by Craig Weber
You’ve just experienced the benefits of mindfulness—of bringing your awareness into the present moment, of noticing and accepting what is happening right now without judgment or reaction. And, no doubt, it feels a lot better than the first scenario (which you might recognize as something you’ve also experienced).
It doesn’t have to be yoga. You can also do tai chi, qigong, or other mindfulness-based activities to strengthen this ability.
Take Care of Yourself
A tired brain is an undisciplined brain. Few things let your monkey mind out of its cage more quickly than being worn out. Feeling exhausted decreases your ability to concentrate your beam in a mindful way, hampering your ability to manage your emotions. So, a big part of learning to focus your beam is to take care of yourself. Get plenty of sleep, eat well, and exercise. Take care of your brain—and the body that houses it—if you want it to perform at its peak.
Unfocus, Focus. Unfocus, Focus
Your beam of focus, like a muscle, can get overused, strained, and weakened by overuse, so don’t over focus. Let your brain wander. “The problem is that excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy and make you lose self-control,” says Srini Pillay, an expert on mental focus. Research shows that “. . . both focus and unfocus are vital. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus, allowing you to develop resilience, enhance creativity, and make better decisions too.”8
Keep It Up
Ongoing practice is key. As with acquiring any discipline, you’ll get out of it what you put into it. But it’ll pay off rapidly. Research shows that even a little practice—done regularly—makes a big difference.
Building Your Personal Awareness
You’re learning to control your beam of focus. Great. Now it’s time to turn that beam inward. Here are a few ways you can strengthen your ability to recognize when you’re at risk of losing balance, or, if you’ve left it, to catch it and quickly recover.
Self-awareness isn’t a one-and-done exercise. It’s a continual process of looking inward, questioning, and discovering the things that have been there all along.
—TASHA EURICH
Keep a Trigger Journal
Keeping a simple trigger journal is one of the most powerful ways to build your ability to recognize when you’re at risk of leaving the sweet spot, or, once you’ve left it, catching it early. What is a trigger journal? It’s an ongoing record of issues and situations that throw you off balance. When I lose discipline and allow my min or “win” tendencies to hijack my good intentions, for instance, I reflect on the experience by asking these questions and jotting down the answers in my trigger journal:
• What was the trigger?
• What was my reaction? How did I let it affect my behavior?
• The next time I notice this trigger, what is a more balanced and effective way I might choose to respond?
The primary goal of trigger journaling is not to identify your every trigger (I’m not even sure that’s possible). The goal is to get in the habit of noticing when you’re triggered.
Here’s an example: I was recently getting off a plane after a long week of travel. It was 11:30 at night, and I’d been in New York all week, so I was exhausted. As I was pulling my bag out of the overhead bin to exit the plane, a man behind shoved past me, almost knocking me back in my seat. I immediately felt a flash of anger and outrage. But then a funny thing happened. I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m being triggered here. I gotta remember to write this one down.” My trigger journaling practice helped me catch, name, and tame the reaction quickly, and this gave me the option to choose how to respond. (I still nailed the guy in the chest with my elbow, but it was a conscious choice, not an unconscious reaction—just kidding.) As I reflected back on that experience, I realized there were at least three triggers: I was tired; the actions of the other person seemed disrespectful (he shoved me aside); and the behavior seemed unfair (you’re generally expected to get off a plane in order).
Reflect Back
Think about the times you’ve shut up when you should have spoken up or argued when you should have listened. What were the triggers? What were the earliest signs you were about to lose discipline and let your defensive tendencies put daylight between your behaviors and your intentions? Reflect on your past behavior by asking yourself these questions:
• Under what circumstances do I let my tendency to minimize separate my intentions and my behavior?
• Under what circumstances do I let my tendency to “win” knock me off balance?
• How quickly can I catch myself when I leave the sweet spot?
• Do I catch myself before I lose balance or at the end of the meeting, or am I often driving home before I realize I was triggered?
Focus on Feelings
Notice when you’re triggered and reflect on the feelings associated with it. What were the physical and emotional precursors? How quickly did they escalate? The idea is to observe and flag those reactions so you can catch them earlier next time, and to dampen their effect on your behavior.
“Feelings arise within you—sadness, anxiety, annoyance, relief, joy—and you try to experience them from a different vantage point than is usual, neither clinging to the good feelings nor running away from the bad ones, but rather just experiencing them straightforwardly and observing them,” writes Robert Wright in his book Why Buddhism Is True. “This altered perspective can be the beginning of a fundamental and enduring change in your relationship to your feelings; you can, if all goes well, cease to be their slave.”9
As one executive told me, “I notice that when my need to ‘win’ kicks into gear, I feel a tightening in my jaw muscles and a tense sensation in my chest. I now use these reactions as my ‘early warning system.’” His awareness of how he’s feeling in the moment gives him more control.
