Category Archives: Real conversation

Tea and coffee and the whole damn thing

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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

~ T S Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

It was about to rain, the cafe looked warm and “we’ll have a quick latte”, we said, my friend wanting to put off the dreaded administration awaiting her at home, but guilty too. Then something happened. We saw real teapots and proper cups and ordered tea instead. She had a green cup with a gold rim, me a yellow one. And inhaling the honey vapour of Melbourne Afternoon the conversation went off-piste into matters wild and deep and never before said, matters in the earth of her life since she was small. We spoke strong and straight, and I saw the moment her shell cracked open. I saw her spirit move in freedom. Afterwards, we came out into the street new people.

I gave up coffee spoons twice over that day. I’m now measuring out my life in conversations.

***

Image: Konstantin Makovksy

Conversational polka

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He was funny and theatrical and I was having a good time talking to him. Then I started to notice that every so often he would make a bid to lead the conversation into the “downward spiral“* and that his poison of choice was politics. What else?

When I noticed it, I decided I was not joining him. I felt too full of happiness that day to be taking no low road.

The first time it happened I mildly acknowledged one of his points, and he was satisfied. At least for a bit. Second time it happened, I offered nothing. Third time it happened I decided I had to enter the dance in earnest. I started a conversation for possibility instead and invited him into it.

At some level he registered the deviation, and was big-hearted enough to choose to follow my lead. He tried the old gambit once or twice more, but his heart wasn’t in it now, and each time I just invited him back into the conversation for possibility. We talked and laughed for hours, and both of us felt exhilarated when we said goodbye. As Homer S would say, we were “embiggened”.

***

In the past, I was a downward-spiral-talking addict. I would do whatever it took to get people to talk doom and gloom with me. I still remember the kind of voluptuous hunger I felt to participate in yet one more session, and the twinge of triumph I’d feel when the old familiar strains would start up.

Nowadays, it’s different. My default position is that I’m not engaging in such conversations. Some days, I forget and get caught up in it again, but most days I’m not going there.

The impact of the downward spiral conversation is vicious. It disempowers the direct participants, and through them, proliferates in the conversations of all the people they come in contact with. It kills the possibility of anything new. It makes us immensely boring to ourselves.

If someone starts a downward spiral conversation in your vicinity:

  • disengage by saying something like, “this topic makes me feel disempowered [or unhappy or demoralised, etc]; I’d like to talk about another topic”, or
  • start a conversation for possibility.

***

* Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility

Image: Conversation by Piet Noest

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The feared communication

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So, I haven’t exhausted the topic of truth-telling yet. I’ve got something more to say.

A few years ago I took the series of courses known as the Curriculum for Living offered by Landmark Education. The first course in the series of three is the Landmark Forum; the second is a course known as the Advanced Course; the third is a course that stretches over 3-4 months which is called the Self-Expression and Leadership Program.

I’ve been a participant and a coach in the latter program, and there’s an exercise in the program that never fails to stun people. The exercise requires each participant, over the course of the program, to interview at least five people who are close to them. They can interview as many people as they like, but five is the suggested minimum.

The interview structure and set-up

The interview consists of five questions:

  1. What are my strengths?
  2. What are my weaknesses?
  3. What can you count on me for?
  4. What can’t you count on me for?
  5. If you were speaking on behalf of the people who know me, how would you describe me?

Participants are carefully coached on preparing for the interviews. They are told when inviting someone for an interview, they are to make it absolutely clear that:

  • the interviewee is free to say whatever he or she wants to say
  • the interviewer is eager to have an absolutely truthful conversation
  • regardless of what the interviewee says, the interviewer will not react to, nor in any way, dispute their answer.

Participants are encouraged to invite their nearest and dearest, as well as their nearest and not-so-dearest, into an interview. People generally interview their husband or their wife, their siblings, their parents, their bosses, their friends, their work colleagues and so on.

Interviews can be conducted by phone, or face-to-face.

The outcome

As you’d expect, many people are terrified at the prospect of this exercise. Some put it off until the very end of the program, some don’t do it.

Most people, however, do take it on, and listening to them talk about it is an extraordinary experience. People who might not have said a word for the entire 3-4 months, stand up and talk about what their boss said to them, or what their wife or their brother said to them, and they are exhilarated. “I was expecting something really negative and it wasn’t at all! What a surprise!”, they usually say, their faces lit up, their whole body moving freely.

