the world. They settled it. They did good work on the problem as well, for sure, very good work. But that personal connection was really huge in terms of transforming that situation.”

Now you and I won’t be negotiating border disputes any time soon, but opportunities to connect with our "other" are with us every day. To quote Doug one more time: “There's plenty of humanity in others for us to learn about.”

If you'd like to listen to my entire podcast with Doug — which I highly recommend — here's the link: Just do these three things...

where the laws of the jungle don’t apply

In this post I want to talk about how we can regain our national sanity. It starts by making a conscious choice to stop reacting in fear.

We know from studies in neuroscience that threats to our strongly held opinions and beliefs can trigger our fight/flight/freeze survival drive. The reason for this, says the late physicist David Bohm, in a mind-blowing little booklet called On Dialogue, is because we identify with our opinions and beliefs, and therefore defend them “as if we are defending ourselves.” He goes on:

“The natural self-defense impulse, which we got in the jungle, has been transferred from the jungle animals to these opinions. In other words, we say that there are some dangerous opinions out there — just as there might be dangerous tigers. And there are some very precious animals inside us that have to be defended. So an impulse that made sense physically in the jungle has been transferred to our opinions in our modern life.”

Now, we can all agree that some opinions, beliefs, perspectives can, over time, become dangerous to us physically. The mistake we make is assuming that the self-defense impulse we learned “in the jungle” to avoid physical harm from an attacking tiger, can also help us avoid physical harm from an attacking ideology. An abundance of evidence suggests this is not so. Dangerous ideas, unlike dangerous tigers, cannot be trapped, caged or killed. Trying to do so seems only to make them stronger.

Let’s take the anti-vacine movement as a case in point.

According to a recent article, the anti-vax movement really got going in 2014-2015, following the swift and rather vicious public reaction to a small outbreak of the measles (125 people). The outbreak was traced back to “mostly unvaccinated visitors at Disneyland in California.” (Note the use of the word “mostly.”) Of those unvaccinated visitors, 28 of them — 18 children and 10 adults — were intentionally unvaccinated.

28 people. That was enough, apparently, to “[wake] up the nation to the threat” of those who questioned or were resistant to getting vaccines. Fearful of what might happen should this anti-vaccine mentality spread, a campaign of public humiliation soon followed, “with everyone from soccer moms to late-night television hosts lambasting parents who refused to vaccinate their kids.” And in California, nonprofits and state legislators worked together “to push for a bill that would remove all non-medical exemptions for school vaccine requirements, which had grown in recent years to allow pockets of low vaccination coverage to spring up.”

In other words, an aggressive, all-out attack on those who questioned vaccines had begun.

So what happened next? Now under threat themselves, those “pockets of low vaccination coverage” transformed into a mobilized national movement. They organized, fundraised, grew, developed sophisticated and targeted messaging, and formed alliances and political action committees to help elect politicians sympathetic to their cause. Everything the pro-vaccine folks most feared.

Did it have to be this way? Might there have been a different reaction back in 2014-15 other than drafting laws and engaging in public humiliation — which Amanda Ripley in her book, High Conflict, calls the “nuclear bomb of emotions” and the driver of “all manner of conflict”? 

What if in 2014, instead of “waking up to the threat” of those resistant to getting vaccines, we simply “woke up” to the existence and consequences of people who had chosen not to get vaccinated, and then, without fear, got curious and made an effort — before everyone’s defense were raised — to understand their mindset so that we could come up with creative, respectful and effective responses?

Would that have made a difference? Well, I don’t know about you, but personal experience tells me the answer is yes. It’s just common sense that people are more receptive to talking and listening when humiliation bombs are not being dropped on their head.

So what can we do now? For starters, we can refuse to act out of fear, refuse to take part in the vilification of the other. None of that helps. It just feeds the conflict. Another thing you could do is help spread this meme:

“Fear ends where conversation begins.”

To see the universe in a box of salt...

In this post I want to talk about perspective, because it’s one of the hardest, and most important, things to maintain in a difficult conversation.

In a documentary I saw recently, the narrator observes that “feelings follow perception.” His example: When you see a shark, you feel fear. If you suddenly realize what you’re seeing is actually a dolphin, fear subsides, and feelings of relief or joy take its place.

Feelings follow perception. And what does perception follow? Perspective — the vantage point from which we see the world. For example, what we see looking through a microscope is going to be very different from what we see standing at the top of a mountain.

The power of this causal chain — perspective, perception, feeling — is beautifully illustrated in an exercise my wife does with her students. She’s an English teacher at our local high school, and at the beginning of every year she takes her students through an experience called “The Milky Way in a box of salt.” Let me briefly describe what she does, and the impact it has on her students.

First, she lays down a large piece of black fabric (representing space), and shakes out a box of salt (representing the stars), in the spiral shape of our Milky Way galaxy:

She then shares a few known facts about our galaxy, such as:

• It contains about 300 billions stars.

• Traveling at the speed of light — 186,000 miles per second — it would take 100,000 years to go from one end of our galaxy to the other.

• Despite its size, it’s still just a small part of the cosmic picture, being one of about 100 billion other galaxies.

Then, answering the question on every student’s mind -- where on earth is earth in all this -- she tells them it lies about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the galaxy, tucked away in the corner of one of its spiral arms:

Lastly, she gives a brief cosmic history lesson, summarizing some of the major milestones that got us to where we are today:

14 billion years ago:
The Big Bang, the birth of space, time and matter.

13 billion years ago:
The formation of the first galaxies, and the starry furnaces out of which every element in nature emerges.

 5 billion years ago: 

The birth of our solar system.

4 billion years ago:
The birth of life on earth. 

200,000 years ago:
The birth of Homosapiens Sapiens — the species that “knows that it knows.” Made of the same elements as the universe itself, we are, in the words of astrophysicist Carl Sagan, “star stuff contemplating the stars.”

17 years ago:
The birth of the students in the classroom. 

Once the presentation is over, the class wrestles with big philosophical questions, such as: What’s the significance of seeing ourselves in this larger context? What does it say about who we are? About what’s important? 

At the end of class they write down their main insights. I looked at this year’s reflections, and organized them into two categories: perceptions and feelings. How did such a large perspective change how they see, and how did that change how they feel? Here’s a selection of what they wrote:

How it changed how they see things

• It makes me understand how my existence automatically relates me to everyone.

• It made me realize that I thought I was living my life the way I wanted to, but I wasn’t actually. It also makes me realize a lot of things aren’t worth the little time I have.

• This experience has helped me understand that what we do or think in life matters in the wider perspective.

• It made me realize how amazing it is that I am here.

• It expands my imagination and creativity. It helps me think about the gray stuff, rather than just the black and white things.

• It really gives me a new look on life. I do not exist for no reason.

• It’s mind blowing and puts things into perspective and challenges our traditional way of thinking.

• Such a big concept attributes a sense of worth to each being in the universe.

How it changed how they feel

• This experience has made me grateful for being alive today, because so many things had to go right for me to be here.

