by Craig Weber
4. Listen for contrast. Listen to people who see things in a different way, not necessarily to find common ground—although it’s a big bonus if you can—but in order to understand and to learn. Holding steady while listening to people, even when they’re spouting a repugnant view that curdles your milk, quickly strengthens your muscles in multiple areas: mindful awareness, mental strength, curiosity, patience, and persistence.
Build Your Overall Discipline
Cultivated discipline lasts longer than fickle motivation.
—JOCKO WILLINK
Tim Ferris, in an article about Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL, explains why building your discipline is so important:
Having spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy—with time spent commanding Task Unit Bruiser at SEAL Team 3—Willink intimidates not only with his extensive military career, but also physically. He is the recipient of the black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and has been known to tap out 20 Navy SEALs per workout. On top of all that, Willink is also a business founder and bestselling author of the book Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual.
No doubt, with all of this expertise in business, sport, and combat, it would be natural to assume that Willink must be incredibly motivated, right? Actually, he would beg to differ, as he says, “Don’t count on motivation; count on discipline.”
“The more you practice,” he says, “the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.” Discipline in any area of your life will increase your skills, productivity, and, he reveals, will “set you free.”
Don’t feel like exercising? Don’t feel like starting that business proposal? Trust an expert U.S. Navy SEAL and remember that your lack of motivation truly does not matter. “You do it anyways,” Willink says. “You grit down.”7
So rather than depend on fickle motivation, grit down and increase your discipline. “I believe that self-control is our greatest human strength, and the easiest thing that we can improve upon,” says Nathan DeWall, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, who went from obesity to running 100-mile foot races by building his discipline.8
Build Your Mental Toughness
Mental and physical agility run on the same track.
—JOHN J. RATEY AND RICHARD MANNING
While you are building your discipline, go the extra mile and build your mental toughness, too. Here’s the difference. You’re building discipline when you accomplish your daily goal of running 10 miles. You’re taking it a step further—and building your mental toughness—when you choose to do it during the coldest, wettest, most miserable part of the day. You build mental toughness by accomplishing your goal in a way that lets your body know your mind is in charge. Cold showers are proven to be good for you, but they’re a miserable experience, so from time to time turn off the hot water and force yourself to tolerate the frigid spray. It’s healthy, and it provides yet another way to show your body that your mind is in the driver’s seat.
When I trail run I have a rule: I always run uphill. I can walk downhill if I need to, but if I’m heading up a long hill and I need to stop, I start to walk back down the hill. Once I’ve caught my breath, I turn around and continue running up the trail. This is a painful practice, but it helps me push my performance to higher levels (I don’t waste any time catching my breath because I know I’ll have to run back up the distance I just walked down) and it builds mental toughness.
Cultivate an Affirmative Bias
“Our brain evolved to scan for problems and it is skilled at finding problems when it looks,” says Loretta Breuning, author of The Science of Positivity. “Negativity will engulf you unless you build yourself a positivity circuit. To guard against or combat a negative bias, spend one minute looking for positives, three times a day for forty-five days. This trains your brain to look for positives the way it is already trained to look for negatives.”9
If you’re in a position of authority, cultivating an affirmative bias is particularly important because you have the attention of the people below you in the hierarchy and they take cues from how you’re framing an issue or situation. Pay attention to what you’re doing with that attention. What signals are you sending to your team? What can you do to cultivate a more affirmative orientation in your organization? What questions can you ask? How well are you at maintaining the balance between keeping a clear-headed, evidence-based, no-nonsense look at current reality and an affirmative bias for how to move forward?
Sometimes you won’t recognize that you’ve been sucked into the morass of negative assumptions until you’re too far gone. To pull yourself out of that dark place, challenge your negative assessments in a rigorous way by asking yourself double-loop questions:
• If my negative assumptions have no more validity than my affirmative assumptions (they’re all just untested hypotheses at this point), then which assumptions are the most useful? Which assumptions make me less a passive victim and more an active agent? Which assumptions are more likely to spark the most learning and progress?
• What examples can I think of in which someone facing similar circumstances (or even more difficult ones) was still able to do something productive?
• Where in the universe does it say, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the situation I’m facing is hopeless?10
• What opportunities vanish if I cling to this negative assessment? And if I adopted an affirmative mindset, what new possibilities might open up?
• What messages am I sending to my team, and are those messages helping them deal with the challenges we’re facing, or getting in the way?