What’s happening here?

The relief is huge. But why relief? Because we spend our lives fearing a certain communication is about to come our way. You know the one I mean. That certain communication you think is designed just for you that you feel might very well kill you if you heard someone saying it to you.

So potent is the fear of receiving this communication, we design our lives to make sure no-one ever says it. For example, we enrol in endless courses and proudly insist on our teachability to ensure we never hear someone telling us we’re dogmatic or closed-minded, say.

When participants do the interview exercise, they discover without fail that the feared communication is not there. Interviewees inevitably say something quite different.

Multiple effects

The exercise generates multiple effects, not merely the relief of not hearing the feared communication.

It also uncovers any unfinished business between two people. Because participants quickly realise it’s impossible to invite a person for an interview, or in some cases, to complete the interview, unless the unfinished business is addressed. Suddenly, it’s there staring you in the face and you have a unique opportunity to resolve it.

By far the biggest impact of the exercise lies in experiencing oneself as someone who is not afraid of the truth, someone who can handle truth-telling. For this reason alone, the exercise is priceless.

***

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Too little said, too much communicated

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I’ve been thinking about this matter of lying that came up in the last post, and it occurred to me we operate under three assumptions when we’re considering whether to be truthful with others:

  1. Only what’s said counts
  2. The person to whom I’m talking is small and fragile and couldn’t possibly handle the truth
  3. No-one will know I haven’t been truthful if I just say nothing.

1. Only what’s said counts

We have it that we’re not communicating if we’re not speaking. Wrong. The unsaid is communicated, and the unsaid shouts louder than the said. Not only does the content of the unsaid shout, the fact of it does too. All of us are geniuses of the first order when it comes to knowing something is there, something is off. As the great US novelist, Anne Tyler, has one of her characters say of his family situation:

Too little said, too much communicated.

And saying something rather than nothing doesn’t change the equation one jot if the something is not the truth. Withholding the truth and giving a “white lie” instead is still a case of the unsaid. The fact of the lie, the fact of the withholding, registers. It registers in the speaker and in the other person and in the world.

The world is not merely the said; it is also the unsaid. The world is not merely the things; it is also the non-things. The world is not merely being; it is also not-being.

2. “They are small and fragile and couldn’t possibly handle the truth”

Only one thing to say here, and I’d suggest a mirror would come in handy. Who is small and fragile and not able to handle the truth?

All of us are large and able. Unexpected wonders occur when we give up our listening of others as small.

3. No-one will know if I haven’t been truthful

Wrong again. You’ll know.

***

Image: Photograph by George Roder

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Straight-talking is not about changing anyone

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When we contemplate speaking with a colleague about something that’s bothering us, there are two things that usually stop us. The first is fear; the second is resignation. Fear doesn’t need any explanation, nor any discussion of remedies. There’s just “do it”.

Resignation is more subtle. Underneath resignation is the thought “they’ll never change”. In this we’re perfectly correct. People don’t change, or don’t change as a result of us speaking with them. However, something else can change, and that’s the relationship.

Here’s an example from my own experience. It’s about a small everyday concern, just the type of thing that can make our work lives miserable.

***

By the end of week one in the new workplace, I realised it wasn’t unusual my new manager was talking constantly. She was always like this. When I’d get out of the lift in the morning I’d hear her strong, ex-smoker’s tones from the other side of the floor, and ahead of me would stretch the prospect of a day sitting at the neighbouring desk being battered by a stream of her random thoughts and complaints. She never stopped talking. It wasn’t stuff that required an answer or a comment; it was literally the contents of her head. And because she was highly anxious, the contents, let me tell you, were no picture.

It was like sitting next to a car alarm.

By week two I knew I had to do something. The next day I invited my manager for coffee. Over coffee, I told her the ongoing conversation was making me distracted and unable to concentrate, and I asked her what we should do. As you’d expect, she was taken aback at first and she said what I’d suspected. “It’s what I do. I have to say my thoughts out loud.“

She said a couple more things including “I can’t not do it”, until she realised I’d asked a question and then the conversation took a little turn and I knew it was going to be alright. She suggested I wear headphones if I wanted quiet, and that I tell her if I was working on something that required extra concentration. She also suggested we review the situation in a few weeks’ time. I agreed and we went back to work, with me feeling happy because she was genuinely concerned and because I’d got to say what was there for me.

