Foundations

What happens for you when you are in a difficult conversation? How aware are you of your triggers, and what happens physiologically for you when you are stressed? What can you do to stay present when this occurs?

Most people are not trained to be able to respond well when triggered. They get angry, go into their habitual reaction pattern, and then berate themselves (and/or others) afterward and vow to change and be more in control the next time. Then another trigger arises, and the pattern repeats.

In this section, you'll learn how to break that pattern. Recognizing when you are in a stress response and how you normally react, you'll be able to apply two key components of your experience — feelings and needs — using the Self-Connection Process to reconnect to yourself and be able to act in a way that more accurately reflects your values. In other words, instead of reacting, you will be present enough to act — to choose how you respond.

This simple (yet not always easy) skill is a first step to being able to be in disagreement and difficult conversations with teammates and coworkers without being in conflict. Let's get started.

Fight-Flight-Freeze (The Stress Response)

All too often in modern day-to-day interactions, people react to what is happening around them as though their physical well-being is being challenged. The human body only has one way to respond to perceived challenge, regardless of whether it is an actual physical threat or simply an unwelcome comment at the water cooler. The way the body reacts to both is by releasing stress hormones such as adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol into our bloodstream.

This process is referred to as the Fight-Flight-Freeze response, or alternatively, as the Stress Response.

The Stress Response serves you when you need to protect yourself from physical danger, like when a lion on the savanna is attacking you. Nonetheless, in work and home environments, triggering the Stress Response because you are dreading an upcoming conversation or because you are upset by an interaction with a colleague not only serves to reduce your effectiveness, but also is harmful to your health.

Once the deeper parts of the brain are triggered into the fight-flight-freeze survival reaction, it's difficult to think clearly and sequentially, and the conscious mind tends to be flooded with thoughts about who is right, who is wrong, and who deserves punishment. In addition, people will tend to respond to similar situations according to habitual patterns of thoughts and actions that they have developed over the course of their life, and it becomes very difficult to apply the language and communication skills they possess.

As a consequence of the release of these stress hormones, peripheral vision narrows, and blood is shunted to the muscles for flight or to fight and away from reproduction and immune function. The hands moisten and you are likely to feel shaky.

If you do not do something to stop the release of stress hormones, it's less likely you will be able to think clearly, sequentially, and logically, and you will tend to act in ways that are contrary to your values.

Finally, as you come down from the Stress Response, you may experience an adrenaline hangover, the symptoms of which are lack of motivation, fatigue and weakness, thirst, headaches and muscle aches, nausea, vomiting or stomach pain, poor or decreased sleep, increased sensitivity to light and sound, dizziness or a sense of the room spinning, and shakiness.

Being able to recognize when you're in the stress response is the first step to being able to change it. Next, we will look at two building blocks that will support you in reconnecting to yourself when you're triggered — needs and feelings.

Universal Human Needs

The term needs, as used here, refers to the motives for conduct. For instance, all humans need water, air, touch, connection with others, fun, play, meaning, care, intimacy, etc. Everyone wants these needs met in order to survive, and more than that, to have satisfying and meaningful lives.

All too often, people become fixated on a particular way of meeting a need — a specific strategy. This fixation can become the source of conflict within oneself and with others. Yet a need is never tied to one single strategy — there are always multiple ways to meet a need. Knowing what you need (and what others need) from moment to moment helps you find strategies that will meet your needs and theirs. And, knowing the needs you are seeking to meet with a particular strategy can help expand the possibilities that might meet those needs.

When people are not aware of their own needs, they tend to spend more of their time reacting to one another, and this often creates havoc in their lives. The core needs (on pages 15and 16) are grouped into three main categories and nine subcategories.

Feelings

Feelings are bodily sensations that signal whether your needs are being met by what is going on around you as well as inside you. Positive feelings tend to indicate needs met, and negative ones, needs not met.

Paying attention to your feelings when asked (by yourself or someone else) about a particular need, you are able to identify which needs the nonverbal parts of yourself interpret as met or not met. With practice, you will learn the signals from your body that tell you if the need you have guessed or your practice partner has guessed is accurate at that moment in time.

