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In our own heads and hearts, we make ourselves righteous, and we make them bad.
Once we move into conflict, everyone involved is tarnished. Everyone involved become become bloodied and hurt – either literally, or at least emotionally. Then our oppositional positions become increasingly entrenched.
The solution is paradoxical, and it might feel like a kind of surrender — but it’s not. The solution is to stand next to your opponent, and, ultimately, to make that person your ally instead.
"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy." - Isaac Newton via @MennettLeeLLC #fablogcon pic.twitter.com/AqxNW7jtJF
The real reason people said I didn’t listen is that I wasn’t fully present; I was someplace else. I was invested in listening to my thoughts and feelings, thinking of answers before I heard the questions, building a case to defend my actions, or solving another problem. I was so busy “being effective” that I was not open, curious, or attentive to the other person.
Some companies have been known to include disclaimers saying that brief emails may give a "false impression of curtness or insensitivity"--though people misinterpret the disclaimers, too.
If nothing else, Byron writes, it's at least important to recognize that "we are fallible as both email senders and receivers." Noted.
Psychologists say it is natural to lash out when we feel threatened. It’s our fight-or-flight response kicking in, where we respond to threats immediately, on an emotional level, by attacking or withdrawing.
Abraham Lincoln is said to have advised his secretary of war, who was furious with one of his generals, to write the man a sharp letter, then “put it in the stove.”
when making decisions, we often allow short-term concerns to dominate long-term concerns that are equally or even more important
when people refuse to negotiate as a matter of principle, impasse is likely
Rather than telling the seller directly that he had sold her a faulty product—an accusation that could have caused him to lose face in his community—the student “let him figure out the problem himself,”
Research suggests that conflicts negotiated indirectly are more likely to reach agreement than conflicts confronted directly, according to Brett.
Rather than allowing the majority to dictate terms to the minority, consensus building involves seeking overwhelming agreement among everyone at the table.
I think that there also has to (occasionally) be room for respectful DISSENT.
Often, there are issues that you don’t care about at all that are extraordinarily important to someone else. Failing to recognize and appreciate that difference can undermine your colleagues’ trust in you.
You have to listen carefully to what other people have said in order to be able to repeat it back. When you accurately state what other people have said, they feel like you have taken in what they had to say.
A new research study confirms what many of us have suspected: anxiety about a negotiation is likely to work against you.
A microexpression is basically a brief, involuntary facial expression
your mind is making either positive or negative connections that go far beyond the content of the interaction. You’re telling yourself things like, ‘this person cares about what I have to say,’ or ‘this person doesn’t have time for me,’ or ‘this person appreciates me and what I do.’ ”
Thank you
Great work
Beyond overestimating our chances, we also tend to devalue our adversary’s arguments and overvalue our own: We always think we make much more sense than the other side.
We don’t just want the conflict to end, we want someone to step in and tell us who is right and who is wrong.
Nothing forces you to identify your weaknesses like the act of stepping into your adversary’s shoes.
In an effort to help people cut through the noise with their emails, and hopefully free up a little bit of my time, I wanted to share a few tips that I’ve found are helpful when writing to people who are inundated with email.
Tired designers kept arriving at brilliant solutions, and then faced the challenge of explaining themselves. Communication is the art of getting your ideas heard, shared, understood, and adopted. Designing and communicating are separate, but highly related fields.1
I began to research communication, persuasion, and storytelling.
Among public figures who need to think twice about their choice of words, the unsent angry letter has a venerable tradition. Its purpose is twofold. It serves as a type of emotional catharsis, a way to let it all out without the repercussions of true engagement. And it acts as a strategic catharsis, an exercise in saying what you really think, which Mark Twain (himself a notable non-sender of correspondence) believed provided “unallowable frankness & freedom.”
It has become fashionable to say that our present epoch is an information age, but that’s not quite right. In truth, we live in a communication age and it’s time we start taking it seriously.