Check in with Yourself
Regularly focus your beam on your current emotional state: “How do I feel right now?” or “What am I feeling and why am I feeling it?” This helps you to recognize your emotions and to label them. Schedule this at a specific time—setting an alarm if necessary—to get in the habit of checking in on your internal state. “Every day at 15 minutes past the hour I’ll do a quick internal check-in to see how I’m doing.”
“Brake” a Habit
Research shows that exercising self-control of any kind builds your ability to exercise self-control in other areas and situations because you’re using the same mental muscles. With this in mind I deliberately find activities that require noticing, naming and taming, refocusing, and replacing. They are not hard to find.
When I drive, for example, I tend to engage in ongoing commentary (some of it quite loud and colorful) about people doing stupid stuff on the road. Someone cuts me off on the freeway and off goes my mouth. Someone pulls out of a parking lot in front of me and off goes my mouth. Someone makes a sudden lane change without signaling and off goes my mouth.
But there’s a downside to this. While this Tourette’s-like behavior seems harmless to me, it drives my wife crazy. So as a loving, caring, considerate husband, obviously I’ve stopped doing it, right? Not exactly. I’ve discovered it’s such a deeply ingrained behavior that it’s a hard habit to “brake.” So, in part to please her, I turned breaking this habit into a practice. When a reaction starts to flare up, I practice seeing, labeling, braking, refocusing, and replacing. When I want to mouth off and make rude comments about the driver who just cut me off, I try to maintain composure and laugh it off instead, or to make a sarcastic comment: “Thank you for cutting me off. Have a nice day.” It’s a hard habit to manage, but it’s the difficulty that makes it such outstanding practice.
It’s not just self-absorbed or irresponsible drivers. Our daily lives are filled with opportunities like this. The key is to see them and to use them:
• You prefer to kick back and read the news, but you choose to work on your proposal.
• Y
ou don’t want to run on a cold morning—you’d rather stay in your warm bed—but you choose to lace up and hit the road.
• You want to make a vulgar hand gesture to the driver who just cut you off, but you choose to smile and wave instead.
• You want to order the biscuits and gravy for breakfast, but you choose to order the oatmeal.
• You want to tell your colleague his point of view is nonsense, but you choose to inquire into his perspective.
Assessments and Feedback
Review any personality or behavioral assessments you’ve taken for clues about your general predilections and habits. This can include 360-degree feedback, formal performance reviews, as well as personality or behavioral assessments like the Predictive Index® (PI) Behavioral Assessment, The Harrison Assessment®, the DISC® profile, the Birkman Method®, or the Hogan Assessment®. These assessments can provide powerful information about your tendencies and the situations in which they’re triggered.
But don’t just take the assessment at its word; use it as a starting point for conversations with your colleagues, employees, boss, family, and friends. Exploring where the people agree and disagree with the assessment is a powerful way to learn about yourself while also getting better at staying in the sweet spot.
Building Your Situational Awareness
Pay Attention to People, Patterns, and Purpose
Pay attention to the fit, or lack of it, between patterns of behavior and the purpose of the conversation or meeting. To do this, here are a few questions you can ask:
1. What are we trying to accomplish here? What is the problem we’re trying to solve? What is the challenge we’re up against, the decision we’re trying to make, or the issue we’re facing? What, in other words, is the purpose of this meeting or conversation?
2. Is the issue we’re addressing routine (a clear problem with obvious solution) or is it more adaptive (a messy problem with no obvious or easy way to solve it)?
3. How do people seem to feel about the issue being discussed?
4. What behaviors are on display? How are people acting? Does the behavior of other people support what we’re trying to do here, or does it work against it?
5. What about my own behavior? How well does it fit with our purpose?
6. If there’s a lack of fit, what can I do to bridge it? Conversationally, what is being played and how can I play what’s missing?
Score a Meeting
A simple way to improve our ability to focus on the patterns in a meeting is to keep score. You can do this by creating a simple template and then monitoring the conversation as it unfolds.
When someone states a position, place a check mark in the “position” column. When someone explains their thinking, place a check mark in the “thinking” column. If they test it, place a check mark in the “testing” column.” If there is an inquiry, place a check mark in the “inquiry” column.
After 10 or 15 minutes, when you have a clear view of the pattern of discourse, ask: Does this pattern of conversation serve the purpose of the conversation? If you’re at a bar watching a game, then yes, this might be a perfect fit. But if your team is wrestling with a major decision, it’s probably a lousy fit. And whenever there’s a lack of fit, the question should always be: What can I do to bridge the gap?
Learn to Think Systemically
Systems thinking skills provide a particularly powerful way to build your situational awareness. As my colleague and close friend Chris Soderquist puts it, systems thinking—or what he refers to as SysQ (systemic intelligence)—helps you identify the “high leverage” places to intervene when you want to improve a process or relationship, or to address a problem. What is high leverage? It’s the place you can intervene to make the biggest impact with the smallest investment and the lowest risk of unintended consequences. If that’s not a great description of situational awareness, I don’t know what is. Chris teaches people and teams how to use a variety of tools—ranging from systems thinking questions, trend-over-time graphs, causal-loop maps, stock-and-flow diagrams, and dynamic simulation models—to expand and improve how they’re looking at a situation or issue. I’ll talk about this again in Chapter 9, but if you’d like to learn more right away, you’ll find a wealth of information about SysQ at findinghighleverage.com.
Readings
Whether it’s single-point meditation practice, yoga, tai chi, running meditation, or some other activity, the goal is to find a mindful awareness practice (MAP) that works for you. I’d encourage you to talk with other people who practice in order to find out what they find most helpful. Here are a few books to consider:
• 10% Happier by Dan Harris
• Aware by Daniel J. Siegel
• Coming to Our Senses by Jon Kabat-Zinn
• FOCUS by Daniel Goleman
• Fully Present by Susan L. Smalley and Diana Winston
• Insight by Tasha Eurich
• Mindfulness for Beginners by Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
• Mindfulness by Ellen Langer
• Mindsight by Daniel J. Siegel
• Running with the Mind of Meditation by Sakyong Mipham
• Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan
• Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron
• The Art of Communicating by Thich Nhat Hanh
• The Art of Noticing by Ellen Langer
• The Mindful Brain by Daniel J. Siegel
• The Mind’s Own Physician by Jon Kabat-Zinn and Richard J. Davidson
• The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron
• Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright
If you want to wield more powerful influence and take more constructive action, mindful awareness—the ability to direct and concentrate your attention on the subject of your choosing—is a bedrock skill to cultivate. But building disciplined focus takes dedicated practice. It’s akin to running. Just as completing a marathon requires a strong, disciplined body, high mindful awareness requires a strong, disciplined mind.
Want to Learn More?
For a regularly updated list of practices, readings, and other resources check out conversationalcapacity.com
MINDSET
That’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being—to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.
—MALCOLM GLADWELL
THE CONVERSATIONAL CAPACITY MINDSET
Turning Your Mind into a Workshop
If you haven’t changed your mind lately, how do you know it’s working?
—ALICE DREGER
This is the most important section of the book. It outlines the essential disposition that determines whether you’re flexible, open, and constructive in a challenging conversation, or rigid, defensive, and destructive. Awareness is vital, and the skills are important, but when it comes to working in the sweet spot under pressure, your mindset is pivotal.
What do I mean by mindset? Your mindset is the values, attitudes, and goals—conscious or unconscious—that inform your behavioral choices. A mindset is not what you say you value, or even what you think you value; it’s what you actually value. It’s what matters to you, the ideas and actions on which you place the most importance. If awareness is what you’re noticing in a situation, and the skills are what you’re doing, the mindset is who you’re being. The conversational capacity mindset drives your behavioral choices and infuses your candid and curious behavior with authenticity. So, for our purposes in this section, mindset refers to the values with which you approach a significant conversation.
Given it’s monumental importance, in this chapter I’ll share with you the distinctive aspects of the Conversational Capacity Mindset. They are the values that inform how you respond to difficult circumsta
nces and issues, and help you remain candid and curious and focused on learning, even when your min and “win” tendencies are doing their damnedest to knock you off balance.
The Basic Discipline: Refocusing
Awareness is essential to the basic discipline of conversational capacity. When you’re being triggered, it enables you to catch it, name it, and tame it. But to remain candid and curious you must next refocus by setting your mental sights on a loftier set of goals. The mindset does just that. It provides something on which to fix your beam of attention so that even when your defensive inclinations are doing their best to knock you off-kilter you’re still able to align your behavior with your intentions. Put differently, this mindset provides a conversational compass for staying on track in situations where it’s easy to lose your bearings; it provides a navigational beacon that helps you stay true to your course even in the confusing fog of a high-pressure conversation.
At its core conversational capacity is a mindset in action.