• Rather than being weighed down by the reminder of how tiny I am, I feel rather comforted by it. It makes me remember that a lot of things I consider a big deal are actually not that big of a deal, and so I start to stress out about them less.

• I feel like I’m part of something greater. I understand better the fact that I hold a place (no matter how tiny) in the universe that makes me who I am; I have importance in who I am because of this connection.

• It keeps you humble. You know that you are lucky to even be here.

• It is humbling and also bewildering. It is so important to realize you don’t know everything, and also that others don’t know everything either. It also shows that it’s okay to sometimes not understand. Some things are made to not be understood.

• It makes me feel less like everything in my life is about me, but instead like I’m a piece to a bigger puzzle.

• It gives us meaning. We can take what we are used to (our lives, our small worries) and put it into perspective; from this we can better appreciate who we are and how we came to be.

As I said, it’s a powerful example of how feelings follow perception, and how perception follows perspective. So how can we use this in a difficult conversation?

We know that when things get heated in a difficult conversation, our perspective narrows, and protecting or defending ourselves becomes our primary objective. When that happens we lock into a specific interpretation of events, and literally “lose sight” of other possibilities. 

If we can become aware of when this is happening to us in the moment, we have an opportunity to pause the conversation and take a few steps back. To breathe, to reflect, to reconsider.

The word “consider” literally means “with the stars.” So if you’re able, take “reconsidering” literally and go ahead — spend some time with the stars. Contemplate the mystery, magic and immensity of existence, and see if it has the kind of effect on you that it had on my wife’s students. See if it helps you perceive and feel things differently, and if it helps you then re-engage in the conversation in a way that’s a little more open, a little more revealing, a little more humble, a little less sure that you have the whole picture. 

Perhaps a practice like this is already part of your process. If not, I hope you'll give it a try, and that you'll let me know how it goes.

If you're interested in the details of the Milky Way in a box of salt exercise, let me know by emailing me at kern@difficultconversationsproject.org/. My wife is more than happy to share it with you.

A liberal walks into a gun shop...and other stories

The other day I received this email:

Good Morning, Kern

Our discussion group selected “Difficult Conversations” for our weekly gatherings.

My initial reaction was “Are you kidding? I don’t need a book. I have been talking just fine for many years!“  

However, after 6 weeks of in-depth consideration and discussion, I saw that I still have much to learn. I am grateful for this experience. Your book made me realize the great impact my “story self”  has on my perceptions and conversations. Your survival strategies are invaluable and certainly have enhanced my awareness of others. 

That was a nice email to receive, for sure. But what I really loved about it was finding out that Audrey, the woman who wrote it, is 80 years old. Talk about having a growth mindset!

Adam Grant, in his new book, Think Again, writes: “Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.” Audrey has those skills. I believe we all have them. They can just be difficult to access. 

As Grant goes on to say: “Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable…. Reconsidering something we believe in deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.” (This threat to our identity is the dynamic I talked about in an earlier post, The Hardest Conversation.)

So what do we do? What does it take for us to put our identity on the line, to open up for reconsideration our cherished convictions and judgements? 

For my cousin, Jon Karpilow, the motivation came when he realized the bubble he’d been living in for so long was running out of oxygen. While he agrees with just about every liberal position you can think of, he was getting tired of the constant vilification of those on the right:  “I was just tired of listening to the same message over and over and over again, and I just had a really difficult time believing that all these people were bad people and that there was no saving element to their personality.”

So what did Jon do to burst his bubble? He and his wife Lori moved from liberal Boulder, CO to Trump-friendly Arnold, CA, where Jon ended up taking a job in — wait for it — a gun shop. He stepped into a situation that forced him to challenge, not so much his views on gun control policies, but his views of the people he saw as standing in the way of those policies.

You can listen to Jon’s story in my new podcast, but here are a few edited excerpts to give you a flavor of his experience:

From day one they nicknamed me “crunchy granola” because of my Boulder origins. Everybody in the community knew that I didn't carry a gun, that I didn't own a gun, that I probably shouldn't be a guy selling guns in a gun shop….But we developed relationships and there was no animosity between me and anybody in the community that was tied to the issues of politics. 

I suspect a lot of the division that exists within the country today is amplified simply because we're not listening to our neighbors, we're not talking to our neighbors. We're listening to the voices in the media instead of actually making our own decisions about who people are, and whether or not they can be our friends and colleagues. 

I think it's really essential for us to mix, to get to know the people who disagree with us, or we think disagree with us. And once we start doing that we’ll find they’re more like us than we thought.

I was paid to come to the shop two days a week, but I ended up coming five days, just because I enjoyed being with this crowd so much. 

I encourage you to listen to the whole podcast. Even if you think working in a gun shop is several steps too far outside your bubble, Jon’s story might encourage you to find your own, more modest version of bubble-popping.

So with that in mind, here’s a suggestion:

Think of a person you’ve decided you don’t like or don’t want to get to know because of a belief they hold, or an attribute they have that you find objectionable. 

Then — unless your reason has to do with something like the threat of physical harm —  see if you can tell yourself, this issue is important to me, but I don’t need to make it the entire basis of the relationship. I’m going to get to know this person in greater dimension, and see if there’s a basis for a different kind of relationship. One that might actually allow us to be friends.

You might find, like Jon eventually did, that by focusing on the relationship you build the trust you need to talk about what matters most to you, and do it in a way the other person can actually hear.

Why I’m Positive About Humanity

There’s a lot of news out in the world that can, from time to time, make us all a little discouraged about the human species. I don’t think I need to go into that in detail. Today I want to offer a personal reflection that gives me reason to be more positive about our prospects.

I was sitting in my office a while ago, feeling a little despondent about the future — mine and yours — when I looked up at a picture on my wall that I see every day. It’s a large photograph of the earth from space. Somehow this time the photo took my breath away, capturing my attention in a way it hadn’t before. I fell into a bit of a trance, and at a gut level I connected with a truth hard to grasp using intellect alone:

 “I am that.” 

It’s something I’ve long believed. After all, as modern science has revealed beyond any shadow of a doubt, I’m not some isolated human, and we’re not some isolated species, cut adrift from the rest of Life. We are Life. But now I felt the truth of that statement more personally. We are Life made conscious. That voice inside our head? Life learning to speak. The eyes below our brow? Life learning to see. The tragedies that befall us? Life learning to grieve. Our sense of humor that emerges even under the most trying circumstances? Life learning to gain perspective.

We’re not Life’s scourge, as some would claim. We’re something far more profound. We’re Life’s desire for more life. Will Life fail in this particular attempt at more? Perhaps. But when you look at Life’s 3.5 billion year journey so far and you plot the data points, the trajectory is one of success, not failure. Each success, by the way, gained at a high cost.

And the reasons for Life's success? Primarily the ability to cooperate in increasingly complex communities — an ability now stuffed into each and every one of the 100 trillion cells working together to create the human experience. We are, in other words, cooperation made manifest.

