Loopy conversations. Over the years I’ve seen people and teams go round and round in loopy conversations trying to determine whether some goal is a what or a how, a how or a why, a means or an end. The reason such conversations spin is that end and means (etc.) are not attributes inherent in any particular goal. Instead, they express relationships among goals. In order to sort out means and ends, you have to consider the relationships among goals.
Example. Suppose I want to buy a plane ticket to Toronto. Is this goal a means or an end? There’s nothing about buying a ticket per se that makes it one or the other. But suppose I want to buy a ticket so that I can attend the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. Buying the ticket is a means to the end of attending the conference.
So attending the conference is itself an end, right? Well, not quite. At least, not in and of itself. I want to attend the conference in order to confer with Agile colleagues. Attending the conference is itself a means to the further end of conferring with Agile colleagues.
Now, hold on. Just two paragraphs ago I said that attending the conference was “the end.” Now I’m saying that it’s a means. What’s going on?
Chain of goals. One thing that’s going on is that, like any goal, my goal of attending the conference exists in a chain of goals, each instrumental to achieving some deeper goal. I want each thing in order to achieve some more important thing, some deeper goal. I want to buy a plane ticket in order to attend the conference. I want to attend the conference in order to confer with colleagues. The chain (or this part of the chain, at least) looks like this:
buy plane ticket -> attend conference -> confer with colleagues
So… is conferring with colleagues the end? Again: not in and of itself. I want to confer with colleagues in order to (among other things) build relationships with them. That is, conferring with colleagues is a means to the end of building relationships. Now the chain is:
We could keep going. I want to build relationships in order to … And so on. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to discover whether the chain ends and (if so) where.
We can also extend the chain in the other direction. In order to buy a plane ticket, I will have to (say) call United on the phone. And in order to call them, I’ll have to look up their phone number. And in order to look up their phone number, I’ll have to … (Another exercise for the reader.)
Relationships among goals. Okay, so our goals form a chain. Each goal in the chain is a means with respect to the goals later in the chain and an end with respect to the goals earlier in the chain. Similar for how versus what, or how versus why. With respect to conferring with colleagues, attending the conference is a means, a how. With respect to buying the plane ticket, attending the conference is a what, a why, an end. Means and end thus express relationships among goals.
Distinguishing means and ends. Okay, so how does this help untangle a tangled conversation? In any moment, in any conversation (loopy or otherwise), what makes a given goal a means or an end?
The answer: Your attention. No kidding. The only thing that makes a goal an end is that you’ve decided, however momentarily, to focus on that goal in particular, to hold that goal in your mind as the goal. That’s it. If you choose to focus on the goal of attending the conference, your focus (temporarily) makes attending the conference the end, and each goals earlier in the chain a means to that end. Whichever goal you hold in your mind as the one to focus on, that goal becomes (temporarily) the end, and all the earlier goals become means to that end.
Unwinding the conversation. If you find yourself stuck in a conversation about means and ends, pause the conversation long enough to draw the chain of goals on a flip chart or whiteboard. Or scratch it into the wall with a nail. Show that the chain can extend in either direction. Then with that picture visible to everyone, get back to whatever you were doing before you got wrapped around that axle.
A further complication: Design versus requirements. A further complication comes into play when people argue about whether a given choice is a design choice or a requirement. The distinction is not in the choice itself, but in your choice of which system you are discussing at the moment. Every requirement for a given system is itself a design choice for some larger system. Every design choice for a given system creates requirements for one or more subsystems.
Whether a give choice is a design choice or a requirement is not an inherent quality of the choice itself. The distinction between design and requirement depends entirely on your point of view, in particular on your choice of which system you are talking about.
So if you’re in a loopy conversation about whether some choice is a requirement or a design choice, stop the looping and take some time to identify as well as you can which specific system you are talking about. That sometimes helps.
Esther says, “Some people are uncomfortable expressing appreciation.” I know something about that. When I first learned about Temperature Reading, at Weinberg & Weinberg’s week-long Problem Solving Leadership workshop in 1992, I felt very uncomfortable expressing appreciation. We held several Temperature Readings during the week, and at each I expressed my appreciation to several people for things they had done. Each time, as I opened my mouth to speak, my throat tightened and my eyes teared up. I was puzzled about that, and I made a mental note to think about what was going on for me in those moments. Why would it be so difficult to express something as wonderful as appreciation?
