I have never been one to wade courageously into the middle of conflict- yet I’ve been in and witnessed plenty of it.
Partially, it’s due to growing up in a family where, as a whole, there wasn’t a lot of yelling, raised voices, or anger expressed. Yes my sister and I fought normal sibling fights, but anger- especially from adults felt destabilizing to me.
Perhaps because I was less familiar with the emotional range of anger, I didn’t learn to become comfortable with my own. Without this familiarity, anger felt out of control- leaving me, throughout life, uncertain on how to consciously navigate it.
Instead, other emotions felt more comfortable to inhabit or explore. I was more in touch with grief, sadness, confusion, doubt, and uncertainty. Even though they could come with intensity, I learned how to find steady ground in their midst.
Anger, especially someone else’s (and directed at me) not so much. It’s taken me many decades of inner work to regulate my nervous system so I can stay in conversations with heightened anger in productive and compassionate ways.
We’ve all got our edges as leaders and humans- the invitation is to continually become more skillful at these edges of our discomfort to make harder conversations easier to have.
Emotional intensity and the messiness of power
For many of us anger is a powerful, justified, and boundary-setting emotion that helps to awaken us from complacency. It shakes us out of ignorance, and points us to recognize, reckon, and reconcile historical and current inequities that have created deep suffering.
Yet even when I’ve acknowledged the necessity of this powerful emotional experience, when its layered with the dynamism of uneven power relations, there are times when I worry I’ll miss something, offend, or make things worse.
If you are an activist leader or leading systems change in multi-stakeholder environments- you know that both emotional intensity and power are ever-present in our individual and collective experience.
Entering into conversations about gender equality, systemic racism, heteronormativity, transphobia, to name a few, raise fundamental differences in and between us that are critical to understanding and solving inequality.
Yet as humans, we feel soothed by connection and sameness, as mediator and Zen teacher, Diane Musho Hamilton points out. She notes that differences can quickly be interpreted as ‘threats’, whereby our nervous systems are destabilized by our neurobiology of fear, anxiety, or shame.
So leading or participating in conversations where emotional intensity, accompanies different perspectives, and power imbalances- is never easy.
It’s too much, I’m Out
Often this combination, feels too much for us. In the process of worrying that we’ll make things, we contact another layer of emotion, such as guilt and shame within our own bodies. If we intuit the ‘feel’ of a conversation is not safe, for whatever reason, the tendency is to side-step the hard conversation, hoping it all just goes away.
So where can you start, when you want to get better at tough conversations- especially when they involve the messy terrain of power?
1. Know yourself (and your neurobiology)
Knowing your impulse, as the heat gets turned up in conversations, based on the fight/flight/freeze response is good place to return again and again.
Do you tend to pull away from the heat, and find ways to soothe tension? Do you put others first, and ignore your own needs, desires, and perspectives? (Flight)
Alternatively, do you tend to walk right in, and take up space with your speech, body language, and emotional experience and insist that you’re right? Is your impulse to fight, and try and win- arguments, decision making points, or allies to your side? (Fight)
Or, do you tend to shut down, and collapse inward all together and say “I’m out”- without actually saying it out loud? (Freeze)
Becoming intimate with your experience over time, can support greater self-awareness and skillfulness in being able to increase your capacities to ‘stay in’ tough conversations without the energetic quality of ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ engagement.
2. Feel Bodily Sensations Fully; Name the Emotion
Learning how to recognize an activated nervous system, as close as you can when your adrenaline and cortisol begin to rise is the first step.
Become intimate with your bodily sensations as you begin to feel activated. This might include a fluttery sensation in your stomach, tightness in your chest or jaw, or a the sensation of heat spread on your face and neck. As you notice your bodily sensations, the goal isn’t to judge or get rid of them, but to bring awareness to how they move and shift. For me, this brings great relief- as I remember that nothing I experience is bad or wrong- it just IS!
Yet we often want to jump quickly to solving or soothing tension or difference, that most leaders miss this step. Allowing your awareness to be with body first (or sensation) helps the mind avoid the tendency to fix.
In their book Compassionate Conversations, my teacher Diane Musho Hamilton and friends Gabe Wilson and Kim Loh, invite us to then name the emotion we are feeling, working to extend our emotional vocabulary as we become more familiar with the nuance. Naming the emotion, associated with our sensation, reminds us of the body-mind connection. We can actually witness how our thoughts create our emotions, and emotions amplify certain thoughts (and stories) as our sense-making unfolds.
It reminds me of a snowball, on a humid wintery day. We form the snow into a tight, robust ball and push it down a slope. As it tumbles, it accumulates more snow- getting bigger and bigger and bigger. This metaphor is what happens to us when we are in the midst of tension and conflict. If we don’t interrupt our stories…our emotions and thoughts can accumulate a stronger and almost ‘stuck’ energetic quality. This reinforces an emotional state as well as positions and perspective- allowing little flexibility or give.
3. Let go of any resistance and own your experience
As you continue to bring your awareness to the bodily sensations, you’ll notice that the energy and potency of it begins to subside. As it does, your nervous system will begin to relax.
With this relaxation, you can consciously choose to be with, and own what’s here in the moment. That is, not resist what is in your field of awareness and your own direct experience. This includes your emotional state, feeling, sensations, and perspectives.
Where so much gets murky in our collaborations and conversations, is our conscious and unconscious moves to disown what’s happening in the moment, including our own experience.
So I invite you to notice when and where you choose to side step or avoid difficult conversations- especially those latent with power dynamics.
Instead of needing to know 17 steps- begin by simply mastering your own direct experience.
When you do, you begin to trust what’s real for you, and use your first-person perspective (“I”), to truth-tell, get curious, and at the same time, become more curious and heart-centered in hard conversations.
Practice- Feeling Fully and Staying with Your Body
So I invite you to practice with some of the offering above, building on the practice offered by Diane Musho Hamilton, Gabe Wilson, and Kim Loh in their new book, Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart (2020).
- Become aware of your patterns of fight/flight/freeze and your go-to moves when you feel a threat of difference, disconnection, tension or conflict.
- Practice staying with your bodily sensations, and see if you can notice when they begin to shift and change.
- Name the associated emotion.
- Return to the obvious/subtle bodily sensations you’re experiencing as much as possible, until they begin to dissipate to relax your cognition that tries to reinforce stories and emotional states.
Jennifer
PS. To build a meaningful life and an equal world, coaching can be a powerful accelerator. To learn more about how coaching can support your leadership now, click here to jump on a Free Discovery Session. I’d love to meet you!