The case for cooperation being an inseparable attribute of who we are gets even stronger when we see how deep it runs. Because before single cells could cooperate to form multicellular organisms like us, there first had to be cooperative organelles to create the first single cells, and before that cooperative, free-living genes to form the genome upon which all else depends.

All of this brings to mind an analogy. As an acorn holds within its genetics the image of an oak tree, so we hold within our genetics the image of increasing cooperation and complexity. It’s why we’ve already traveled so far in that direction, aggregating ourselves first into families, then tribes, then villages, then states, then nation-states, and now, as global problems mount, facing the next aggregation: a planetary cooperative.

Of course, once again it won’t happen without pain, and most importantly it won’t happen without our consent. That’s the price, I imagine, of consciousness. Ultimately it must be a choice we make. But the path leading us in the right direction is well worn, reason enough for me to do my part.

The Hardest Conversation

I want to share something that really clarified for me what makes difficult conversations difficult. It comes from the book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen. In it they write that every difficult conversation is actually three conversations: The what happened conversation, the feelings conversation, and the identity conversation. Of the three, the identity conversation is the hardest, and often most important, to have.

Distinct from its usage in the term identity politics, the identity conversation is what the conversation is saying about me as an individual. Does it imply I’m a good person or bad person? Worthy of love or unworthy of love? In other words, the identity conversation gets to the core of our sense of self, which is why it's so difficult. 

All this gives us insight into why we live in such polarizing times: Our country is awash in identity conversations. Removing confederate statues in the south? That’s an identity conversation. Examining our country’s racist past and present legacy? That’s an identity conversation. Being asked to examine white privilege? That’s an identity conversation. All of them require us to reassess symbols, ideas, beliefs and values — many of them unconsciously held  — core to our understanding of who we are.

To be clear, it’s not that we shouldn’t have identity conversations. We must! We just need to acknowledge that’s the kind of conversation we’re having, and that it requires a high level of emotional intelligence. Identity conversations are not for our reptilian brain, which only knows how to fight, flee or freeze. They require our whole brain, the one able to deal with complexity, and capable of compassion, intuition and deep wisdom. (If you’re wondering about this distinction between our reptilian brain and our whole brain, check out my short video on Dr. Dan Siegel’s hand model of the brain.)

So what does all that mean at a practical level? If we acknowledge these are identity conversations, how might we approach them differently?

Let me take a real life example. A while ago there was an article in the New York Times about the town of Wausau, Wisconsin, whose county board had overwhelmingly voted down, in a charged racial atmosphere, a proclamation stating that Wausau was “a community for all.” To the town’s minorities and more liberal minded whites, this was an example of stunning ignorance at best, hateful racism at worst. Many others around the country who read the New York Times article seemed to think it was the latter. Of the more than 1600 comments, this one was typical and the one most recommended by readers:

“To put energy into opposing this [resolution] shows how deep the hatred is. Equality feels like persecution to these folks.” 1797 Recommend

The person who made that comment, and the nearly 1800 people who agreed with it, assumed that Wausau was having a racial conflict between whites and non-whites. It wasn’t that simple. Wausau was primarily dealing with an identity conflict within the white community itself, for which racial issues were the trigger. To hear fully what the minority community was trying to tell them, the white community had to be willing to re-examine long held and deeply entrenched beliefs about who they were as individuals and as a community — a difficult undertaking for any of us.

Looking at the Wausau conflict as an issue of white identity helps us get out of the simplistic “us vs. them” mentality that sabotages any chance of real communication. Rather than perceiving the “no” voters as hateful racists beyond redemption, we can see them as humans like ourselves, fearful of the implications of opening themselves to a more complicated and painful view of reality. This is an important distinction. Hate is very hard to work with; fear is easier. Once you know what triggers the fear, there are strategies to mitigate it. 

So in the case of Wausau, what might those strategies have been? Here’s one scenario:

According to the New York Times article, neither side was happy with the final outcome. No one liked the idea of sending a message to the world that Wausau was not “a community for all.” Which, if you think about it, meant the people of Wausau had actually built a little bit of common ground: everyone was unhappy. 

What if they then voted on a second, opposite resolution: “Wausau is a community only for some.” For the same reason no one liked how the first resolution turned out, it’s pretty clear this one would have gone down in defeat as well. But this time, unanimously.

Now there's a little more common ground, and it’s feeling a bit more positive. A door seems to be opening, a possibility for a different conversation to emerge, one more exploratory and potentially less threatening: 

“If Wausau is not a community for all, and not a community only for some, then what kind of community are we? What kind of community do we want to be?”

With defenses down, fear levels reduced, a little more goodwill generated, that could be a transformative conversation — one where people actually listen to and learn from each other. Relationships get built. Perceptions begin to shift. Progress is made.

Would it all have been that simple? Of course not. As I said, the identity conversation isn't easy. There needs to be at least one person others listen to who’s able to recognize when the identity issue is getting triggered, and is able to help everyone navigate through it in creative, compassionate and constructive ways.

If you'd like to learn more about the identity conversation I highly recommend PStone, Patton and Heen's book. While I'm at it, I also highly recommend Amanda Ripley's High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Brilliant story telling and extremely insightful.

If there's a topic relating to the art and science of difficult conversations you'd like me to address in this newsletter, please let me know by emailing me at kern@difficultconversationsproject.org/.

"I felt like I didn't belong anywhere."

In my book and workshop, I talk a lot about how difficult conversations require good relationships. Today I want to share an experience that highlights just how quickly good relationships can be built and the positive impact that can have — at work, in our daily lives, everywhere.

I was at my health clinic having minor surgery. It was a simple operation, and the doctor chatted with me throughout the procedure. What was odd, though, was that he left his assistant mostly out of the conversation. After a while it became uncomfortably obvious that we were both treating her as if she wasn’t even there.

After the procedure was over, the doctor left as his assistant bandaged me up. Feeling badly that I hadn't talked to her earlier, I asked how long she’d worked with this doctor. “Three years,” she said. “And he’s just now beginning to warm up to me.”

“Really?” I said, surprised not only because I’d always found this doctor friendly, but also because she’d revealed something personal so quickly.  “Yes,” she said. “For the first couple years he never said a word. This time was the most he’s ever spoken to me.”

Seeing she was open to — perhaps even wanting — a conversation, I asked her a couple more questions. In a few short minutes I'd learned that she came to the U.S. from the Philippines when she was seven, that she spoke almost no English when she arrived, that she was badly teased by other kids for her limited ability to communicate, that while her English had eventually improved it came at the expense of her native tongue, Tagalog, and that when she and her family went back to the Philippines for short visits she'd get teased for her poor language skills again. Getting teased for the same thing in both countries, she said, “made me feel like I didn’t belong anywhere.”

The story just poured out of her, no doubt one among many she could have told about adjusting to life as an immigrant. But it gave me a glimpse into her challenges, and I wanted her to know how much I admired her for all she’d accomplished. So I told her, and it was clear she genuinely appreciated the acknowledgment.

The whole conversation took maybe five minutes, but there was a sweet sense of connection at the end. As I walked out of the office I thanked her for telling me her story. “Thank you,” she replied, “for listening to my story.”

