January 23, 2022
Welcome to Disagree Better, a twice-monthly email designed to help you collaborate and negotiate in ways that keep vital relationships resilient and important decisions sound in business and life.
Insight
Lots of people say that want to write a book, when what they really mean is that they want to have written a book. People tell me all the time that they want to be better listeners, but far fewer put in effort to change bad listening habits that get in the way. Listening deeply and well during disagreement is hard. It’s also so very learnable when we make the commitment:
— 5 bad listening habits and how to break them
Go deeper
When I’m teaching conflict resolution skills and habits, I tell participants not to walk out of the training and try the new skills and approaches in the middle of their next disagreement. No one takes a single snowboarding lesson, then safely and gracefully makes it down the black diamond trails. Practice in low-stakes moments and build muscle memory for use in the more difficult moments. The dinner table, an easygoing committee meeting, a cup of coffee with a colleague — these are excellent places to practice better listening habits. Go deeper on habit change with this awesome book; it’s been at the top of multiple bestseller lists worldwide for a reason:
— Atomic Habits by James Clear
Elsewhere
One reason we lose sight of our good listening intentions is that we’re distracted by our mind’s keen interest in formulating a story about what we’re experiencing. Some researchers think the drive to explain the world is a basic human impulse, similar to thirst or hunger.
“I think very often the world presents us with ambiguity. And what we do is we try to connect the dots in a way that tells a compelling narrative and that allows us to have a sense that there is order…[For example] when we interview people, often I think even without realizing it, we construct a whole story about the kind of person this is and how they’re going to do in the job and how they fit into what we’re looking for. And that’s one kind of evidence that we might use for deciding who to hire. But then we also have things like their resume and their letters of reference. And perhaps we tend to over-rely on our own story that we construct and under-rely on these other sources of evidence that may or may not fit into our story so nicely.”
— Princeton University psychologist Tania Lombrozo in The Story of Stories on Hidden Brain
Take care of each other,
Tammy