Eight months later when the project was complete and I was going on to my next consulting engagement, my manager took me out for lunch. Over lunch, and again in a card, she thanked me for my work and acknowledged me:

Trust is the most important thing to me, and I just knew I could absolutely trust you to do what was required.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence she cited trust. She cited trust as a direct result of the conversation eight months earlier. Because here’s the thing: she did not change her talking habits one iota. She was just as loud and talkative at the end of the eight months as she had been at the beginning. What changed was our relationship.

We went from knowing each other only as manager and subordinate, to knowing each other as human beings. I got she was someone who was prepared to participate in a difficult conversation with generosity and aplomb, and she got I was someone who wasn’t prepared to hide things. And thereafter, I just cut her some slack when she went on and on, and she gave up the micromanaging and let me run things as I thought fit.

What started out unpromisingly ended by being a satisfying experience for both of us. And I’d work for her again. Neither of us changed. The relationship did. And it was the relationship that did the work of having us operate together successfully. Where two people are concerned, the relationship is a third and infinitely powerful participant.

***

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More 360-degree foolishness

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Susan Scott, author of Fierce Leadership, describes 360-degree reviews as one of the worst “best practices” used by organisations.

Feedback, she says, is invaluable. It’s just “the anonymous part that gets us in trouble”.

We’re like Woody Allen saying, ‘I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’

Similarly, we’re not afraid of feedback. “We just don’t want to be in the room when it’s delivered.”

Here are some of her issues with anonymous feedback:

  1. Anonymous feedback doesn’t tell us what we need to know because it is anonymous;  ie, “most people don’t provide specific examples to support their evaluations because more specifics might help the recipient guess who wrote it.”
  2. When the feedback is given, usually once or twice a year, it “rarely immediately follows the behaviour that generated the evaluations, so exactly what we did right or wrong [...] remains a mystery.”
  3. Mostly, such feedback “merely affirms what we already know about who we have been since the day we were born.”
  4. Anonymity is “addictive and contagious”; we “grow accustomed to withholding our real thoughts and feelings. We become anaesthetised, barely registering the consistent message our gut has been sending us for years: Tell the truth. And we infect others.”

Why can’t we be straight with our work colleagues? It’s very simple, though we cook up a storm of reasons and justifications to pretend otherwise. “No, no, they’d be too upset”, “He couldn’t handle it”, “She’s going through a divorce”, “He’d get uncomfortable if I praised him”.

Ah. There’s the clue, the “tell”, as Scott calls it.

Who’d get uncomfortable?

The simple reason for our reticence is that we’re addicted to safety, addicted to being comfortable. Even if it’s momentary, we avoid discomfort at all costs.

She asks,

What is it we fear?

And answers thus:

The consequences of authenticity – intimacy and vulnerability. We fear being real, being ourselves, disclosing our real thoughts and feelings, being seen, being known.

She concludes,

It’s time to change all that.

To read her manifesto about changing it, read the book or go to the Fierce website.

***

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360-degree cruelty

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Earlier this year, when chatting with a client, I happened to mention I was writing a book about leaders. Instantly, the atmosphere changed, and the idle chit-chat became a real conversation. She told me a tale to make any employee’s hair stand on end.

In the previous year, she had had difficulties in the working relationship with her boss who had since left the company. She didn’t elaborate about the difficulties. Somewhere in the midst of the strife she had been asked to complete a 360-degree review.

A 360-degree review is an online survey which rates different aspects of an employee’s performance. It is sent to a certain number of people who are peers, “subordinates” and managers of the employee, the idea being it will provide various viewpoints – a 360-degree panorama – of an employee. The employee chooses the people to whom the survey will be sent, but does not know which person has given which response because the responses are anonymous.

The client did as requested and got a big shock. On the parameters purporting to measure emotional intelligence she scored close to the negative end of the spectrum. This was directly counter to her expectations. She said,

I was totally devastated.

She mentioned two other points:

  • as a result of the review a coach had been hired to help her raise her performance in specific areas
  • over a year later, she still puzzles about who said what, and why they might have said it.

I’ve thought about her story several times since I heard it. Here are some observations.