Sharpen Your Baloney Detection Kit (BDK)
Familiarize yourself with Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit (BDK). I’m not going to describe it here, but you can find descriptions online or read about it in his brilliant book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
Ask Questions That Challenge Your Worldview
• Why do I think what I think?
• How might others be making sense of the issue differently?
• How might my previous experience, or the lack thereof, be influencing my interpretation of this situation?
Refocusing
Once you’ve seen, labeled, and braked, refocus on what really matters:
• I can feel my need to be right urging me to argue my point. But the goal here is to make the smartest decision we can, so let me see if there are contrarian points of view and explore what others are seeing that I am not.
• Uh-oh. There’s my minimizing tendency telling me to play it safe and avoid this issue. But if we’re to make progress it needs to be addressed. So, let me put my view on the table and check it with the team.
Focus on the Good
Get in the habit of directing your beam of attention on the positive aspects of your surroundings. As you walk along a street, instead of focusing on the trash on the sidewalk, watch the birds on a bench. Rather than focus on the traffic in front of you, notice the trees above you. As Mr. Rogers’s mother suggested, when things are going horribly wrong, rather than focus on the people causing the trouble, focus on the people stepping in to help.11
Change Your Self-Talk
Practice what psychologists refer to as “cognitive reappraisal”:
• Instead of thinking, This situation is hopeless and it’s not my job to fix it, deliberately shift to, Yes, the situation is a mess, but if we work together and work smart we can do something about it.
• Instead of thinking, I can’t make a difference here, so why waste time trying?, think instead, I can make a constructive difference here, or at least learn something by giving it a try.
• Shift your thoughts from, Clearly I’m the only person who cares around here; everyone else is just a self-protecting bureaucrat, to People may see things differently, and they may be frustrated, but they probably want things to improve as much as I do.
Another simple way to change your self-talk is to ask yourself more affirmative, responsible, and constructive
questions:
• What can I do to make a constructive difference in this messy situation?
• We should never waste a crisis, so how can I use what is happening to spark some learning and progress?
• People seemed to be focused on the downside to this decision, but I wonder if there’s an upside?
• Everyone is focusing on what’s wrong with this situation, but what are the opportunities it presents us? How might we take advantage of those opportunities?
• We’ve got two strong, opposing views here. I wonder how we might combine them to generate an even smarter response to the situation we’re facing?
• With whom might I partner to help shift the focus of the team, organization, or community on this issue?
The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of the state of your mind.
—WAYNE DYER
Celebrate Mistakes
Celebrate slipups for the learning they provide. Embracing your frailties and blunders breeds learning, compassion, and humility. Frank Barrett explains it this way:
. . . errors violate expectations. Essentially, they disrupt routines and unthinking behavior. They wake us up and demand we pay attention to something that previously was in the background. We are forced for the moment to look again, to become curious, to ask about our own approach, clearly showing how mistakes are a powerful tool for growth and learning. We have to disengage ourselves from patterns and pay attention in new ways. An error can energize us to investigate strange outcomes and can lead to discovery. When we make a mistake, it’s not possible to comfortably live inside our assumptions and comfortable beliefs. We’re forced to confront our biases; we have to explore alternatives.12
Here are questions you can use to learn to do a better job of this:
• What was the cause of my mistake? What led me to be so ineffective?
• Did other people see me make the mistake? How do I think they judged me?
• Have I seen other people make a similar mistake? How did I judge them?
• What can I learn from all this?
• What can I do to ensure that the next time I’m in a similar situation I respond in a more constructive way?
• Do I need to strengthen some aspect of my awareness? My mindset? My skills? Some combination of them all?
Goof Off
“The time you enjoy wasting,” said Bertrand Russell, “is not wasted time.” It’s easy to overdo it when you get excited about a goal. One way to build this mindset is to occasionally get your mind off building it. Take time to relax and goof off.
Emma Seppalla, author of The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success, points out the dangers of overdoing it. “Although overwork can appear to be the most productive route, it actually fails us in two major ways that are critical to our success: creativity and problem-solving skills, on the one hand, and social connections, on the other.” And these skills, she points out, are essential to taking our work or product to the next level. Emma goes on to make this point:
Here’s how overworking fails our problem-solving skills and creativity: research by former Harvard psychology professor Dan Wegner suggests that too much concentration on set goals can lead to the exact opposite of the desired goal. He coined the term ironic processes to describe the failure of positive mental processes when performed under conditions of stress. For instance, the more you obsess about having to hit a perfect golf tee shot, the more likely you are to choke; or the more you try to maintain a strict diet, the more likely you are to eventually binge.13
So, if you’re working hard to build your conversational capacity, make sure you enjoy periodic timeouts and just take it easy.
