Over the last couple of weeks I have witnessed a couple of things occur between different sets of people that led to communication difficulties.
Both of these are related to communicating things that may be uncomfortable. This generally revolves around behavior of one party that the other doesn’t appreciate. This happens in personal relationships such as marriages, friendships, parent/child, even more distant relationships like cousins, aunts, uncles or grandparents.
This kind of conversation can also occur in work relationships. Examples would be a supervisor correcting the behavior of and employee, or one employee guiding a fellow employee in better ways to perform.
These conversations also occur between neighbors, associates in community events and sports teams. Really, anywhere people are together.
Let’s not kid ourselves… we all have behaviors that annoy other people! And we are all annoyed by some of other peoples behaviors.
One of the pitfalls that I saw some folks fall into was during the bringing up of the unappreciated behavior.
Let’s say Mary finds a behavior of Francesca to be objectionable. Mary wants to bring it to Francesca’s attention. Unfortunately, the way Mary brought it up was in a harsh, aggressive and accusatory manner. It was obviously an emotional situation for her. She was clearly irritated.
What’s is the natural reaction of Francesca? Yup, you are right… Defensiveness. This was the second pitfall I witnessed.
The natural reaction is to be defensive to this kind of confrontation. It’s an immediate reaction. It is not delayed and then given after careful introspection. The natural reaction is push back with a underlining tone of ‘who do you think you are tell me such and such?‘
From there the conversation goes downhill. Even though it started off in the pits to begin with! Both of the people involved feel they are being attacked. They are going to dig their heels in and close the doors to their mind.
As I thought about the interactions I witnessed, it was clear that although both Mary and Francesca’s approaches to these conversations may be considered normal, reactionary behavior, both of these methods of communication do not build up the relationship between the folks involved, nor solve the issue at hand.
To Pursue Great!, In All You Do, usually requires you to learn and apply ways of thinking and acting that are contrary to what comes naturally. In this case, Mary must learn caring, loving and gentler approaches to bring these kind of subjects up. Mary is not interested in tearing down Francesca, but is interested in sharing how the behavior of Francesca hurts or negatively impacts her or others.
Francesca has to learn to fight the natural ‘fight or flight’ instinct and listen to Mary share something that is important to her and, from her perspective, important to the relationship.
Mary and Francesca like each other and desire a better, stronger relationship. So they take the focus off of themselves and place their focus on the other person and on the health of their relationship. They approach these talks with gentleness, love and humility and accept the difficult words with grace, love and compassion. Because they value each other, they desire to please each other and to work together to build a stronger relationship.
We all engage in these kind of conversations. And they tend to be some of the most difficult. So difficult in fact, that sometimes, (maybe often), people avoid these conversations and bury their annoyances, hurts and disappointments down inside themselves.
I encourage you to think carefully about how you engage in these kinds of conversations, both sides. Think about how you can change your approach and behavior. It will improve your relationships!
Pursue Great!, In All You Do.
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