Institutionalised cruelty

360-degree reviews represent institutionalised cruelty. Franz Kafka wrote about modern man’s worst nightmare: the unspecified crime alleged by the unspecified accuser. And here we are, practicising the nightmare every day.

Institutionalised cowardice

360-degree reviews represent institutionalised cowardice. Such is the terror at the prospect of speaking to another human being in a way that’s straight and frank, a whole industry of cowardice has been concocted to avoid it.

The impact

A person treated in this way may be seriously impacted for months, even years, into the future if he or she doesn’t have the opportunity to get complete on the experience. In this person’s case, the coach may be able to assist her; however, at the time we spoke the emotional charge was still palpable.

How’s she left?

This person was big enough, courageous enough, to continue in her job, and since that time things have improved dramatically. The problematic manager has resigned and she admires her new boss. On the other hand, she is left unsure of where she stands with her colleagues and what they really think of her. That’s potentially crippling.

What about you? Do you have any horror stories of 360-degree reviews and other organisational instruments of torture? Add a comment or write me an email. I’m going to start keeping a file of them.

****

Image: From the movie, The Trial by Orson Welles, 1962, based on Kafka’s book

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The Truth about Truth: Part 2

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The story so far:

The truth about truth is that human beings are incredibly lousy at apprehending the truth. Most of the disappointments and frustrations at work – indeed, any place – are due to such misapprehensions. There are at least three common types of misapprehensions. The first, covered yesterday, is mistaking inference for the truth.

This post is about the second.

***

Misapprehension 2: Not enough information

The second common failure to apprehend the truth is your garden-variety misunderstanding.

A guest on a recent radio program gave a great example, great because it’s so banal, so typical of what happens in workplaces all round the countryside.

An employee who we’ll call P receives an email from her manager. The email expresses some dissatisfaction with something P had done and requests she do it differently next time.

P then notices the email has been copied to a senior executive. She goes into shock. She says, recounting it later,

I felt sick. Every time I thought about the email my stomach turned. I was so upset with my manager, I couldn’t understand why she had done that.

P’s upset and bitter rage with her manager persists for weeks. She can barely function at work. At last, after two months, she decides to speak to her manager.

Her manager tells her she copied in the senior executive because it was the senior executive who had requested the matter be addressed. The truth then? The manager was doing what she had been requested to do by the senior executive, and she was letting the executive know she had done it.

Maybe the manager could have handled it better by keeping the two communications separate, but she wasn’t doing any of the sabotaging things P had envisaged she was doing.

As the radio guest, a dispute resolution practitioner, noted

If P had had a conversation with her manager at the outset, she could have avoided it all.

Instead, she’d suffered in bitter rage for two months, which sounds horribly protracted except most of us have scores of incidents under our belt where we’ve hung out for far longer.

The wonder of it really is that P got it resolved after only two months. Having straight conversations, the risky kind – those which Susan Scott calls “fierce conversations“ – in the workplace is not your average, everyday occurrence.

And yet these type of misunderstandings, our second common failure to apprehend the truth, are rampant.

To be continued …

***

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Image: Poster by Raymond Savignac, 1986, courtesy of Galerie Montmartre, Melbourne, Australia

Leadership’s allure

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Leadership has always had a charge for me, as a concept and a practice. There are at least three reasons:

  • On good days, I recognise it in myself.
  • It is missing from the public conversation of Australia.
  • It is elusive as a concept, and I find this alluring.

Leadership as a missing in the public conversation of Australia

The other day I was in an airport book shop, prime terrain you would think for books on leadership. There were none. There were no Australian books on leadership. And there were no books on leadership from the US, the home of the concept of leadership.

What the business section of the book shop had instead were books on making money (How to make a million in a month), avoiding work (How to work 4 hours a week) and investing in property (Your path to 20 properties in 2 years).

Continue reading →

Real conversation #4

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A little while ago in response to a previous post on real conversation, Dafna asked whether real conversation could occur on a blog.  I answered “no” because it requires one person being with another.  Now I tossed this off pretty cavalierly, and since then I’ve been thinking about what I meant by this “being with” and how Dafna has put her finger on the great issue that underlies the topic of real conversation.

The great, precious jewel

The make-up and problem of “being-with” is everywhere in philosophy, psychology and religion.  Who are we, and how are we, in relation to another?

