Google has spent millions of dollars proving that trust is the bedrock of constructive communication. They wanted to know why their best teams succeeded, and after not being able to prove any of their assumptions and going back to observe those teams, they found that what they had in common was not personality or intelligence or confidence or prior success, but something they called ‘psychological safety.’ That’s the kind of safety that’s built on feeling able to be real and vulnerable in a group, not competing with your peers, and being encouraged to learn from failure collectively.
How do we create this kind of trust and safety? In the session on difficult conversations I put my favourite quote from psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl on the screen behind me: “Between stimulus and response there is a space,” he wrote, and “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
It’s a space that grows with reflection and requires slowing down our knee-jerk reactions into considered responses. We tend to think of this as an individual process. Aided by meditation, mindfulness, breathing and other practices, we seek to expand that space in ourselves and on our own. Yet because we are social animals that respond to cues in our context, seeking that space together is much more powerful.
The idea of using our feelings as a signpost to shared needs comes from ‘non-violent communication’ (or NVC), a method of conflict resolution created by mediator and activist Marshall Rosenberg. NVC is a deceptively simple and powerful approach which asks that you take responsibility for your own reactions - so someone doesn’t ‘make’ you angry; rather, you may feel anger when something is said. This is at odds with everything we’re taught in today’s ‘culture of blame.’
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