Look for the Humor
Look for the humor in a situation, especially when it’s about you. It’s a great way to increase your humility, and research shows it can increase your persistence. Looking for what’s funny—and relishing it—is not wasting time; it’s an investment in your ability to stick with a challenging task.14
Rethink Risk
Assess the risk of the situation in a different way. Sure, there are hazards associated with speaking up and making a difference, but rather than just focusing on the dangers—something we’re naturally prone to do—deliberately focus on the opportunities as well. Instead of emphasizing what might happen if you speak up, for example, consider what might happen if you don’t speak up. Yes, speaking up can be a risk, but what’s the risk of remaining silent?
Study People Who’ve Done It
Put things into context by studying people who have overcome bigger obstacles than you’re facing; people like Malala Yousafzai, Temple Grandin, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lech Walesa, and even Steve. If they were able to make a difference in their situations, why can’t you?
Cultivate a Constructive Orientation
Consider this big question: What are the patterns of choice in your life? Are they mostly constructive, with the occasional slip into destructive? Or the opposite? What is the trend over time? This is an important question to consider, for the choices you make lead to the character you cultivate, and the character you cultivate influences the choices you subsequently make. We’re all somewhere on this continuum. The goal is to be more conscious about where you are and to deliberately choose activities that push you toward The Leadership Mindset. Be more focused and deliberate about the wolf you feed.
Questions to Continually Ask
Here are questions to continually ask:
• Are there more useful ways to frame this issue?
• What are my blind spots in this situation?
• What biases are distorting my perceptions?
• How might I be seeing things that others are missing?
• How can I frame the changes I’d like to see so that people respond more positively to the idea?
• How can I help others get their ideas into the conversation?
• What perspectives are we all missing, and how can we find them?
• Are we avoiding issues that need to be addressed?
• If things were to change for the better, where would be the most high-leverage place to begin that work?
• What can I do to improve the status quo?
• How can I play what’s missing to bring more balance to this meeting or conversation?
Watch Films
Watch dramas and documentaries that demonstrate people making progress on tough issues against tough odds. Here’s a short list to get you started:
• A Beautiful Mind
• Dead Poet’s Society
• Gandhi
• Rabbit Proof Fence
• Sophie Scholl
• Temple Grandin
• The King’s Speech
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Twelve Angry Men
What would you add to the list?
Suggested Readings
Here is a list of readings to help you strengthen particular aspects of the conversational capacity mindset:
• “Level 5 Leadership” by Jim Collins (HBR article)
• 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do by Amy Morin
• A Mind of Its Own by Cordelia Fine
• Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz
• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
• Emotional Agility by Susan David
• Grit by Angela Duckworth
• Leadership for a Fractured World by Dean Williams
• Leadership Without Easy Answers by Ron Heifetz
• Making Great Choices by Jennifer Riel and Roger Martin
• Mindset by Carol Dweck
• Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
• On Being Certain by Robert Burton
• On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Thinking by Edward DeBono
• Real Leadership by Dean Williams
• Team of R
ivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• The Abilene Paradox by Jerry Harvey
• The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
• The Heart of Man by Erich Fromm
• The Lost Art of Listening by Michael P. Nichols
• The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin
• The Person and the Situation by Lee Ross and Richard Nesbett
• The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown
• The Science of Positivity by Loretta Graziano Breuning
• What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman
• Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney
• Yes to the Mess by Frank J. Barrett
Want to Learn More?
For a regularly updated list of practices, readings, and other resources, visit conversationalcapacity.com
SKILLS
Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.
—ANTON CHEKHOV
CANDOR SKILL #1
Stating Your Position
Language is the magnificent faculty that we use to get thoughts from one head to another. . .
—STEVEN PINKER
Without specific skills for putting the ideas into action, the mindset we explored in the last section is little more than a bumper sticker. It is the focus on skills—specific behaviors you can learn, practice, and adopt—that separates this work from most of the other training and development advice on the market today. Think about it. Most of the guidance on interpersonal effectiveness, team building, or leadership development focuses on improving your intentions:
