It's hard to feel defensive and curious at the same time. Rather than ask, "What's the worst and most personal way I can take this?" (leading to defensiveness), we should ask, "Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person think or feel this way?" (leading to curiosity). It also helps curb our own defensive response. Exploring helps others move away from harsh feelings and knee-jerk reactions and toward the root causes of those feelings and reactions. When others go to silence or violence, actively explore their path. We know what they think, but we don't know what we or others may have done. They show us their feelings and share their stories, but we may not know what they actually observed. We typically join them at the end of their Path to Action. We have to find a way to move others back to their facts. By asking ourselves the "and" question, we force our brains to move to higher-level, more complex thinking.Īs we see others moving to silence or violence-sharing mostly stories or very little at all-it helps us stay in dialogue if we can encourage them to share their entire Path to Action, or the explanation of how emotions, thoughts, and experiences lead to our actions. Replacing "either/or" thinking with "and" thinking provides a way to reduce the ill effects of adrenaline. When it comes to crucial conversations, "and" thinking makes a great deal of sense. As we find ourselves forgetting our original goal of candidly and honestly adding meaning to the pool and instead striving to look good, win, or achieve some other unhealthy objective, we need to ask ourselves, "What do I really want?" Also, while it's true that sometimes we are caught in a genuine dilemma with only two bad options, most of the time we do have healthy alternatives. Our next change in heart comes with a change in motive. We need to examine our personal role in any problem we encounter. Our first change in heart comes from realizing that as much fun as it would be to fix other people, we need to work on ourselves first. In order to break away from silence and violence, we have to change our behavior.
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