I felt pretty certain not many people had.

I relate this experience not only to illustrate how quickly we can connect with another person, but also to highlight how many times we pass up the opportunity to do so, as the doctor had done for nearly three years. New people enter our lives — maybe a new work colleague or neighbor — and we often don’t take the time to make a connection, to establish a level of trust and goodwill. If we did, many of the difficult conversations that inevitably arise in such relationships would become a lot less difficult.

Work doesn't need to be an exception.
Sometimes people will point out it's not always appropriate to focus on the relationship, like in a work environment where personal issues are considered off bounds. All I can say is that my own experience convinces me otherwise. I once ran the communications department for a large technology company. I could tell when someone on my staff came to work not fully present, and it often had to do with an issue in their personal life. Sometimes I’d invite them into my office, ask how they were, and let them decide how much to tell me. Whether they said a little or said a lot, they appreciated the check-in. It built trust, which made difficult conversations easier when they came up. It also helped them set aside whatever was bothering them so they could focus on the work at hand.

To be clear, I wasn’t providing answers or therapy, I just listened and, if appropriate, shared my own story if it pertained to what they were dealing with. Often just knowing you’re not the only one with a problem lowers stress and helps you think more clearly.

Sometimes our closest relationships need the most attention.
Another objection I hear is that with people we're already close to, like family members, focusing on the relationship isn’t necessary when having a difficult conversation. Again, I have a different view. If over the course of a relationship too much has gone unsaid, unaddressed, and unappreciated, the threads of the relationship can be surprisingly frayed. A conflict erupts, that one final straw gets added to a pile of unspoken grievances, and the relationship collapses into animosity, hurt, retaliation, even estrangement. If we’re not attentive to those we're closest to, there can be years of past hurts to untangle before a productive difficult conversation is possible.

So here’s a suggestion.
Think about a relationship in your life that could use some attention. Who could you get to know a little better, or appreciate a little more? Once you have your answer, go ahead and take action. Then, when a conflict comes up and a difficult conversation needs to be had, your relationship will have that much stronger of a foundation to help smooth the process.

Remember, it doesn’t have to take much. In a doctor’s office, as we all know, there’s not a lot of time to chat. Just 5 minutes as she was bandaging my wound was all that was needed to make a connection, not to mention a small difference in someone’s life.

If there's a topic relating to the art and science of difficult conversations you'd like me to address in my blog and newsletter, please let me know by emailing me at kern@difficultconversationsproject.org.

Photo by Oscar Keys on Unsplash.

what 40 years of marriage taught me about how to have difficult conversations

This month I celebrate two anniversaries: 40 years of marriage and 5 years leading workshops on the art and science of difficult conversations. Here’s what the former taught about the latter.

My wife, Amy, and I in
San Francisco.

Cultivate humility.
I'm probably not alone in sometimes being a little overconfident in my opinions and beliefs. It's an attitude that can quickly shutdown or inflame a difficult conversation. That's why it's important to be honest with ourselves about who we are — our talents and, especially, our limitations. We’re all the product of our experiences, which literally shape how we see and interact with the world. And since no two people’s experiences are exactly the same, that means there are 7-plus billion people in the world all seeing things a bit differently.

In my marriage, when difficult conversations arise, humility helps us remember that the filter of our past experiences may be causing us to misperceive the other’s words and intentions. This helps us dial back any antagonism or defensiveness, making us more willing to solicit and listen to each other’s perspective. 

The importance of humility is why a good portion of my workshop is spent helping people see themselves more clearly, to get in touch with and accept the subjective nature of their perceptions, and the wonderful human foibles we all share. In my experience, this is a workshop game-changer. People become more open and more ready to listen.

Be willing to be vulnerable. 
Vulnerability is one of those emotions that can trigger our fight/flight survival drive. To our reptilian brain, the word conjures the image of a soft underbelly exposed to the sharp teeth of a predator. But in the context of difficult conversations vulnerability means exposing a very different part of ourselves: a particular fear perhaps, or an experience we don’t like to recall, or something we did or thought that we’re ashamed to admit. When appropriate and relevant to the conversation, revealing such vulnerabilities builds trust, deepens connection, and often puts the conversation in a more understandable and relatable light.

In my marriage, so many of our earlier difficult conversations were connected to my insecurities as a husband and breadwinner — insecurities I didn’t want to admit because it would make me look weak or deficient in some way. But admitting them had the opposite effect. Rather than annihilating my sense of self worth, as I had feared, showing vulnerability strengthened it as I discovered the freedom that comes with a new level of self-acceptance. And rather than putting my marriage on less stable ground, vulnerability reinforced its foundation with greater trust and compassion.

In my workshop, experiencing the power of vulnerability happens during an exercise where people reflect on and draw the high and low points of their life story. Afterward they break into pairs — often with a stranger — and share the story they drew. While the prospect of sharing their story can at first make people anxious, most work through their fear and reveal aspects of their life’s journey they often don’t talk about. The deep connection that results is profound. Typical comments include:

• “At first, I was afraid to tell much of my story. But my partner was so vulnerable in telling his that I decided to do the same. I’m so glad I did. It was a privilege to have this shared experience.”

• “I feel closer to this person, who I just met, than I do to some people I’ve known all my life.”

• "I’ve worked with this person for 10 years, and I never knew any of this about her.”

• “We come from such different backgrounds, yet we’ve had so many similar experiences and challenges. It’s helped me see that I’m not alone."

So how do we take what we know about humility and vulnerability and apply it to a real life difficult conversation? Here’s a thought:

Humility and vulnerability clearly go together. It takes humility to be vulnerable. So the next time you’re working through a difficult conversation, have the humility to ask yourself if there’s a part of you that’s under some protective shield, something that if said would help reveal the deeper issues impacting the conversation. See if you can identify it. And if the relationship is basically a healthy one, or if your intuition tells you can trust this person with your vulnerability, bring what you discovered into the conversation. You may find it totally changes the conversation dynamic — in a very good way.

If there's a topic relating to the art and science of difficult conversations you'd like me to address in my blog and newsletter, please let me know by emailing me at kern@difficultconversationsproject.org.

On Deep Stories and Alarm Systems

I recently came across an interview with renowned sociologist Dr. Arlie Hochschild, who spent five years “deep in Louisiana bayou country” to better understand the viewpoints of people she knew she’d have differences with. Her experiences and insights are chronicled in her New York Times bestseller Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. 

Here are a few edited-for-clarity highlights from her interview.

Sharing our ‘deep story.’

In response to a question about how we can learn to see things from the perspective of someone we disagree with, Dr. Hochschild replied that “the first thing we have to do is establish a civil floor, not to come to agreement but to disagree well.” 

It’s an important distinction. It means being able to disagree without losing empathy or compassion for the person we’re disagreeing with. “To disagree well,” says Dr. Hochschild, “we need to understand each other's deep story: The story and pictures that evoke the feelings of the person on the other side.”

