Words Can Change Your Brain (23 page)

Now try getting really angry at the person and watch how they react in your imagination. Then ask yourself: if this were a real conversation, what would be the result? In this way you can often pinpoint conversational strategies that won’t turn out well, and you can see how you might influence a more positive outcome by changing your style of talking.

It may take as long as an hour to find a strategy that will satisfy you, but we can guarantee that the approach you decide to use will be superior to what would have happened if you confronted the other person without this mental preparation. The “empty chair” exercise turns out to be more successful than other forms of interventions,
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and the following “warm-up” exercise will help you to develop this skill.

Imagine, for a moment, that someone—an old friend, lover, or business colleague (but not someone you currently interact with)—walks up to you and says something upsetting. Or think about a time in the distant past when someone you knew hurt your feelings or made you mad.

Imagine that person walking up to you right now and hurting your feelings again. Use your memory to recall the feelings of anger, hurt, or pain. Keep focusing on the negative thoughts and feelings that come up and notice where in your body they affect you the most. Do they make your jaw tense up? Do you feel like making a fist or striking out or running away? Exaggerate the feelings and hold on to them for thirty seconds, but not longer.

Now think about how you would normally react and notice how that makes you feel. Take a few deep breaths, relax your body, and let those thoughts and feelings float away.

Now you ask yourself this question: when someone says something that upsets me, what is the best possible way to respond? Notice the thoughts that come to mind, then take another deep breath and relax.

Again imagine someone saying something to you that would normally make you irritated, angry, and hurt. But instead of getting upset, imagine that you remain perfectly calm. Visualize the two of you standing there: the other person is yelling at you, but you are remaining completely relaxed and calm. No matter what the other person says, you continue to feel happy, joyful, and serene. Continue this visualization for as long as it takes you to really feel that sense of calmness.

In your mind’s eye, look at the angry person in front of you. Instead of focusing on the anger, try to see what is causing the other person to feel so upset. See if you can feel their hurt and pain, and then take a very deep breath and relax. Now speak out loud to this imaginary person, and see if you can find the best words to make that person feel cared for, understood, and loved.

Notice how you feel, stretch a few times, and bring your attention back into the present moment.

The more you practice this imaginary exercise, the easier it will be to carry this relaxed and nondefensive state into a dialogue with someone else. The result, as research has shown: less interpersonal distress, fewer complaints, more mutual esteem, and more satisfying resolutions—at home and at work. And the effects have been shown to last for at least a year.
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When you are ready to engage a loved one—or a colleague or friend—in a conflict-resolution dialogue, make certain you maintain a clear focus on the qualities you admire and respect about that person, in a manner that allows you remain true to your deepest values concerning relationships, communication, and love.

Asking Your Partner to Change

Compassionate Communication fosters self-awareness, but it doesn’t give you the power to change the behavior of someone else. Only they can do that. You can let them know how their behavior makes you feel, but only if you communicate this in a way that does not assign blame. If you create the right atmosphere, using the strategies we’ve been describing, you can call for a special meeting to request a behavioral change. The other person may or may not comply, or even be able to change, but they will feel your kindness and respect.

The famous meditation teacher Thích Nhât Hanh suggests trying the following strategy when you want to request a behavioral change.
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Ask for an appointment to have a compassionate dialogue later in the week, and tell the person, with warmth and compassion, the issue you want to address. As he explains, this gives both of you time to prepare, to reflect deeply on the matter, and to be ready to enter the conversation with openness and trust:

Suppose your partner says something unkind to you, and you feel hurt. If you reply right away, you risk making the situation worse. The best practice is to breathe in and out to calm yourself, and when you are calm enough, say, “Darling, what you just said hurt me. I would like to look deeply into it, and I would like you to look deeply into it, also.” Then you can make an appointment . . . to look at it together. One person looking at the roots of your suffering is good, two people looking at it is better, and two people looking together is best . . . When you speak, you tell the deepest kind of truth, using loving speech, the kind of speech the other person can understand and accept. While listening, you know that your listening must be of a good quality to relieve the other person of his suffering.

Words of Love, Words of Hate

You can actually measure how stable a relationship is by counting the number of positive and negative emotional words that are used in everyday conversations. When researchers at the University of Texas analyzed the journals, e-mail, and text-messages of eighty-six young dating couples, those who included the most numbers of positive emotional words were more likely to still be dating three months later.
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The message is clear: if you want your romantic relationships to last longer, send your partner as many heartfelt affirmations as you can. But they must be genuine, because the other person’s brain is built to intuit lies.

Inflammatory words are particularly damaging to any relationship, whether it be at home or at work, and if you let your emotions take over during a marital conflict, they may literally break your heart. In a recent study reported in
Health Psychology
,
forty-two couples were asked to talk about a topic that made them upset. Emotionally charged discussions caused the release of cytokines, proteins that are linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, and various cancers. When people used words reflecting reason, understanding, and insight, the release of these stress chemicals went down.
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Our advice: choose your words carefully and be careful about ruminating on the conflicts in your marriage. This too releases stress chemicals that are damaging to your heart.
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Finally, some advice for everyone: avoid hostile words when you are around other emotionally volatile people; they can cause them to react with physical and emotional violence.
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Does Criticism Ever Work?

