What's on your mind?
My friend, Matt, has had a long career in public relations and communications, and introduced me to the term, "committing candor" when a politician or public-facing official actually says what's on their mind in a deviation from the message, talking points, or informationless response they were trained to deliver.
Interesting questions for me are ultimately invitations. Someone offers me a space to express myself. I want to commit candor. In this post, I'm making the distinction between an invitation to share my point of view, as opposed to a demand for information.
Invitations are much harder than demands. The invitation usually isn't a cold call. It's often best sent when someone has let you in a bit on their point of view. This becomes an opening for you to make more space for them.
Reflections -- responses that mirror back what you think you heard -- are a very good place to start. Reflections assert our awareness and understanding of another’s communication without indicating whether or not we agree. The purpose isn’t to mask our own view. On the contrary, we reflect to keep the clutter of our own view out of our understanding of what the other is saying.
Sometimes these are specifically begun with “Here’s what I hear you saying, . . .” or “What I’m getting from you is . . .”
Other times, your frame of reference is understood, and question is inherent in the statement.
“You don't sound happy about this.” “That must have made your day.” “You seem frustrated.” “You seem to have mixed feelings.”
Reflections serve a number of purposes. They show you’re listening and taking things in. They keep the conversation open and give encouragement to the speaker to expand and elaborate.
Most important, reflections allow your subject to check the accuracy of your mirroring. They bring to the surface what you think you heard and understood out into the open for mutual scrutiny.
Further, no human thought is ever fixed. Our thoughts are in constant motion along those complex neural pathways bumping against one another, traveling together, adding new information, forgetting other information. When we reflect on what we understand, our partner takes in the information coded with our vocabulary, freighted with our demeanor. It necessarily enlarges the perspective.
This process of questions and answers helps us not only to learn about others, often our most illuminating questions are the ones we ask others of ourselves.
“Why am I so tired?” “Why did Brian’s email upset me so much?” “What could I have done differently?” “How could I have been such a fool?”
Most of the time, the best strategy for gathering more of another’s point of view is to keep our own mouths shut. In American culture especially, we fill silences.
Pauses allow us to catch up with our thoughts and our thoughts to catch up with us. Often our thinking and our expressions of our thinking walk at different paces. When we pause, we give them a chance to synchronize and to return to consistency.
Pauses also allow our active processors to rest and our dormant processors to activate. They give us the chance to think under different lights.
Pauses give implicit permission to others to start or stop. However, when someone else pauses, we should resist the opportunity to weigh in with our views. Often the pause precedes a peroration. The speaker is summoning a conclusion. If we jump into the pause, we can lose the best part of the communication.
At the same time, too much silence can suggest we’re not engaged. Silences can also be aggressive in that they can signal unspoken disapproval. Small signals of attention can encourage the other to keep going.
“I see” “Keep going,” “I get it.” “Did they really?” “No joke? “ “Wow.” “Hmmmm” "Tell me more."
And we do it symbolically: Raised eyebrows Nodding Facing another with open body positions
Some of us are more responsive to verbal cues; others to symbolic cues. Over time you can take the measure of your partner.
May I suggest you light up some neurons today and invite someone in to add their fuel to the warmth. Save seats for candor and silence.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper