Positive Principles Newsletter
April 2008
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Key Quotes:
“…principled leaders solve moral problems. They have the courage to act
rightly. They consistently demonstrate principled conduct under pressure.”
- Gus Lee, Courage: the
backbone of leadership
…if there is no dialogue, there can
be no solution – that is, there can be no consensual, interest-based
solution.”
- Daniel Dana, Conflict
Resolution
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This month's tip – Silence may be
a reaction and not a response.
Conflict evokes strong emotions for most people, and these emotions tend
to drive people towards reacting rather than responding to a situation.
Many people recognize that their reaction often makes the situation worse.
After speaking too quickly, too harshly, or too critically on too many
occasions; they might adopt a different approach: silence. Other people
gravitate almost instinctively to silence because they would rather “let
it pass” than confront the substance of the conflict. Most people can
clearly see how an attack is a reaction. I find that many of these same
people often do not see that silence, even if chosen, can also be a
reaction and not a response.
Reactions generally come from the emotional, or feeling, side of our
brains. Responses come from the logical, or thinking, side of our brains.
And therein lies the problem. In the heat of the moment, our thinking
brain tends to shutdown and our feeling brain takes control. So, we
gravitate to either attack or avoidance in order to protect our feelings.
(I mean attack with words in this case. Physical attack opens a whole new
line of discussion.)
If you shutdown emotionally when you experience conflict and immediately
withdraw from the situation, you can probably see clearly that your
silence is a reaction. In this case, your feelings have taken control, and
your emotional withdrawal leads to silence. In my experience, most of the
people who have this tendency recognize that their silence is emotionally
and not logically driven. As a result, they know that their silence is a
reaction. Learning to speak into a conflict takes courage and practice,
and it is worth the effort. In this case, choosing a different behavior
generally implies a response mode rather than a reaction mode.
If you tend to attack, you have probably seen how these attacks usually
make the conflict worse. You may have already learned from your
experiences and started working diligently to control this tendency by
remaining silent. Controlling the tendency to attack is certainly a good
first step. Be careful, though, that this choice to remain silent does not
become a secondary reaction rather than a truly chosen response. You can
tell the difference between a secondary reaction and a chosen response by
asking yourself one question: “Am I silent because I am afraid of the
consequences of speaking?” If you are silent only out of fear of the
consequences, then your silence is probably a reaction because it is
driven by fear and fear is an emotion.
In answering to the question above, you might say that you are remaining
silent in the moment so that you can find the right words, so that you can
calm down and control your tone, or so that you can find a more
appropriate time to confront the situation. In general, these motivations
come from a desire to address and resolve the conflict and not from a fear
of the consequences. These motivations would make your silence a response
and not a reaction.
As it is with so many topics in the realm of conflict resolution, the
behavior you choose and your reason for choosing it determine its
appropriateness in any given situation. Both your intention and your
technique matter. Keep your intention on solving the problem while
preserving the relationship and you can resolve most conflicts. I
recommend that you adopt good intentions and also develop good techniques.
I have seen, though, that good intent with bad technique can work while
bad intent with good technique usually fails. When you choose to remain
silent, check your intent.
So for now, I encourage you to remember this month's tip . . .
Silence may be a reaction and not a response.
Have a great day,
Guy Harris
The Recovering Engineer