Over the next several months I experimented with expressing appreciation to people at work. Slowly I noticed what made it hard for me. Whenever I expressed my appreciation, I was reminding myself (unconsciously) that I, too, yearn for appreciation, and that I wasn’t experiencing the appreciation I wanted from others. And I was reminding myself (again unconsciously) that I often left my own appreciation unexpressed.
Once I was aware of my yearning, I found ways to satisfy it. The most important way was to remember to express appreciation for myself. When I began to do that, I found that I was more able to appreciate others, and that I didn’t feel such a strong need for other people to appreciate me. I’m sure that affected the way I related to people, because they began to express their appreciation for me.
In a comment on Esther’s article, Robert Watkins suggests that “This is one of those new age ideas which can be nice in theory, but in practice often just results in fake sincerity.” When I’m facilitating a session of appreciations, I do a few things that encourage sincerity. First, I invite appreciations. I don’t require them. It’s possible that people may feel some internal pressure (“I should …”) to say nice things when others around them are saying nice things to each other. I haven’t noticed a problem with that. Sometimes I see a chain reaction, in which the people who receive appreciation immediately want to offer appreciations of their own. However it happens, the appreciations that people express seem sincere to me.
Second, I encourage the person giving the appreciation to describe specifically what the receiver did, and what need that fulfilled for the giver. The main reason I encourage this is that the specifics make appreciation more meaningful, both to the giver and to the receiver. Sincerity is just a bonus, a nice side effect. It’s hard to be both insincere and specific about what someone has done and what need that has served for you.
In another comment, Jason Yip says, “I’m wondering if it’s useful, if doing it in public is a bit too ‘New Age’, whether it would be appropriate to start out with individuals doing it privately by themselves.”
I think it is wonderful for individuals to start by offering appreciations in private. It’s also wonderful to start in public. Here’s an example.
My friend Joe managed a team of a dozen software developers. He wanted his team, one of the more effective teams in the organization, to become even more cohesive than they already were, and asked me to help with that. One of Joe’s concerns was that the people on the team may not be reviewing each other’s code as often or as eagerly as he would like. We talked more about the situation, and decided that I would facilitate a Temperature Reading for the team.
A Temperature Reading is an activity that gives a team important information about itself and its members. The first phase of a Temperature Reading is appreciations. I offered people an opportunity to express appreciation to their colleagues for things they had done.
The people in the room—hardcore geeks all—had no trouble offering appreciations to each other. They offered dozens. And my impression was that about half of the appreciations were about code reviews. “John, I appreciate that you found that null pointer bug in my code.”
Joe noticed, over the next few weeks, that people were more eager to review each other’s code, and more eager to express appreciation to each other in the moment.
Starting privately is good. Starting publicly is good. When it comes to expressing appreciation, whatever will get you started is the right way to start.
Speaking of getting started, I started to write this article two weeks ago, inspired by Esther’s earlier article. Then I set it aside. Today Esther offers another look at appreciation, this time as a form of recognition. And I was inspired again.
Esther, I appreciate your two articles about appreciation. The first inspired me to remember some of the wonderful things I’ve learned about appreciation, and to start writing this article. The second inspired me to finish what I’d started.
Robert and Jason, I appreciate your expressing your concerns. Your comments to Esther inspired me to write about my experience doing Temperature Readings with technical people, many of whom may share your concerns.
Here’s an old saw: “Studies show that only seven percent of our communication comes from words. The rest comes from nonverbal cues—38 percent from vocal cues such as tone of voice, and 55 percent from body language.” I’ve heard that hundreds of times, but until yesterday I’d never seen a source for those figures.
I learned yesterday, through an online forum about training and coaching, that the “seven percent” claim is a misrepresentation of studies conducted by Albert Mehrabian. I decided to find out what Mehrabian himself had to say. I searched the web and found that in the few cases where people give a source for the claim, they cite Mehrabian’s book Silent Messages . I hopped into my car and drove to the CSUS library, near where I live, to research this.
In Silent Messages, Mehrabian gives the following equation:
Next, he briefly describes related research by other people about other communication and feelings. Based on that, he generalizes from liking to “all feelings”:
In Silent Messages, Mehrabian refers to more detailed descriptions of his research in another book, Nonverbal Communication .
Nonverbal Communication describes Mehrabian’s research. He constructed a number of inconsistent messages about feelings. Each message included three specific components: specific words, specific vocal qualities, and specific facial expressions. Each component was designed to convey a specific attitude (positive or negative) and a specific strength (e.g. strong liking or mild disliking). Mehrabian constructed inconsistent messages by combining components of differing strengths and attitudes.
Mehrabian observed people giving and receiving these mixed messages, and assessed the receiver’s perception of the sender’s feeling. From this information, Mehrabian performed a linear regression to assess the extent to which each component contributed to the receiver’s perception of the sender’s feeling. That’s where the percentages come from.
Mehrabian is very careful in these books not to generalize beyond the specific context of his research: He studied only messages about feelings, specifically inconsistent messages about feelings. Also, he notes that his generalization from liking to general feelings is unverified, and that the specific percentages in the formula are probably not exact. He does seem confident that for mixed messages about feelings, facial messages carry more weight than vocal messages, which in turn carry more weight than verbal messages.
Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.
Language Log is one of my favorite blogs. Today Geoffrey K. Pullum posted “Get Your Boyfriend to Move It,” a marvelous case study of communication gone awry. Read it now, before reading my analysis below.
When I teach communication, I use Virginia Satir’s Ingredients of an Interaction as my foundational model. The Ingredients model describes the process by which we receive messages and respond to them. First we take in information through our five senses (the Intake step). Next we make meaning of the information we receive (the Meaning step). Then we gauge the significance of the message (the Significance step). Finally, we respond outwardly (the Response step).
Pullam’s “boyfriend” story is a wonderful example of what can happen when we make mistakes in one of the steps.
Early in the phone call, the animal rescue officer makes a mistake in Intake: she hears “feline” instead of “sea lion.” The subsequent conversation, which I’m sure seemed bizarre to each of the women as it was happening, validates a key principle of communication: If you get the Intake wrong, you’re certain to get the Meaning wrong.
When the animal rescue officer suggests that the resident ask her boyfriend to move the animal, the resident interprets that as sexism and lack of concern. That seems like a reasonable interpretation to me, given the conversation up to that point. Reasonable, but mistaken, and the mistake exacerbates the confusion.
When the officer suggests that the resident ask her father for help, the resident, even more puzzled than before, says, “Umm, my father?” It’s possible that the resident is testing whether she heard the officer’s words correctly, but I suspect that this is more a test of Meaning than of Intake. Not, “Did you say, father?” but, “What does my father have to do with this?”
The officer explains her meaning, and the conversation continues, each person working from a mistaken interpretation of what the other is talking about. This exemplifies another principle of communication: If you get the Meaning wrong, you’re certain to get the Significance wrong. The resident increasingly believes that the animal rescue officer doesn’t care about her plight, or even understand it. The significance is that she fears that she will not get the help she needs. She expresses her incredulity through her increasingly annoyed tone of voice.
Eventually the resident says that the animal weighs three or four hundred pounds. Well, clearly, pussy cats do not weigh three or four hundred pounds, so the officer can’t make sense of this. What she’s hearing is so nonsensical that she knows she’s getting the meaning wrong. So she checks her Intake by repeating the non-sequiturial phrase, adding emphasis to express her confusion. “Three or four hundred pounds?”
Yep, she heard right. Then the resident repeats the words that the officer misheard the first time: “sea lion.”
It’s challenging to notice these communication errors. It’s challenging to notice Intake and Meaning errors before they’ve escalated into feelings and Significance. How can we notice these errors in our own conversations?
What were the clues in this story that something was going wrong? The strongest clue is confusion. Each woman, at several points in the conversation, is stunned. Being stunned is a darned good clue that communication has gone off the rails somewhere. And that’s a good time to stop, step back, take a breath, and walk slowly through the Ingredients of an Interaction one step at a time.
Upon being stunned by the officer’s initial suggestion, the resident could check her Intake. “Did you say that my boyfriend could move it for me?”
When the officer confirms that she indeed said that, the resident might then check the Meaning she’s making. She might say something like, “Do you mean that this seems like a small problem, and that you do not want to help me?”
That may or may not clear things up. If not, the resident (the only one who knows, at this point, that the communication is tangled), might check the officer’s Intake. “What did you hear me say?”