As an example, Dr. Hochschild shared an experience of being in conversation with a small group of liberals and conservatives, brought together by the organization Living Room Conversations. It began, she said, “with a very general question: What kind of country do you want to see? And there was general agreement: we'd like it to be peaceable, democratic, prosperous….There was agreement at the general level.”

Then the conversation moved to a more controversial topic: government regulations. “At that point a Republican in the group said, ‘Well, I'm against government regulation; it goes too far.’ And he told a story about someone he knew who owned property, and after the passing of some  wetland mitigation legislation discovered he had some wetland that he hadn't even realized was wetland. Next thing he knew someone was tromping onto his property with a gun representing the government telling him it now was being regulated. 

“Well, I couldn't believe it... that's not my picture of regulation. But if it were my picture of regulation, I would agree with him. So let's talk about the picture. Right? It's not that he's responding differently from how I would respond to that picture of a man with a gun who’s the regulator. If you saw it that way, of course, you’d feel, ‘What are you doing here? Get off my property. It is my property.’ 

That's the level of conversation I feel is missing in the nation now, where we're seeing the pictures and the stories that evoke the feelings of the person on the other side.”

Turning off our alarm system

Another thing that makes difficult conversations difficult is what Dr. Hochschild calls our ”alarm system.” Unless we consciously choose otherwise, we’re primed to get angry or upset as soon as someone says something we find disagreeable or offensive.

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not that hard to turn off our alarm system if we set for ourselves the intention to just listen, as Dr. Hochschild did in this one last story:

“I was at a meeting of Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana. There were eight women around the table eating our gumbo, and one woman said, “Oh, I love Rush Limbaugh.” Rush Limbaugh! -- personally, I'm appalled by Rush Limbaugh -- he’s very angry and externalizing and opinionated, and every time he comes on the station, I'm not even interested. It's upsetting to hear him. So for her to love him -- oh my god, how could I identify with this woman?

“But I had my little switcheroo and I said, “Oh, I'd love to talk to you. Could we meet for sweet teas sometime this week and you can tell me why you love Rush Limbaugh?” So we sat down for sweet teas. I had told her what my project was and where I came from. And so she said, “Oh, I love Rush Limbaugh. He’s my dear heart,” she said, “because he hates femi-nazis.”

“Well,” I asked her, “who's a femi-nazi?” I thought, “Oh, my god. If she googled me -- she’d probably think I’m a femi-nazi.” Anyway, then we went on to environmentalists and I asked her why she didn’t like environmentalists. “Because environmentalists actually worship animals; they are animists. They put animals ahead of people.” So that was her understanding of environmentalists. That’s the picture that comes to her.

And after the interview, she said to me, “Is it hard? You've told me you come from Berkeley, California, and, you know, you don't agree with all the things I'm saying. Is it hard for you to listen to me?”

“And I thought, “Oh, she's watching me.” And I told her back, “No, actually it's not hard at all. I have my alarm system off. My purpose is not telling you who I am or trying to convince you of anything. I'm just trying to understand your world and I'm very grateful to you for helping me learn.” And she then came back and said, “Oh, I know what you're doing. I can turn my alarm system off too. I often do with my parishioners.” She was a gospel singer in a quite wonderful large Pentecostal church where her husband preached. “And I do that with my kids.” 

And then we had that in common -- that one thing in common. And she called me her first Democratic friend.”

Now you might be thinking, so what? What good does being friends do? She didn’t change her mind about femi-nazis or environmentalists.

But now she has an open communication channel to a liberal friend. She has a voice coming in from the other side, and that is golden. One of the main principles of persuasion, it turns out, is called likeability. If someone likes you, and if they think you like them, they’re far more likely to be open to what you have to say.

Compared to the other approach seems to be leading — one of ceaseless vilification on both sides — it’s hard for me not to see that as meaningful and hopeful progress.

Photo by John Cafazza on Unsplash

America: Tear Down This Wall!

As a kid in the ’60s, I learned to duck under my desk in the event of a nuclear attack. As a young man in the ’80s I got my first taste of social action, working to help educate the public on the folly of nuclear war and the imperative to end the Cold War conflict. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I remember the intense sense of relief, and the joy of anticipating a brighter future. I also became a believer in miracles, of sorts — the kind that come after a lot of hard work.

Now in a different 60s — my own — I’m helping to tear down another wall, this one entirely of America’s own making and on America’s own soil: the wall between liberal and conservative. Like the Berlin Wall, this wall too serves as a symbolic dividing line between two seemingly incompatible worldviews. It too is buttressed by a growing mutual certainty that the other side wants nothing less than the total defeat of its adversary. And it too obstructs and distorts our perceptions, provoking serious miscalculations that could end our democracy as we know it.

But perhaps the most important parallel between our wall and the Berlin Wall is the dynamic that built it: A psychological construct called the Image of the Enemy.

The Image of the Enemy

The Image of the Enemy is a phenomenon where each side in a conflict sees in themselves the exact same virtues, and in their enemy the exact same vices. Once created, this mirror image becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Convinced that survival requires responding in-kind to the other’s hostile actions, each side manifests behaviors that fulfill the other’s worst expectations. This explains why, in our conflict, both sides claim the mantle of patriotism while labeling their adversary seditionists, and why each can point to credible evidence of the other side’s anti-democratic activities.

Eventually the psychology of the Image of the Enemy undermines trust, corrupts channels of communication, exacerbates tribalism, distorts truth, justifies dehumanization, and finally leads to violence. Clearly, we’ve reached this point. And while it’s legitimate to claim that the violence so far has been mostly one-sided, that obscures a more salient fact: The dynamics of the Image of the Enemy require the participation of both sides, and any outcomes, negative or positive, are owned by all.

So what can we do? Now that we’ve built the wall, how do we tear it down? Here’s one critical lesson from the Cold War that can help.

Humanize the Enemy

At the height of the Cold War, citizen diplomacy — efforts outside US government channels to build relationships between the peoples of the US and USSR — helped each side deconstruct their Image of the Enemy by creating opportunities to humanize the “other.” Well-documented though rarely acknowledged, the impact of these efforts changed each side’s perceptions of their adversary and built critical public support for ending the Cold War.

Thankfully, the humanizing spirit of citizen diplomacy is alive and well today, evident in numerous organizations like Braver Angels, Living Room Conversations, and my own Difficult Conversations Project, which takes a deep dive into the art and science of difficult conversations, and how the tools of self-awareness can help us stay present and creative in any interaction.

Having the tools to engage the “other” in a spirit of respect and openness is, in my view, the greatest need of our time. Before I started the Difficult Conversations Project, I set out on a road trip across the country to talk to those who held views different from my own. I discovered the power of listening and genuine curiosity. These simple conversational strategies opened minds. They led to insights on both sides. Most importantly, they created an opening for more conversations in the future.

One obstacle facing many organizations working to bring liberals and conservatives together is the relatively low engagement of conservatives. And no, this is not evidence that liberals are more open-minded. Both groups show equal intolerance of opposing views. The hesitancy of many conservatives to engage, it turns out, may have more to do with perceiving dialogue as a liberal activity — indicating that the very idea of coming together to “talk things out” is itself part of the cultural divide.