With few exceptions, the evidence says that criticism is not helpful, especially in spousal relationships. In fact, hardly anyone can tolerate criticism, especially from close relatives
.
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If there is already a degree of marital discord, criticisms will lead to greater unhappiness and strain,
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and if you notice an increase in critical comments, it’s a sure sign that the relationship is heading for trouble.
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It’s important to recognize that different people can tolerate different levels of criticism. For example, some people seem to overreact to criticisms, and this may be a clue of an underlying depression.
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On the other hand, some people don’t realize that what they say would sound critical to the average individual; they just have thicker emotional skins.

Negative or destructive criticism means exactly what it says: you voice an objection or complaint that basically states that the person is wrong, mistaken, or bad without saying anything that might be helpful. Negative criticism strongly predicts marital discord and psychological symptoms, whereas constructive criticism is not perceived by the listener as being negative, critical, or dismissive.
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Constructive criticism requires that you don’t voice a complaint or disapproval. Instead you offer a positive alternative approach that you feel may lead to a win-win interaction or solution. You can, for example, open the dialogue with a question like this: “I’m intrigued by your idea, but may I offer a different suggestion?” This type of question invites a positive response, and the person will usually say yes. When you address a problem in this manner, you show respect for the other person’s opinion or behavior, even if it fundamentally differs from your own.

Criticizing other people rarely promotes cooperation and trust, but the real problem concerns the inner speech of everyday consciousness, because that is where the voices of self-criticism reside. The more self-critical you are, the more likely you’ll become immersed in feelings of insecurity,
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so it’s important to recognize those voices and interrupt them in any way you can. Research shows that the most effective strategies involve the practice of self-love, self-appreciation, self-acceptance, and self-forgiveness, but you’ll have to practice them on a daily basis if you want to extinguish the power of self-critical speech. Thus the first priority of Compassionate Communication is to teach your own inner voices how to get along with one another.

Who Are Better Communicators, Women or Men?

Men and women process language differently, they have different-sized brains and different neurochemical balances, but none of these differences translate into vast differences in behavior, memory, cognition, or verbal skills.
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Men and women think, feel, and speak in essentially the same way.
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The differences we see are superficial, culturally conditioned, or shaped by childhood experiences and adult biases. In reality, every person, whether male or female, has a unique style of thinking and feeling because no two human brains are wired the same way.

As the Smithsonian Institution reports, the differences we think exist are massively exaggerated: “When it comes to most of what our brains do most of the time—perceive the world, direct attention, learn new skills, encode memories, communicate (no, women don’t speak more than men do), judge other people’s emotions (no, men aren’t inept at this)—men and women have almost entirely overlapping and fully Earth-bound abilities.”
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C
HAPTER 11

Compassionate Communication in the Workplace

_C
ommunication in the workplace is crucial to individual success and to the overall success of a company, and it begins the moment two people lay eyes on each other. In business first impressions matter. A recent brain-scan study found that one can even tell by looking at a CEO’s face if he or she is trustworthy, has strong leadership skills, and is financially successful in governing the corporation.
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Of course, looks can also be deceiving. It’s easy to mistake charisma—the ability to exude confidence—for competence. Charismatic leaders often spout values-based philosophies, and this tends to stimulate similar values in the people under their guidance.
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But if the leader does not practice what he preaches, the followers’ sense of being deceived will destroy the leader’s credibility and possibly the credibility of the company itself. Just watch the stock market when a corporate leader violates a moral standard or gets caught up in the mystique of power and greed. These issues reflect the great importance of having and maintaining a strong sense of values.

Your Innermost Values Will Transform Your Work

Peter F. Drucker is an internationally renowned teacher best recognized for his popular books on business management, leadership, and entrepreneurship. He developed one of the first executive MBA programs in the United States, at Claremont Graduate University, where he was the Clarke Professor of Social Sciences and Management. At the age of eighty-nine, in an article published in
Harvard Business Review
, he said that if you want to build a life of excellence, ask yourself these questions: “What are my values?” “What are my strengths?” and “What can I contribute?” Concerning values, he has the following to say:

To be able to manage yourself, you finally have to ask, What are my values? This is not a question of ethics . . .

. . . Ethics is only a part of a value system—especially of an organization’s value system.

To work in an organization whose value system is unacceptable or incompatible with one’s own condemns a person both to frustration and to nonperformance.
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However, Drucker adds, “There is sometimes a conflict between a person’s values and his or her strengths.” What, then, should you do? Drucker believes that if you are not making a genuine contribution to yourself and the world, you should quit that job and search for another: “Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.”