It seems that "Oh, puhleeze!" has become my default reaction to the polarizing rhetoric in our current political season. Do you have your own default reaction? That I don't have much better to say is humbling to me as I prepare to speak to a group about having fearless conversations to "put the civil back into discourse." I say to myself: "Where do I get off, anyway?!"
Well, fearless conversations have meaning only when we're confronted with challenges that make talking to one another difficult. Our political climate is one thing. We also are challenged in many ways in our personal and professional relationships. Things come up that cause us to react - sometimes in ways that we are not proud of necessarily.
In the moment I exclaim: "Oh, puhleeze!" I am absolutely closed to the point-of-view or stance confronting me. I can try to separate a statement or act from the person originating it, but it's nearly impossible not to judge a person if what they say or do is really hard for me to swallow. Do you find that, as well? In
Fearless Conversations we acknowledge this difficulty, empathize with ourselves about what causes us to react, and try, once again, to open ourselves to deep listening to one another.
Today when I groaned "Oh, puhleeze!", I decided to take a few minutes to get a hold on just why I was so exasperated. I believe that my feeling of exasperation and my judgment about the person involved are indicators of needs in me
that want to be met. For my "check in" I used the
Nonviolent Communication list of universal human needs. Clearly, some of the needs I was experiencing were harmony, inspiration, order, understanding, creativity, hope. Giving attention to these needs helped me to shift my energies to thoughts and activities where I could honor these needs. It was a shift from being merely reactive to proactive.
Reactivity is often a powerful "event" in ourselves because we are caught in typical polarizations like: wrong vs. right, negative vs. positive, good vs. bad, Democrat vs. Republican, like vs. dislike; want vs. don't want; the list goes on. It helps me to think of reactivity, spoken or unspoken, as an understandable part of "creative tension" between what one wants and what is. Creative
tension shifts us away from "vs. this or that". The notion of creative tension is typically illustrated by stretching a rubber band between two hands. When I react with "Oh, puhleeze!" I essentially want to release the creative tension between what I envision and what is. But, that's not life!
Holding the creative tension requires being clear about what I want while acknowledging what is. Holding creative tension is particularly challenging when we would prefer to dismiss as wrong the spokesperson for "what is". Rather than loosening the creative tension by dismissing another person as wrong, we can choose to explore the creative tension by saying such things as:
What leads you to conclude that?
Can you help me understand your thinking?
I wonder if you would consider . . .?
When you say [ ], I worry that you mean . . .
What do you think about what I just said?
As we know it from our media, our current political discourse is not civil; but where we live and relate to one another, we can keep our discourse civil and enriching. Indeed, we must for the sake of basic decency and for the good of all. "Oh, puhleeze" becomes "please" by staying with the creative tension and talking with one another.