While this obstacle can be overcome, it’s also an important reminder that most opportunities to connect with the “other” don’t require structured settings or liberal-friendly formats. Unlike citizen diplomacy during the Cold War, where relationship-building required visas, travel, translators, and other complex logistics, our “ideological other” is often a relative, friend, neighbor, or co-worker — people we see frequently, if not every day. And that means the opportunity to connect and humanize the “other” comes to us regularly and in the most neutral and mundane settings. To increase participation of everyone, it’s important to be ready, willing and able to take advantage of these opportunities when they arise.

Then What?

At this point you might be thinking, “So we’re successful at humanizing the enemy. Then what? Our differences and divisions will remain.” In many cases that’s no doubt true. But energy no longer invested in sustaining our Image of the Enemy will become available for more creative and collaborative purposes. Fear and antagonism, like other negative emotions, narrow our perspective, force us to miss critical information, and limit our range of responses to not much more than fight, flee or freeze. In contrast, empathy, compassion and other positive emotions broaden our perspective, open us up to new ideas, and encourage novel thinking — potentially leading to new, breakthrough solutions. Solutions that might just seem like a miracle.

Photo by Jonas from Berlin on Unsplash.

Be Curious, Not Judgmental

Part three of our series on deep listening.  

We all author our personal stories as we go through life, making ourselves the main character in a narrative that makes sense of everything we’ve seen or done. Being a good listener involves opening our own story and sharing the main character mantle — not easy when we’re in conflict with someone. 

One reason it’s difficult is our overconfident assumption that we can know the intention behind the words or deeds of others. For us, the calculation is simple: If someone says or does something we find offensive, inconsiderate or hurtful, we simply assume that was their intention. In other words, we attribute intention based on how someone’s actions made us feel — a barometer that research shows is highly unreliable.

Put the shoe on the other foot and you can begin to see why. As the main character in our own story, everything we do is contextualized for our internalized audience, which makes us, by default, the “sympathetic” character. Our well-intentioned goals and motivations are established, and even if we do something less than charitable, it can be justified as only a minor trespass, quickly forgiven. 

The classic example that comes to mind for me is driving in traffic. If someone cuts me off, the first and strongest reaction I tend to have is anger. Blame follows, whether I realize it or not. I decide that whoever cut me off is selfish and irresponsible. They’re unsafe. They wronged me, and they did it on purpose. But if I cut someone off — hey, it’s only me. I didn’t mean anything by it, and mistakes happen, right? 

Knowing this about ourselves, the key then is to give the other person the same benefit of the doubt. Imagine them as a fellow main character in an unfolding story. Be curious about where they’re coming from. What information are you missing that’s present in their own “main character” storyline? 

In the book, “Difficult Conversations: How to discuss what matters most,” the authors recommend a three question analysis to disentangle the impact a person’s actions or words might have from the intent behind them:

1. What did the person actually say or do?

2. What was the impact of this on me?

3. What assumptions am I making about their intent? 

When possible, check out your assumptions and give the other person a chance to clarify. And if that's not possible, try this: If you could easily forgive yourself for a similar word or deed, go ahead and forgive the other person as well.

It’ll make for a good ending.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop/Unsplash.com.

Opening up to new ideas

This week’s post is a continuation of our series on deep listening.  

How do you help someone open themselves up to new ideas? It’s a question that feels more relevant now than ever. 

Fortunately there is a way. It’s called deep listening. Unfortunately, it's not a skill we’re generally trained in. 

I remember vividly one of my first experiences engaging in a structured debate. In a high school social studies course we spent several days debating the issue of assisted suicide: the class split into camps, chose speakers, and debated back and forth, each side trying to win over those who were on the fence. For the entire period we traded undecided classmates back and forth, spending each turn trying to rile emotions higher and higher. In the end the two core groups were more entrenched than ever and those on the fence remained largely undecided. What the experiment seemed to have produced was hot tempers and more than a few hurt feelings. 

The thing is — debate in that format is an intellectual exercise. Watching two pundits argue on television does nothing but show you which one is more clever. Although there was no rule that said we couldn’t, at no point in my high school debate did either side spend their allotted time polling the opinions of the other group, asking questions and ascertaining what thoughts and fears might be driving their opinion.  Instead, each projected what they assumed the other group was thinking, and attempted to argue to them that these imagined thoughts were wrong or insufficient. Unsurprisingly, this was not effective in reaching anyone on a deep level. 

Deep listening turns the rules of debate on their head. Rather than arguing to win, our intention is to listen to understand — an approach that can lead to real change. For starters, being really listened to releases the neurotransmitter Oxytocin — sometimes called the love hormone — which is known to accelerate the formation of relationships and kickstart cooperation. And that, it turns out, can open the door to progress, as a recent Massachusetts ballot campaign demonstrates.

In 2018, a ballot measure in Massachusetts threatened to revoke the protection of transgender rights. Activists campaigning against the measure employed what is called ‘deep canvassing’: similar to typical political canvassing, volunteers went door to door, but instead of the usual, “here’s why voting for us is what you should do” approach, they asked questions, and really listened to the answers in an attempt to find out why people might be vote in favor. In instances where they felt a voter might lack empathy for discrimination against trans people, they asked them to think about and share times when they felt ostracized or mistreated. They showed empathy, and shared their own experiences living as a trans person. They were successful, and the activist group credited the win in part to the deep canvassing approach.

This technique was developed by Dave Fleischer through his work with the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and has been employed in similar campaigns all over the country with positive results. “The key part of this is having people think back on their real, lived experiences in an honest way,” Fleischer says.   

Even in the face of deep seated prejudice, listening can lead a person to open up, which enables them to connect. The idea is not to win, but to identify common humanity. If you can do that, both sides have already won. 

— Will Beare

Tune in for part three of this series. Part one is available here. 

Photo by Miguel Carraça on Unsplash

Stand on your ground

Think of a time when you’ve been humbled. How did it feel? Was there a sense of losing your place in the world? Your stature diminished?  Did it make you feel somehow vulnerable, and suddenly less picky about who you might associate with — because at that moment any company was good company?

The root of the word humble is hummus. It means ground. Being humbled is being grounded. It’s a closer experience of our true self. Neither less than nor better than anyone else. 

Being humble is one of the primary conditions for having a productive “difficult conversation.” It allows us to listen better, to be more open.

How do we nurture humility? One way, say the experts, is to cultivate experiences of awe and wonder. Such experiences tend to reduce the unpleasant mind-chatter of self preoccupation, while expanding our sense of connectedness.

Another way is to embrace our own humanity. When you start to harshly judge another’s attitudes or behaviors, ask yourself: “How am I like you?” If asked sincerely, the answer will quickly bring you back down to earth.

Can You Hear Me?

I’m not a fan of predictive text. Generally speaking I’m wary of anything designed to do work for us that wasn’t that difficult in the first place. But predictive text algorithms in particular give me pause because they allow (on a small scale) history to dictate the future in a repetitive way, using only what we’ve already done as the template for what to do next. 