Feelings give you important additional information with which to navigate your internal and external worlds. When you have this additional information, you do not have to react to your feeling states out of habitual patterns of action, the early versions of which were learned in childhood and typically have been built upon and reinforced. Instead, you can examine your life with an eye to how you can better meet your needs and the needs of others.

For example, if you feel angry, instead of reacting as you normally would, you can inquire into what needs aren't met and then choose to try something different than your patterns would dictate. Choosing responses that are different than your habitual patterns allows you to learn how to free yourself from the mindlessness of these habits. This process of personal learning gives you insight not only into yourself, but also into the interior lives of others. So, feelings can be seen as a doorway to learning deeply about yourself and others.

The feelings on the next page are a selection of the hundreds of feeling words that exist in the English language.

Faux Feelings

Since most people were not taught much about feelings, it's important when considering them to distinguish between what is actually a feeling and words that people tend to treat like feelings but aren't. These "faux feelings" are words that actually imply that someone is doing something to you and generally connote wrongness or blame.

Below are just a few examples of faux feelings (see the Appendix for a more complete list) and examples of what a person might be really feeling when they use this particular faux feeling word. Notice that there are multiple feelings listed — this is a key way to tell if a word is a faux feeling. For example, if someone says, "I feel abandoned" they could conceivably be frightened, angry, or lonely. Using a faux feeling word doesn't actually give the information of how the person is feeling. The list below also includes unmet needs that might be motivating the use of the faux feeling word.

Now that you're familiar with your stress response, feelings, and needs, let's put it all together with a process that can help you reconnect in times you most would like to act from presence instead of react from habit: the Self-Connection Process.

The Self-Connection Process

When people perceive a challenge to their well-being, they're triggered into the stress response and typically are not able to act in ways that are consistent with their values, often later regretting their actions.

During the stress response, you can do specific things to become conscious of the needs you want to meet and how you want to meet them. As you become aware of how the stress response feels in your body, you will be able to use the Self-Connection Process to respond more effectively in these moments of stress. Thus, this process is a way to return to presence and choice in times of stress so that you have access to and can act according to your values.

It's imperative to practice how you want to act when experiencing the stress response. The ancient Greeks knew this more than 2600 years ago:

In adversity, we do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.

— Archilochus, Greek soldier and poet, c. 650 BC

Training is thus essential to be able to act as you would like to when you are under stress. That is why first responders, military, medical personnel, and others have increasingly trained in simulated real situations. They want to be feeling the rush of the stress response when they are training. They want the pretend situation to "feel" like the real situation, so they can practice how to respond in the heat of the moment.

Both science and the wisdom traditions point to the benefits of focusing on your breathing and bodily experience in order to reconnect and return to presence. With regular practice of the Self-Connection Process, you will build the capacity to respond more effectively in the midst of situations you perceive as emotionally or physically challenging. In addition, daily practice of the Self-Connection Process will remind you of your needs and the benefit of seeking to better meet needs over focusing on avoiding punishment.

You are encouraged to set aside at least five minutes a day to practice the Self-Connection Process, and also to practice throughout the day in as many moments as you can. The more often you practice, the greater access you will have to this ability to be present in challenging situations.

Suggested times for the Self-Connection Process:

[] Planned times you set aside each day, such as first thing in the morning

[] During transitions between activities, for instance as you prepare for a meeting

[] During activities throughout the day

[] When you are experiencing intensity

Applying the Foundations to Conversation

In Part I, you learned how to tell when you're not connected with yourself and effectively reconnect. We start there because being connected to yourself is helpful to be able to connect with other people. Feelings and needs are the bases for connection with yourself and others; when you can inquire about and recognize your own feelings and needs, it becomes second nature to start guessing what other people might be feeling and needing.

In Part II, we'll start applying these foundational skills when you're interacting with other people. Listening comes first; in order to collaborate with others, you first have to listen to them and demonstrate your understanding. Since teamwork often requires asking for things, we will cover what makes up a request and how to ask in a way that is more likely to meet your needs. In any good team, there may also be disagreements and dissent about the best way forward, leading to difficult conversations. The remainder of Part II will address how to prepare for these conversations, stay present during them, and debrief afterward so that you can learn from what happened and approach the next conversation better equipped to meet your needs.