Patients, meanwhile, face a different and very significant loss of autonomy when they don't have these conversations. They don't get to decide what type of death they want, what goals will be important to them, and what type of life-sustaining treatment they'd prefer.
May all working in healthcare now or in future incl. industry, read this !! What Broke My Father’s Heart mobile.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/mag…
Doctors peddle their wares on a piecework basis; communication among them is haphazard; thinking is often short term; nobody makes money when medical interventions are declined; and nobody is in charge except the marketplace.
My mother was given more government-mandated consumer information when she bought a new Camry a year later.
One reason for the disconnect, says Dr. Babak Goldman, is that too few doctors are trained to talk about death with patients. "We're trained to prolong life," he says.
Murray says he hopes his essay will spur more physicians to initiate these difficult discussions with patients and families facing end-of-life choices.
So, with communication and choice, pathways, plans and shared decision making, I found myself one evening by his bed.
Strip away the political posturing and nonsensical talk of death panels and the like, and we’re left with a stark truth: that we too often fail to have those difficult but crucial discussions about dying, and this failure leads to untold human suffering and billions in squandered resources. We are failing as caregivers, we are failing as family members, and we are failing as individuals—failing to simply have a conversation that ensures that we direct our own destiny. Plainly put, we need to talk about dying.
All this can be interesting, surprising, and sometimes downright painful, when you are leading a global team: as you Skype with your employees in different cultures, your words will be magnified or minimized significantly based on your listener’s cultural context So you have to work to understand how your own way of giving feedback is viewed in other cultures.
Awesome part of my job - I serve as 2nd/3rd opinion for many families. Poor communication # 1 reason why so many seek additional help.
It’s a natural human reaction to shy away from disagreeing with a superior. “Our bodies specialize in survival, so we have a natural bias to avoid situations that might harm us,” says Joseph Grenny, the coauthor of Crucial Conversations and the cofounder of VitalSmarts, a corporate training company. “The heart of the anxiety is that there will be negative implications,” adds Holly Weeks, the author of Failure to Communicate.
Being a medical professional myself, I knew what to say to the hospital staff to ensure my mother would get appropriate treatment. Not all patients do.
If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know, what is it that you're hungry for?
post-truth society
when anger turns to contempt, you've been dismissed. It's associated with moral superiority.
When dealing with a person or entity that gaslights, look at what they are doing rather than what they are saying. What they are saying means nothing; it is just talk. What they are doing is the issue.
A manipulative individual may insist on you meeting and interacting in a physical space where he or she can exercise more dominance and control.
By deliberately not responding to your reasonable calls, text messages, emails, or other inquiries, the manipulator presumes power by making you wait
Baggett notes, “The simple act of soaking feet inverts the traditional patient–physician power dynamic and conveys to patients we are there to serve them.”5
Baggett’s approach, like those of other clinicians who are devoted to helping these patients, essentially affirms our shared humanity.
For patients, here is the terrifying truth; climbing up the ladder has very little to do with what you need, want, or expect.
The stuff your doctor needs to do to be a successful doctor has not only very little to do with you, often you are getting in the way.
Sometimes, I don’t want to navigate through the narrative
you assume the most important communicative right – right to start (and also probably end) communication. This, in fact, tells me a lot about your power
The way I see it is that when I am asked to be ‘constructive’, I am really asked to be respectful. After all, I am addressing the royalty, I mean, the doctors, the crème de la crème of the society, so, I should address them with a slightly bent knee, gratefully genuflecting as I write.
For me in order to be constructive, I need to be acknowledged as a partner.
And still there was something off….So, let’s have a look at how the author writes about patients
I started looking at the differences and it suddenly struck me. Patients are nasty, doctors are overworked.
I had forgotten to take off my ID card on which my name was preceded with….yes, you guessed it, ‘Dr’. I have no idea whether he thought I was a fellow physician or just someone who could write a half-decent complaint, but his attitude changed completely. He became very polite, I didn’t become impressed.
direct, honest not caring
But, yes, every time I am soooo invited to ‘share’. The ‘listening face’, the body tilt, the concern, every time.
