Are you a conversational drive-by shooter?
When was the last time a situation or a conversation got really hard, and rather than turn away from it, you pressed into it?
In episode 26 of my podcast, speech pathologist and communication coach Alex Perry and I discussed the value of "staying in the struggle" when it came to having uncomfortable conversations.
These days, it's far too easy for us to do the conversational or relational equivalent of a drive-by shooting.
We enter a high-stakes conversation or situation — discussing politics on Aunt Jenny's most recent Facebook post comes to mind — emotionally tangling with our own unresolved questions.
We blast away at our targets with our opinions, threats, and accusations, and then we leave.
We remove ourselves from the scene, unaware or perhaps unconcerned about the damage we've left in our wake.
The unsocial side of social media
In a world where our “social” interactions involve less and less face-to-face contact with another human, we lose empathy — the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person.
In social media- and Internet-driven relationships, we no longer have the chance to read the body language and facial gestures of our counterparts, particularly when we debate a topic on which we disagree.
By communicating with others nearly exclusively through technology and social media, the idea that these are actual human beings on the other end of our emails, posts, and tweets begins to fade, because we read responses and reactions in the form of lifeless texts and words rather than cueing on a furrowed brow or a syllabic emphasis or a heightened tone of voice.
We begin to interact as if we are communicating with lifeless, emotionless robots, and so we fling vitriol into cyberspace the likes of which we would never spew if we were standing face to face with the target of our disagreement — another person.
In a moment of heated emotion, we fire off a 280-character tweet that after its been sent, we never have to deal with the human emotion on the receiving end. We lose our capacity for empathy.
Technology and social media are great for making connections, sharing and exploring new ideas and places, creating efficiencies, and bringing important issues to the forefront. But it takes getting uncomfortable with and around other people to have prolonged, thoughtful, civil discourse.
Stay in the struggle
Most of us spend our lives pursuing comfort — or rather, avoiding discomfort — above everything else.
But when you make comfort the goal, it warps how you view your relationships. If your primary objective is to live comfortably and you constantly avoid difficulties, then every experience you have and every interaction with another human being becomes self-serving.
It breeds laziness and entitlement. It creates an attitude that hard work is an inconvenience and something to be avoided, even if that hard work involves keeping a relationship with a friend, a spouse, a child, a partner, a co-worker, or a boss healthy and strong.
Give yourself and others grace. Press into the discomfort. Ask questions of yourself and others. And know that things are gonna get messy sometimes.
As Alex said in our conversation in episode 26:
"(Acknowledge) that you’re going to get things wrong and you’re going to mess up, and (trust) yourself and (have) the confidence in yourself that you can then use skills, use things that you’ve learned, to repair a relationship, re-state what you wanted to say, make a correction. Perfectionistic behavior and the expectation that people are going to speak perfectly all the time, that’s a lot of pressure for all of us to be under, and I don’t want people to live that way. We have to be able to make mistakes."