Keeping the past in mind is important, but it’s equally important to continually take in the new. In a small, but not insignificant way, predictive text and convenience algorithms like it stymie our active participation in life by locking us into the patterns we follow. In the macro, it makes us behave a bit like drones. In the micro, it makes us bad listeners. 

Just as our phones and computers store data to predict the future, our brains do the same when we attempt to listen to one another. “The human brain is not a passive organ simply waiting to be activated by external stimuli,” wrote Harvard neuroscientist Kestutis Kveraga in a 2007 publication. Instead, says Kveraga, it’s continuously trying to predict the future based on the “memory of past experiences.” In other words, our brains are constantly set to autofill.

“Our predisposition to predict what someone’s going to say makes us prone to bad listening, which is particularly unfortunate given how important being listened to is to us all.”

This constant whirring of gears, filtering out “irrelevant” data in an attempt to be more efficient, is in many ways what makes humans exceptional. Ever wonder why you can navigate a crowded freeway while simultaneously creating a mental shopping list or preparing for a big meeting with the boss? Thank your brain’s ability to draw from past experience. But when it comes to actively listening to someone, our brain’s memory-based predictions can be a huge detriment. Our predisposition to predict not only what someone’s going to say, but also what exactly they’ll mean when they say it, makes us prone to bad listening, which is particularly unfortunate given how important being listened to is to us all.

So what is real listening? American psychologist Carl Rogers defined Active Listening as “empathic understanding, unconditional positive regard, and congruence behavior.” Breaking that down, the act of listening on a deep level requires you to be sensitive, to suspend judgement, and to commit to a positive result. It’s a lot to do at once, all while trying to filter back in what your brain might be filtering out. So is it worth it? 

Yes. Both for us and for the people we strive to listen to. A 2014 study for the National Institute of Physiological sciences in Japan measured the effect of active listening. Subjects were listened to by evaluators with and without active listening behavior, and brain imaging technology was used to measure results. Active listening behavior was identified positively by the subjects, and those interactions were shown to arouse positive feelings and were perceived as more beneficial. 

Being listened to feels good. It lets us know that we’re respected and valued by the people we interact with. Yet being the listener does not come naturally or easily to most. In subsequent posts, we’ll examine what active listening looks like, and strategies to improve that skill.  

— Will Beare

Sources:

Kveraga, K Top-down Predictions in the Cognitive Brain. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2099308/
Kawamichi, H Perceiving active listening activates the reward system and improves the impression of relevant experiences. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270393/#CIT0038

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash.

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"It was rich to be among them."

What happens when liberals from western Massachusetts get together with coal-country conservatives from Kentucky? More proof that common humanity prevails over political partisanship. This 9 minute podcast from WBUR’s Here and Now tells the story.

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Don't Walk Away

We’ve probably all had the experience of walking away from a relationship because the other person held an opposing view on an issue important to us. The basis of the relationship was undermined, and so we walked.

To our tribal reptilian brain, that makes sense. After all, you’re either with me or against me. Part of my team or part of the other team. But an honest look at the world today would tell us this reptilian brain logic doesn’t hold up. By walking away from each other, our divisions are deepening, our problems are mounting, and our conflicts are getting more heated.

So what’s the alternative?

Now I could say it’s to see we’re all on the same team — the team of humanity. But what does that really mean?

To me it means that we all carry — and at some level manifest — the same set of human attributes, the good, the bad and the ugly. Think about it: the root of every problem we face comes down to some set of universal human frailties, including fear, ignorance, pride, selfishness, arrogance and greed. Frailties that, if we’re honest, we’d admit to knowing intimately.

Prioritizing the relationship over being right — the first of three “new survival strategies” I talk about in my workshop and book — is an acknowledgment of this commonality. And when we clearly see how these frailties operate in our own lives, we can’t help but replace our harsh judgements of “the other” with something else we all have in common: humility and compassion.

And rather than walking away in rejection of the other, we can instead demonstrate what’s so sorely lacking in the world right now: acceptance, respect, and kindness. Not toward their views or actions, necessarily, but toward that which we share: our humanity.

Will that solve our problems? No. But it will create the only foundation from which they can be solved.

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"Agents of Dialogue" series: Mayor Mike Dahl

Redding, California Mayor Emeritus: Mike Dahl

Mike Dahl at a Difficult Conversations workshop.

While the goal of every Difficult Conversations workshop is to have as much diversity as possible, it’s a difficult task to accomplish without the help of local allies. In Redding, California — the 10th most conservative city in the state — that ally was Mike Dahl.

A Redding native, Mike had grown up in the area, served on the city council and as mayor, owned a local business, and remained thoroughly connected to community leadership. That background, together with his interest in the mission of the Difficult Conversations Project, made him the ideal person to help organize not just one, but a series of Difficult Conversations workshops.    

“I was enthralled with the concept of providing an objective workshop that focused on developing the skills necessary to augment a ‘difficult conversation.’ ”

Putting his connections and reputation to work, Mike helped assemble three of the most diverse workshops in the organization’s history. People representing the private, public, non-profit, and advocacy sectors — many of whom had histories of strong disagreements — came together to  find common ground and develop channels for positive discourse. 

The selection process, said Mike, was carefully considered. “We wanted diversity and balance. But we also wanted to attract people who would pass on the principles of open-minded, respectful dialogue to their social spheres of influence.”

The Redding workshops remain a model for the ideal grouping of individuals within a community. So what motivated Mike to help make it happen? “I was enthralled with the concept of providing an objective workshop that focused on developing the skills necessary to augment a ‘difficult conversation.’ Then as now, I was concerned by the fissures threatening our society, such as counterfactualism, conspiracy theories, and our evolving tribalism.”

Mike’s commitment to dialogue over division, however, is nothing new. Deeply concerned about America’s current “descent into warring clans,” he’s also lived through such times before.  

A lifetime reflecting on division

““In my view, I was an expert on the War in Vietnam...Maturity would eventually teach me that I was not an expert and I knew little about the war. I just happened to be there.” ”

Raised in a politically conservative household during the counterculture revolution of the 1960s, in the rural, ethnically homogenous community of Shasta County in Northern California, Mike followed the path of many young men in his community: He joined the Marines. Soon he found himself on the front lines at the outset of the Vietnam War, an experience that would lead to the first major shift in his worldview: “This surreal, brave new world of war, 6,000 miles from home, provided a lot of time to think… and ponder… and wonder, and ask questions of fellow Marines who came from other states, big cities with diverse cultures, and small towns in the Deep South and Midwest.”

After two tours of duty (during the first of which he was awarded the Combat Action Ribbon), he returned home to a country even more divided than when he left. Attitudes toward the soldiers coming home were cold, often hostile. At the time, he greeted the hostility in kind: “In my view, I was an expert on the War in Vietnam. This attitude set me up for another learning experience. Maturity would eventually teach me that I was not an expert and I knew little about the war. I just happened to be there.” 