Listening and Being Listened To

Most people "listen" to others while actually thinking already about what they want to say. Listening, in the way that is referred to here, is first about being present in the moment. It also includes being connected to the person you are listening to by being curious about understanding what they are saying and what needs they are seeking to meet.

By demonstrating your understanding of another's feelings and needs in that moment, you give the other person a sense of being fully heard. One way to demonstrate this is to verbalize your understanding of what they are saying, perhaps even guessing their needs. Another way is through nonverbal sounds of understanding and engagement with what they are saying. You can also ask questions for clarification that show you have been paying attention. All of these collectively refer to what we call "empathy."

This process often helps the person who is speaking to you regain connection with themselves and others. It also typically helps them gain understanding about what their needs are in this situation, what they imagine would meet their needs, and what happened to create the situation they are talking about.

For practice purposes, the process of empathizing with another person is broken down into four elements, or stages.

The Four Elements of Empathy

1. Presence: Resting your attention on the speaker, not thinking about what is being said or how you are going to respond, and practicing being present.

2. Silent Empathy: Silently guessing the meaning of what is being said, including the speaker's Observations, Feelings, Needs, and Requests. More generally put, this element is about guessing silently what is important to the speaker.

3. Understanding: Saying what you are hearing back to the speaker in a way that supports them to feel heard about their perspective in the way that you guess they would like to be heard. It is important to clearly indicate you are not agreeing or disagreeing with what they are saying or indicating that what they are saying is objectively true, but rather that you are hearing how they are seeing things from their subjective frame of reference. You may be reflecting back some of their thoughts, but you do so by naming the thoughts as thoughts, which turns them into observations.

4. Needs: Guessing what needs might be motivating the speaker, even when that person has not verbalized those needs. At times, this might mean guessing what needs the speaker is seeking to meet by speaking. For instance, when a person talks about a challenge at work, your guess might be, "Are you frustrated because you would like more collaboration in your team?" Be aware of "faux feelings" and translate them into words that name a bodily sensation or feeling. Once the speaker has clarified their needs, you may want to encourage them to take a few moments more to linger on their needs. Finally, you may want to support the person to determine if they have any requests, of themselves or of someone else.

The elements are presented here as four steps you practice sequentially. As you become experienced in this type of listening, you will find that you use these elements as reminders when you are listening to another person, and not as steps you go through in sequence.

When conversing "in the wild" (that is, in your business and personal life, as opposed to in a workshop setting), practice presence as much as possible throughout the conversation, as it is the foundation for the other elements of empathy. With that foundation, then moment by moment you might choose one of the other elements based on your evaluation of what will create connection. It's like playing jazz — you have the possibilities available to you with silent empathy, understanding, and needs, as well as all the other strategies for creating connection such as storytelling, humor, advice, play, and any others you know, and you weave them together as you navigate the conversation.

When you are connected to another person, asking for what you'd like or helping them ask for what they'd like becomes much easier. Still, knowing how to make a request is essential to being effective in a team. Next, we'll take a look at what requests are and how to make them.

Making Requests

Have you ever left a meeting unclear about the outcome or next steps? Or had a miscommunication with a boss or subordinate about a task? Making requests forms a backdrop of many team interactions, and yet few people are aware of how to be clear in their requests, leading to a significant amount of miscommunication and conflict in the workplace.

In these pages, I will differentiate among Three Types of Requests. Common to all three is that they are requests and not demands. What's the difference?

[] Demand: explicitly or implicitly threatens physical or emotional consequences if the person doesn't do what is being demanded.

[] Request: asks a person to do something that you are hoping will meet your needs, but also, very important, will meet their needs.

Here are the three types of requests:

Action Requests are asking for a change in behavior, either from another person or from yourself. These are the requests that, if met, you imagine will meet your needs. For example, "Would you be willing to get me a glass of water?" or "Would you tell me your thoughts on the proposal?" or "Would you be able to have the report on my desk by 5 p.m. Friday?"

Process Requests: These two types of requests ask people to tell you either what they have just heard you say, or how they feel having heard what you just said.