The problem is probably best defined by this negative instance I heard a psychoanalyst give.

It may sound strange to say this but there are more people around than one may realise that do not really see that there is another person there that is different from me. And if I’m in that state, I will try to drag the other person into my own mode of being. (1)

“Being-with” or Mitsein is a special instance of the key concept of Dasein (Being there) for the philosopher, Martin Heidegger.  “Being-with” underlies Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue and the “I-Thou” relationship, as well as the radical asymmetry of the Other in the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas.  It’s all through the courses I took at Landmark Education, so heavily influenced by Heidegger, and it’s also key to counselling methodologies such as that used in Imago Relationship Therapy founded by Dr Harvill Hendrix in the US.

Today I want to look at Imago because it focuses on the crux of the matter of being-with: the great precious jewel we’re seeking in all our interactions with others, to wit, emotional presence.

Finishing childhood at last

Hendrix begins with a startling proposition – that the whole (unconscious) purpose of marriage is to help each other

… finish childhood. (2)

When looking for a partner, he says, we all unconsciously bring to the search the “template” of our own caregivers.  In fact, we search not only for our parents, we search for the negative aspects of our parents.  We do this, Hendrix says, because we are looking to satisfy our unmet needs from childhood.

Oh huh.

Yes, this means exactly what you think it means.  Once the spell wears off, we find our “dream” lover has morphed into our “nightmare” person, the very same type of person who didn’t meet our needs in childhood.

And conflict starts or escalates.

Partners stay away from home, drink, gamble, have affairs, and so on.  And because in our society we’ve been conditioned to view conflict as something to fear or suppress, when it arises in our marriage or relationship, most of us can’t be with the chaos and we attempt to “restore order instead.”  For example, Hendrix says, we decide to divorce or lead separate lives or live in a “hot” marriage, which is not anything as appealing as it sounds, rather, it’s a life of constant argument.

Yet, he says, if we can resist the urge to restore order, we might come to see instead that

conflict is growth trying to happen.

For here, in the midst of the conflict and the chaos, is the golden opportunity, the opportunity we’ve been waiting for since childhood.  The opportunity to finish childhood and be free at last.

Did you get that?  The ramifications?  For it means that the great opportunity of intimacy comes not on wings of romance and fulfilment, but through, and only through, conflict.

How amazing is that?  How contrary to all our conditioning.  What’s even more amazing is that we can take up this golden opportunity, resolve the conflict and finish childhood by one simple means: real conversation.

One core need and one solution

Imago proposes that the unmet needs of childhood, though they have different flavours, boil down to one core need – the experience of connection or emotional presence.  Many or most parents may be caring, even loving, yet not be emotionally present to the child.  Being emotionally present to the child means really experiencing the child experiencing themselves, and not substituting the experience with the parents’ own expectations or ideas of what the child should be feeling.

Imago proposes that this one core need, and the rupture or failure of it in childhood which we carry into adulthood, has one solution: dialogue, or what I’ve been calling real conversation.

“I see you”

Imago teaches couples a highly structured form of dialogue and to become skilled in it you should consult an Imago practitioner.  In any event, the exact form of the dialogue is not as important as the key elements and why it works.  The key elements include the simple technique of mirroring, a kind of manifest demonstration of curiosity and a final empathising statement.  The isolating of the curiosity dimension is really interesting because it’s curiosity that first signals,

I’m paying attention to you, I see you.

It’s the element that most clearly announces you have stepped over the threshold – the threshold of one’s own ego – and are becoming “fully dialogical.”

And when you become “fully dialogical,” you become, at last, emotionally present to another, and you have the peerless experience of profoundly and accurately knowing another person.  By engaging in this kind of dialogue with your partner, the unmet needs and scars from childhood begin to be healed and the marriage or relationship can begin from a whole new place.

You will marvel

To know another human being in all their particularity, in every way they are, and in every way they are not – and in turn, to be known in this way – is what we all long for.  And when it occurs you will never forget it and you will marvel.

For more information about Imago Relationship Therapy, click here.

*****

Image: The Conversation (1908-1912), Henri Matisse

Notes

1. Dr Neville Symington, “Loving Companions”, Encounter, Radio National, broadcast by Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), May 16, 2010

2. I have paraphrased Dr Hendrix’s ideas from a talk he gave in the radio program listed in (1).