Upon returning home he entered University, earning a bachelor’s in political science and a master’s in public administration. Mike spent much of the next few decades in the private sector as a partner in a manufacturing firm, often traveling to China and Mexico for work. Of these travel opportunities, he says, “I was exposed to a completely alien culture…my worldview continued to evolve and expand.”

During these years Mike also entered Redding local politics, serving terms as both city councilor and mayor in the late eighties and early-to-mid nineties. “During this period, I was able to leverage my knowledge of business in the private sector with my academic background in public administration. It was an experience that taught me humility and the importance of teamwork, like in the Marine Corps,” Mike said. 

“...wisdom is an asset. It has value. If it is shared. That is the key. If it is shared.”

Mike is now retired from his job, but remains highly active in the community he’s spent a lifetime working to maintain and improve. His energy for what can often be thankless work is nothing short of inspirational, but he sees it simply as his duty to the world and to future generations, saying, “wisdom is an asset. It has value. If it is shared. That is the key. If it is shared. To me, that is the responsibility and opportunity for our late-stage elder phase. We have a responsibility to the incoming generation to mentor, prepare, share, and guide. We can leave the world in a better condition than when we entered if we follow this path. Each generation must realize the legacy they leave behind is the legacy the incoming generation inherits. The good, the bad, and the ugly.” 

In closing, I asked Mike to reflect on how the issues facing his community and the world around have evolved since his time on council and before. The biggest change he points to is the ubiquitousness of social media, saying, “As a society, we are overwhelmed with information, disinformation, and noise. This novel digital platform has democratized social interaction, including the most bizarre and extremist assertions only a science fiction writer could develop in the past.” 

“…time is not static, and change is never permanent. Keeping that in mind provides comfort in the hope and desire that our upcoming generation of leaders and influencers will have the ability to listen and learn and participate in difficult conversations...”

He acknowledges that these trends have created some dark dynamics, but his own outlook is much brighter, “…time is not static, and change is never permanent. Keeping that in mind provides comfort in the hope and desire that our upcoming generation of leaders and influencers will have the ability to listen and learn and participate in difficult conversations, leading them through their lifecycle of leadership which will leave the world a better place when they leave than when they entered.”

— Will Beare

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The full text of the interview with Mike Dahl is available here. Mike and his former wife Pam also run the Nick Dahl Memorial Veterans Fund in memory of their son, Army veteran, Nicholas Dahl, as a means to assist local veterans with housing and to help with other veteran-related issues in the Redding community. 

Banner photo by Korney Violin on Unsplash

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Carrying On

The election is upon us and tensions are palpable. Amidst the flurry of news stories about final polls and last-minute campaign stops, my eyes have been drawn to articles and posts more personal in nature. In particular was the story of a mother whose son had cut her out of his life because they disagreed on who to vote for. He told her she wasn’t his mother anymore, and she was dubious they would ever reconcile. It’s an extreme example of a situation many have recently found themselves in: cut off from someone close by a conflicting ideology. 

There’s  an understandable instinct to throw too much weight onto what happens on Tuesday, November 3rd, but we should be cautious to do so. I don’t mean to imply that the outcome doesn’t matter. It certainly does. But for those who’ve had personal relationships fractured by the turmoil, what happens Tuesday won’t necessarily change anything. The blame may lie with a political machine but the mending comes from within, so best to start now. 

There’s a lie that’s spread all-too well, that we’re a country that no longer allows civil disagreement. An imaginary line’s been crossed and instead of discussion we simply oppose one another mob-to-mob. But this is only true if we allow it to become so.

A relative of mine posted on social media about her trip to the polls with her husband and young daughters. She shared her thoughts on the state of things that I found poignant:

“I’m seeing so many if-then statements (if you’re a democrat, then you hate babies, if you vote for Trump, then you are a monster). Generalized statements like these denigrate and dehumanize, and preclude understanding. While I do hold strong and ‘radical’ views, I also work very hard to understand how someone might believe differently at the same intense level. I’m not saying it’s easy, especially when you believe that your beliefs have a moral basis — but when I start by assuming there is something I don’t know, I tend to learn something, whether or not it changes my mind.” 

The perspective offered there is essential to approaching any argument, particularly a politically motivated one, whether you’re having it with a loved one or a total stranger. And allowing one, two, or even a handful of political issues however important to dictate who you can or cannot get along with is diminishing to the self. There is complexity to our identities that we need to embrace, in ourselves — and in others. 

So, though you may be on tenterhooks waiting for a decision Tuesday evening, whatever the outcome, you’ll carry on living and learning and changing, and so will the people you so strongly disagree with.

— Will Beare

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All he did was ask…

Will Beare on the Difficult Conversations Tour.

It was almost four years ago that I set out on a road trip with my father across the country, visiting 12 states over the course of a two-week journey. Our goal was to conduct interviews and host group discussions on the state of our political and cultural climate, culminating in our attendance of the 2017 presidential inauguration and the Women’s March that followed. This was an impulsive trip, but we’d recently awakened to the rather obvious reality that the emotional state of our country was far more fragile than we’d imagined, and we wanted to act. 

At a gas station stop in Southern Louisiana, I met a man who, after approaching me and chatting for a bit, asked me about the veracity of an article he’d seen claiming that Hillary Clinton was in prison, along with a doctored photo of her behind bars. I got the sense he knew not to trust his source, but was at a loss for where to turn for a second opinion. He displayed vulnerability in that moment that I think about often, even four years later. 

“Millions of dollars are spent building a narrative that he and I live in “two separate Americas,” that we should write one another other off and keep each other out of power at all costs, and in this wonderful moment it was money wasted.”

He represents the truest victim of the polarizing place we find ourselves in politically — a person who does not want to be uninformed, but is because the world around him has decided it will be so. And of course he isn’t alone. News comes at us now in tailored format — stories to fuel our not-so-neighborly instincts and deepen false divisions. This new normal is unsettling, but I’m bolstered when reminded of that brief interaction, because it’s a reminder that even the most effective attempts to be divisive fail in the face of honesty and compassion.  

To me, he represents the unlimited potential of what we refer to as a “Difficult Conversation.” I didn’t even seek him out— he saw that I was from somewhere else and decided that I might provide him with a different opinion. Millions of dollars are spent building a narrative that he and I live in “two separate Americas,” that we should write one another other off and keep each other out of power at all costs, and in this wonderful moment it was money wasted. The reality is that difficult conversations aren’t difficult because they’re unpleasant, but because there are forces at play trying to keep them from happening. The biggest threshold to clear is opening your mind and heart a bit. 

Had he not made the choice to strike up a conversation, the interaction wouldn’t have happened. It had been a long day of driving and I find the Bayou to be a bit spooky. I’d retreated for the moment into the bubble we all carry with us everywhere we go, ignoring my surroundings because they caused me mild discomfort, and this stranger brought me out, as though a cosmic reminder of why I was there in the first place.

It is so difficult to hate someone when you know their story. Hate does not allow for nuance, and we are nuanced creatures.

— Will Beare

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