Mindful Communication

November 21, 2011

The Background Story:

In the last six months at my job, I got really interested in how we communicate. My interest was sparked by observing how staff reacted to different people in leadership roles. And my initial goal was to figure out if there are easily adoptable things that make some leaders able to gain respect and cooperation more easily than others. The short answer (in my opinion) is yes and no. I do think that some people are naturally more suited for leadership roles; but a lot of leadership appears to be teachable. Specifically, it occurred to me that two people could convey the same message with two different speeches and get completely different reactions. I started listening incredibly carefully to the types of words that different folks used, and noting tactics that were particularly effective.

I love this game of listening to how people communicate; it makes every interaction a learning experience. Over the summer, I started trying to implement some tactics that I liked, some of which worked for me and others didn’t fit. The general skill I am trying to develop is speaking more gently with others. The specific skill has initially been focused around how to express a different viewpoint in a way that doesn’t immediately garner a prickly response. I was blessed with a plethora of amazing role models in my time at the Foundation, and some of my favorite “best practices” include:

1. In August I went to a course on evaluation theory taught by Mel Mark, one of the country’s experts on the topic. Yet regularly throughout the day, he would preface his comments with, “Now, from what I understand…” and then he would ask the class if that was how we understood the theory. The genuine modesty this conveyed—that he was positioning himself not as the expert, but rather a student of the field just like the rest of us—made me so much more attentive to his comments. It was incredible. That’s the kind of professor I want to be—deeply knowledgeable but unwaveringly interested in learning from others, regardless of their background and education.
2. My first supervisor at the Foundation was a powerful speaker because she is the most even keeled person I’ve ever met. By maintaining such a calm speaking style, you don’t get distracted by the way someone is speaking and can really pay attention to the content of what they are saying. Though this is not something I am likely to ever achieve (I just get so gosh darn excited sometimes!), I greatly admire the skill.
3. My second supervisor at the Foundation is a pro at explaining really complicated methodology in a simple way. In our department, we did a lot of teaching, and at times I felt like a broken record, saying the same things over and over again. I was always worried that at some point I’d hit my limit of times folks were willing to listen to my guided tour of statistical significance and bar charts. Yet she skillfully avoided this trap by prefacing things with, “I’m sure you know this, but…” kind of making every point a reminder of things we learned previously rather than her always teaching something new. Just fabulous.
4. Two of our program officers had a marvelous way of expressing an opposing viewpoint by starting with a positive about what the other person had just said. So even when they completely disagreed with someone, they would start a point by saying something like, “Wow, I never thought about it like that, thanks! Here’s what I had been thinking…” This one’s hard for me to pull off because I tend to have such strong opinions that the intro feels disingenuous to me. Maybe I need to model these ladies’ open mindsets at a more fundamental level before I have success here.
5. Another coworker was my idol for how she adapted her speaking style for each of the people she assists. She has a knack for understanding what makes people tick and can quickly shift between many different approaches. This to me is like a platinum level skill, which I don’t think I’ve seen someone so good at—it requires both an expert knowledge of effective communication and the prowess to switch between tactics smoothly.

The Recent Experiment:

Despite all my effort in this area, I noticed last week that it is the people I have known the longest that I am slowest to change around. I guess I fall back into old patterns when around people who knew me before the patterns were broken. It seems completely unfair that the people who put up with my flaws for the longest are the last to benefit from my self-improvement. Most recently, this manifested with my tendency to immediately shut my dad down the moment he suggests something contrary to my opinion. So I decided to go cold turkey on the word “no.” For one week, I tried my very best to avoid using the word “no” at all. My thinking was that there is always another way to convey your point, but leading with the word “no” is unnecessarily harsh.

Giving up “no” was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be and I think I did pretty well this week. There were, however, three occasions that I did not succeed at avoiding “no:”

1. There are a lot of phrases that have the word “no” in them! “No problem” and “no idea” are two that I use a lot. At the end of the week, I decided that these phrases were acceptable, because they are not harsh like “no,” so the general policy of speaking more delicately can still be achieved.
2. In one of the Dalai Lama’s famous speeches, he suggests analyzing your behavior at the end of each day, noting how many negative activities and how many positive activities happened. “Because you give this subject special attention, as time goes by your behavior will improve.” What I’ve found is that proper behavior becomes particularly challenging on days when your mind is not in top shape. I am not a nice person when I’m grumpy. I was in a foul mood one day this week and the “no”s came back out in full force. Ugh. In retrospect, I wonder if by focusing more on a concrete task like not saying “no,” my bad mood might dissipate because it would not have mental energy to feed on. An experiment for another day.
3. Direct yes/no questions, particularly when there is a language barrier, sometimes require a firm “no.” When my Nepalese cab driver asked “Do you want to stop to take a picture?,” he did not understand my response of, “That’s ok.”

This was a fun little experiment for me. I hope I’m able to keep avoiding jumping to the “no” reaction. Speaking more gently may be a lifelong challenge for me; I’m aiming for gradual improvement in my speaking style over many many years. But I like this strategy of taking a speaking tactic to an extreme for one week and I may try to think of some others for the months I’m back in the States. A week of speaking really slowly immediately comes to mind. Yikes, that sounds hard. Maybe I can start with just a day…