Whenever I’m asked about communication skills, I’m torn. I support efforts to make clinical communication better, more useful for me, the patient. But then the linguist inside me raises his (ugly?) discourse analytic head.
He was the all-powerful man in the castle, I was a minion not to be even engaged with. I was unable to oppose. I don’t know why, but I was just crushed by his power. I wouldn’t say I was traumatised by it, but the discomfort with the situation was so strong that I promised myself never to feel it again.
I'll argue that what really matters for kindness in our everyday interactions is not empathy but capacities such as self-control and intelligence and a more diffuse compassion. Indeed, those who are high in empathy can be too caught up in the suffering of other people.
There is the capacity to understand what's going on in other people's heads, to know what makes them tick, what gives them joy and pain, what they see as humiliating or ennobling.
I'll end with a classic fictional example of the power of cognitive empathy. This comes from George Orwell's 1984
Ultimately, O'Brien uses Winston's greatest fear - something he had never told O'Brien, something that he had perhaps never articulated to himself - to destroy him. This is what cognitive empathy looks like in the wrong hands.
Some doctors are scientists—just as some politicians are scientists—but most are not. As medical students they were filled full with information on biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, and other sciences, but information does not a scientist make—otherwise, you could become a scientist by watching the Discovery channel. A scientist is somebody who constantly questions, generates falsifiable hypotheses, and collects data from well designed experiments—the kind of people who brush their teeth on only one side of their mouth to see whether brushing your teeth has any benefit. Most doctors follow familiar patterns and rules, often improvising around those rules...
Questioning whether doctors are scientists may seem outrageous, but most doctors know that they are not scientists.
If doctors are not scientists then it seems odd to supply them, as medical journals do, with a steady stream of original scientific studies.
The inevitable consequence is that most readers of medical journals don't read the original articles. They may scan the abstract, but it's the rarest of beasts who reads an article from beginning to end, critically appraising it as he or she goes. Indeed, most doctors are incapable of critically appraising an article. They have never been trained to do so. Instead, they must accept the judgment of the editorial team and its peer reviewers—until one of the rare beasts writes in and points out that a study is scientifically nonsensical.
A person’s value is based on where he or she fits into the organizational hierarchy (sometimes referred to as position power), technical abilities (expert power), access to information (knowledge power), and whether he or she controls staff, money, and other assets (resource power).
A former pawn might challenge or confront the individual, and perhaps even try to bring the situation to the attention of higher-ups. Unfortunately, by this time the psychopath is well positioned through the influence networks already established with others in the power hierarchy. The tables are turned because the credibility of the complaining employee has already been “managed” and undermined.
Let your altruism meet your egotism, let your generosity meet your greed, let your joy meet your grief. Everyone has a shadow
With shadows that go unexamined and unchecked, they use power heedlessly in ways that harm countless people and undermine public trust in our major institutions.
Care about being effective, of course, but care even more about being faithful … to your calling, and to the true needs of those entrusted to your care.
We refer to this phenomenon as “hostage bargaining syndrome” (HBS) because, in the presence of clinicians, patients and their families may behave like hostages negotiating, from a position of fear and confusion, for their health.
Most commercial services are “want” services
Medical care is a “need” service
an adaptive response to authority figures who retain de facto control because of attributes such as expertise, prestige, and position
The worse the offense and the greater the shame, the more difficult it is for the wrongdoer to empathize with the harmed party and feel remorse.
Reduce your expectations to zero for getting the response you want and deserve. Speak your truths because you need to speak for your own self - because this is the ground you want to stand on, irrespective of whatever response you receive.
When you feel like you've learned whatever there is to learn from what you're doing, it's time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward.
The thing is, you never really start over. You don't lose all the work that's come before. Even if you try to toss it aside, the lessons that you've learned from it will seep into what you do next.