The resident may also choose to express her confusion. “I don’t understand why you would suggest that I ask my boyfriend (if I had one) to help me move a dead sea lion.”
Any of these ideas might help to untangle the communication. None of these ideas is hard to do. What’s hard, for me at least, and perhaps for these two women, is to notice the confusion rather than simply acting out of confusion. When I’m stunned in a conversation, I’m as likely as the next person to continue as if it all makes some sort of sense, and to stumble from one non-sequitur to the next, utterly failing to notice that confusion is important information about the quality of our communication.
I’ve been thinking about a number of “flows” within organizations — the flow of authority, the flow of value, and the flow of communication — and how they interact. I have a few ideas and a lot of questions today. No answers.
The flow of authority is defined by the organization’s formal hierarchy. Authority is the organization’s permission to allocate its resources. People higher in the hierarchy have greater authority. That is, they have permission to allocate more resources.
The flow of value is the circulatory system of the organization. The organization functions by arranging the flow of value within and across its boundaries. Across the organization’s boundaries, products and services flow out to customers; and money flows in. Profits flow out to investors; investment capital flows in. Money flows out to suppliers; materials and tools and services flow in. As long as each flow creates value for each person who participates in the flow, the organization sustains itself.
Within the organization, value flows from group to group. Each group acts as internal investors, customers, and suppliers for others. As long as each flow creates value for each group, the organization thrives.
Here are some questions I’m pondering: How do these flows relate to each other? How do they interact? What are the effects of different ways of relating and interacting? What kinds of interactions lead to a healthy organization? What kinds lead to organizational illness and death?
Communication flows along both kinds of channels. It flows up and down the hierarchy, and it flows through the networks of internal and external investors and customers and suppliers. It flows from one channel to the other, allowing the flow of value and the flow of authority to inform each other.
What happens when communication flows less readily along each path? One kind of blockage is when communication flows more readily within a group, but not across the group’s boundaries to related groups. This is the familiar stovepipe or silo problem.
What other kinds of communication blockage are there? Are there organizations, for example, in which the people in each group communicate readily with their internal customers and suppliers, but not up and down the authority hierarchy? What do those organizations look like?
What other kinds of flow are there? How do they relate to the flows of value, authority, and communication, and to each other? What are the characteristic symptoms of blockage in each flow?
I suspect that thinking about flows can help us identify ways to increase an organization’s health.
Listening is a crucial skill. You’ve heard that so often that it has become a platitude. I’m sad about that because… well… because listening is a crucial skill.
Crucial for what? If you want to unstick a stuck conversation, you will need to listen well enough to understand what the other person is saying. If you want to respond to resistance, or to resolve a conflict that involves a significant emotional component — and nearly all conflicts do — you will need to listen for the other person’s motivations. If you want to maintain or strengthen or repair a relationship, you will need to listen for the other person’s feelings and needs.
Okay, listening is crucial. That’s still a platitude unless we put some details behind it. If listening is so important, what are some practical steps we can take to improve? I’ve found a number of tests that help me sharpen my listening.
In any situation in which listening is especially important, my first goal is to make sure I am prepared to listen. To test how well I am prepared to listen, I ask myself, “To what extent am I willing to be changed?” If I enter a conversation intent on persuading the other person to my point of view, unwilling to change my own point of view, I limit my ability to listen.
This is just a test, not an admonition. I’m not recommending that you go into each conversation prepared to abandon your most cherished beliefs and values. Into each conversation you bring a suite of plans, intentions, conclusions, interpretations, judgments, beliefs, and values. You may be willing to change some of these things, and inflexible about others. The key is not to put all of these up for negotiation, but to be mindful of what you’re holding onto, and mindful that inflexibility may limit your ability to hear what other people are saying. Are the things you’re holding onto more important than listening fully? That depends on the specifics of the situation. My way of sorting out the specifics is to notice what I’m holding onto and to remind myself of my choices. I ask myself, “What am I holding tightly to in this conversation? Is this more important to me than listening with empathy to what others are saying?” If so, fine. If not, I’ll want to relax my grip so that I can listen.
The first test is about being prepared to listen. The next test tells me whether I am understanding what another person is saying. To test for understanding, I say what meaning I’m making of the other person’s words, then ask “Is that what you mean?” If the person replies, “Yes, that’s what I mean,” I’ve understood. If not, I haven’t.
