3+ tools for de-escalating reactivity
You’ve found your courage and initiated a tough talk. You started soft, presenting the problem without reactivity. You were prepared. You did everything right.
And still, things have gone wrong.
They’re angry. Resentful. Reactive. Even though you spoke from your own experience, they feel blamed. You’re the bad guy just for bringing this up.
The third Boss Battle of Difficult Conversations is navigating reactivity.
I have personally avoided so many conversations because I’m afraid of the other person’s response. I don’t really need to bring it up, right? It was just a boundary violation. A broken promise. An angry outburst. I’m sure it won’t happen again.
I know, somewhere inside, that I’m just kicking the problem down the road for future me to deal with. I’ve learned some skills to deal with reactivity, so that future me will stop giving me dirty looks - or broken relationships.
When I share something important to me and the other person reacts badly, the first thing I do is de-escalate…myself.
Inevitably, I’m annoyed that they’re annoyed. How dare they respond to my beautiful need, my (often not) well-crafted share, with anything less than a humble apology? Where do they get off, having their own emotions??
In the self-regulation module of our Art of Difficult Conversations course, we talk about a couple techniques for coming back to center. The most important thing is to recognize that you’re upset, and give yourself space to pause. You can do box breathing, or a physiological sigh, or count to 10. Just try not to respond from anger, especially towards the start of a tough talk.
Once you’ve de-escalated yourself, do the same to the other person. A couple good techniques for this:
-
Mirror what you heard. “It sounds like you feel hurt that I brought this up.”
-
Validate their experience. “I get why you might feel hurt, since you thought this issue was resolved.”
-
Ask a question. “What happened last night, for you?”
We call these 3 techniques - plus a 4th of Revealing your experience, which you hopefully did in your soft start - the “Conflict Toolkit”. You can resolve just about any issue using just those 4 tools.
Now - there’s a slightly different set of tools needed if your conversation partner starts using what we call Bad Actions, such as aggressing, deflecting, stonewalling, manipulating, or going into victim mode. You’ll have to check out the full course for those! (Perhaps we could call another Bad Action “over-promotion”?)
If you use the 4 Conflict Tools for a couple minutes, while remembering to de-escalate yourself, it will usually get you through the first fires of a tough conversation. Congratulations - you’re over the scary part!
Now you just need to, well, have the conversation. We’ll get into that in the next episode of (cue theme music) the Boss Battles of Difficult Conversations.
To better fights,
Sara and Geof
Responses