In most cases, if I didn’t understand well the other person will point out the parts I misunderstood or rephrase them in some way. Every now and again I have to prompt for clarification by asking, “What parts did I misunderstand?” After the person clarifies, I can test again for whether I understand.
This is a test of understanding, not of agreement. I may understand perfectly well, to the other person’s satisfaction, and still disagree.
The second test tells me whether I have heard a piece of what another person is saying. Now I want to know whether I’ve understood all of what the person wants to say. To test whether I have listened fully, I ask, “Is there more that you want to say?”
Sometimes the person has more to say, and says it. I use the “test for understanding” to make sure I’ve understood the new information and how it fits with what the person said earlier. Then I ask again, “Is there more?” When the person says, “No, there’s no more I want to say,” I’ve listened fully.
The second and third tests tell me whether I’ve fully understood the person’s meaning. Sometimes I want to go further, to empathize to make sure I’ve understood the feelings and needs behind what the person is saying. To test my empathy, I ask, “Are you feeling because you are needing ?” And I fill in the blanks with whatever feelings and needs I think the person is experiencing.
How do I know what the other person is feeling and needing? Sometimes the person expresses feelings directly: “I’m angry” or “I’m disappointed” or “I’m really looking forward to this.” Sometimes the need is clearly expressed: “I’m worried about losing my job.”
Sometimes the signs are less direct — shouting, a crack in the voice, changes in gestures, body position, facial expressions, or skin tone. I never know for sure what these mean. Sometimes, especially when I notice a sudden change in one of these signals, I ask, “What’s going on for you? What just happened?” Other times, I take the advice that Kelly Bryson offers in his book Don’t Be Nice, Be Real : guess! As Bryson says:
You do not have to guess right. Just guess human. Just imagine a human feeling and need that might be behind their words. Guessing feelings and needs at least puts us in the camp of humanness, instead of judgment.
The best way I know to build skill in understanding other people’s feelings and needs is to learn more about my own. As I learn to distinguish my feelings and needs more accurately, and to empathize with them, I am better able to imagine what others may be feeling and needing. The Center for Nonviolent Communication web site includes helpful lists of human feelings and needs.
Whew! That’s a lot of work! Is all of this squishy, touchy-feelie stuff necessary? Sometimes no. Sometimes yes. Empathy is important whenever the conversation involves strong feelings that may interfere with communication. And empathy is important whenever I want to maintain, strengthen, or repair a relationship. That is, whenever I care about the person and our relationship, and I want to show that I care.
References: I learned the “willing to be changed” test from Amy Schwab, who learned it from David Schmaltz, who learned it from Sharon Bennett. The “test for understanding” and “test for listening fully” come from Harville Hendrix’s audio book Keeping the Love You Find . Though much of this book is specific to love relationships, Hendrix’s techniques and exercises about listening apply equally well to other kinds of relationships. The “test for empathy” comes from Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication and Kelly Bryson’s Don’t Be Nice, Be Real .
by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler helped me to make a big leap in that direction, and that’s why it is my favorite book of 2003.
A few years ago my friend Kay Pentecost, knowing of my deep interest in communication and relationships, recommended Crucial Conversations very highly. I bought the book a few months later, and finally read it in September, 2003. Of the ton of helpful ideas in Crucial Conversations, I found four most helpful: starting with heart, filling the pool of shared meaning, safety, and stories.
Starting with heart means clarifying your purpose in the conversation. Before starting the conversation, ask yourself, What do I really want for myself? What do I really want for others? What do I really want for the relationship? If a conversation becomes difficult, return to your purpose by asking the questions again, and by asking, How would I behave if I really wanted these results?
Filling the pool of shared meaning. The authors define dialogue as the free flow of meaning between two or more people. We each enter a conversation with a personal “pool of meaning”, the combination of our opinions, feelings, theories, and experiences about the topic. “People who are skilled at dialogue,” the authors say, “do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool.”
Safety. What makes safety important? “At the core of every successful conversation lies the free flow of relevant information.” When people feel unsafe in conversation, that flow is blocked. “As people begin to feel unsafe, they start to move down one of two unhealthy paths. They move either to silence (withholding meaning from the pool) or to violence (trying to force meaning in the pool).”
Crucial Conversations offers many ways to test and maintain safety. One key idea is that if we want to maintain safety, we must attend to two “safety conditions.” The first is mutual purpose. We can maintain mutual purpose partly by “starting with heart.” The second safety condition is mutual respect. “In essence, feelings of disrespect often come when we dwell on how others are different from ourselves. We can counteract these feelings by looking for ways we are similar.” The authors say that in many cases, “If you simply realize that your challenge is to make it safer, nine out of ten times you’ll intuitively do something that helps.”
Stories. Like several other books I read in 2003, Crucial Conversations emphasizes the importance of stories in our communications and relationships. “Just after we observe what others do and just before we feel some emotion about it, we tell ourselves a story. That is, we add meaning to the action we observed. To the simple behavior we add motive. Why were they doing that? We also add judgment—is that good or bad?”
This sequence is very similar to Virginia Satir’s Ingredients of an Interaction, the model of communication that I describe in my article “Untangling Communication.” I like the author’s use of the word story here, because it gives me a richer, more dynamic way to talk about how we make meaning.
My review has only scratched the surface. I highly recommend Crucial Conversations. And Kay, thank you so much for recommending this book so strongly.
As you can see from the list of books below, over the past year I’ve been a student of conversation and relationships. I’ve been especially interested in how we can make our conversations more rewarding for ourselves, for others, and for our relationships. Crucial Conversations helped me to make a big leap in that direction, and that’s why it is my favorite book of 2003. [Full Review]
Difficult Conversations shows that any conversation that matters is really three conversations: one about what happened, another about how we feel about what happened, and a third about how all of that affects the way we think of ourselves. When we try to talk about all of these important things at once, each conversation confuses the other, and we derail the overall conversation.
The second half of the book describes how to conduct a learning conversation, a conversation in which we learn the other person’s story, express our views and feelings fully, and solve problems together. These ideas are very similar to the concepts in Crucial Conversations of dialogue and the “shared pool of meaning,” and also to the approach I describe in my articles “Resistance as a Resource” and “Untangling Communication.”
Difficult Conversations and Crucial Conversations complement each other nicely. The books cover similar content, and express compatible ideas about how to make challenging conversations work.
How to move beyond understanding each other to empathizing with each other. Expands on Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (below). [Full Review]
The story of how clock maker John Harrison solved the problem of longitude. The difficulty Harrison experienced in gaining acceptance for his solution, despite the gravity of the problem, makes this a fascinating case study of resistance.
The Illustrated Longitude , by Dava Sobel and William J. H. Andrews, has the same text as Sobel’s original book, with the addition of 180 marvelous photographs and illustrations, each described in detail.
Katie describes “The Work,” a set of good questions by which we can identify and inquire into beliefs that cause stress and interfere with our communications, relationships, and happiness. Includes transcripts of many sessions in which Katie facilitates many people to inquire into their beliefs to resolve a wide variety of painful situations.
A CD version of Loving What Is includes live recordings of people doing “The Work.”
Narrative therapy invites people to make visible the stories that create and sustain the problems with which they are struggling, and to create alternative stories that better support meaningful and fulfilling lives.
It was from this book that I began to understand the importance of stories and the influence that stories wield in our interactions and relationships. Also enlightening for me was the chapter about helpful questions.
How to move from moralistic judgments — judgments that imply wrongness or badness on the part of people who don’t act in harmony with our values — to clearer, more effective ways to express our needs.
Rosenberg’s Speaking Peace is an audio version of these ideas.
Open Space Technology, a simple and powerful way to organize meetings and conferences, encourages passion, commitment, and personal responsibility, and taps the capacity of a group of passionate, committed, responsible people to self-organize to address complex issues.
Wheatley encourages us to hold conversations about what matters most to us. Nothing fancy; just simple conversation. Simple and powerful. [Full Review]
Over the past few years, I’ve been learning to express my judgments in a way that I like better than my old way.
By judgment, I mean a statement that some person, event, or condition is good or bad, or morally right or wrong. For example, “John is lazy” is a judgment, a statement that John is bad in a particular way.
I’ve found that beneath every judgment lies a feeling, and beneath every feeling lies a need. Every judgment I make comes not from the person, event, or condition I’m judging, but ultimately from my needs, and from how I feel about my needs being either met or unmet. A “positive” judgment means that my needs are satisfied. A “negative” judgment means that my needs are unmet.
“John is lazy.” What needs and feelings lie behind that statement? The need could be nearly any need. Maybe I’m needing some companionship, and I’ve asked John to go to a football game with me. When John says that he doesn’t feel like going out today, my need for companionship isn’t met. I feel lonely, and attribute my loneliness to John. I see John as the reason that I don’t have the companionship I’m needing. I judge him to be lazy.
Judgments leave the most important information unsaid. “John is lazy” says nothing about my need for companionship or the loneliness I feel when my need isn’t met. My loneliness comes not from John’s actions, but from my need for companionship. If I had other people to be with, I wouldn’t feel lonely in response to John not wanting to go to the game. And my need for companionship is about me. It has nothing to do with John.
Judgments deflect attention away from my responsibility. “John is lazy” seems to be a statement about John. Though I’m the one making the statement, the content of the statement says nothing about me. It says nothing about my needs or about my feeling about my needs being unsatisfied. My needs and feelings are my creations, and therefore entirely my responsibility. By talking only about John, I distract your attention, and more importantly my attention, away from my responsibility.
Judgments are ineffective ways to satisfy needs. I believe that every judgment is an attempt to satisfy the need that gave rise to the judgment. But judging makes it less likely that I will satisfy my need. By judging John as lazy deflects responsibility for my feelings from me to John, and gives away my power. It makes John responsible for meeting my need. And given that John is not meeting my need, I’m stuck with my loneliness.
I’ve learned a more effective way to meet my needs: Express my needs and feelings directly. I might tell John, “I’m feeling lonely because I’m needing some companionship.” (I first learned of this phrasing from Marshall Rosenberg’s book Nonviolent Communication . The earlier first edition of Nonviolent Communication was my favorite book of 2001. Thanks to my friend Bill Pardee for recommending it!)
I see two main advantages in expressing myself this way. First, by expressing my need clearly and directly, this gives me a chance to find other ways to meet my need. And it gives John a chance to offer ideas if he chooses. Maybe he will invite me to his house to play chess.
Second, directly expressing my needs and feelings draws my attention (and John’s) to my responsibility. My need is my need. My feeling is my response to my need. If John chooses not to satisfy my need for companionship, I can seek other companions, or simply accept that I don’t have the companionship I need. In any case, I am now owning my need, and owning my feelings.
I’m still working on this. I’m often tempted to say “That was a great movie” instead of “I loved that movie.” Exploring the needs and feelings that give rise to my judgments is sometimes a lot of work. But I’m much happier with the results.
A relationship is a story. I don’t mean that as a metaphor. I mean it literally: A relationship is a story. In particular, a relationship is a story about two people responding to each other and with each other over time.
Like all stories, the story of a relationship is told from a particular point of view — some person’s point of view. The nature of the story, the nature of the relationship, depends a great deal on who is telling the story.
If you want to influence others, relationships matter. Of the four factors that affect the way people respond to your proposals and requests — expectations, communication, relationship, and environment — relationship may be the most important to nurture. Every time you talk with someone, your relationship enters the conversation before you do. You each bring a story into the room, a story that carries your history and expectations, providing the structure that integrates this conversation with your past and your future, and the context within which you attach meaning and significance to each other’s words and behaviors. As you interact, your story guides your experience — perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors — even as you weave your experience back into the ongoing, unfolding story.
I’ve been thinking about this idea, about relationships as stories, for a few weeks. It feels like a rich vein for me — every thought leads to three more thoughts. I struggled for days to start this article because I didn’t know where to begin. I struggled for hours to write it because I didn’t know where to stop.
I’ll stop here for now, having set out only the basic idea, and leave you (and me) with a few thought experiments.
Experiment: Think of a relationship that you are enjoying. If you were to tell an empathetic listener about this relationship, what would you say? What story or stories would you tell? How did the relationship begin? What events or patterns of events stand out for you as being especially important to you? What happened? What meaning did you make of those events? How did you feel? What role do you play in the story? How do you describe yourself? What role does the other person play? How do you describe the other person? What do you think will happen in the relationship over time? How does all of this affect the way you interact with the person? How does it affect the way you think and talk about the person when you’re apart?
Experiment: Think of a relationship in which you are feeling some stress or pain or frustration. Answer the same questions as above.
Experiment: Compare the two relationships from above. What similarities do you see? What differences?
Experiment: How would the other person in each relationship answer these questions?