3 Exercises For More Productive Meetings

Conversational Blind Spots

Three decades ago I began my first experiment in Conversational Intelligence®. I was hired by Union Carbide to work with 17 high-powered sales executives in danger of losing a bid for a key contract. My job was to figure out how they could raise their game and beat the other seven competitors.

For two weeks I had them role-play potential conversations with “customers” and charted what they said. The patterns were clear: The executives used “telling statements” 85% of the time, leaving only 15% for questions. And almost all the questions they asked were actually statements in disguise. They were talking and talking, trying to bring their counterparts around to their point of view—all the time thinking that they were still conducting good, productive conversations.

Having observed thousands of executives in similar, real-world situations—from prospecting to performance reviews, business development to innovation—I can tell you this is a common problem. People often think they’re talking to each other when they’re really talking past each other. They carry on monologues, not dialogues.

There is a biological explanation for this: when we express ourselves, our bodies release a higher level of reward hormones, and we feel great. The more we talk, the better we feel. Our bodies start to crave that high, and we become blind to the conversational dynamics. While we’re being rewarded, the people we’re talking to might feel cut off, invisible, unimportant, minimized and rejected, which releases the same neurochemicals as physical pain.

Feeling rejection sends them into a “fight, flight” response, releasing cortisol, which floods the system and shuts down the prefrontal cortex, or executive brain, letting the amygdala, or limbic brain, take over. To compound conversational challenges, the brain disconnects about every 12 to 18 seconds to evaluate and process; hence, we’re often paying as much attention to our own thoughts as we are to other people’s words.

These are natural impulses. But we have to learn to master them because clear two-way, compassionate, non-judgmental communication is necessary in leadership—it is how deals get done, projects get run, and profits get earned.

Recognize your blind spots. Stop assuming that others see what you see, feel what you feel, and think what you think (that is rarely the case). Your blind spots cause you to fail to recognize that emotions, such as fear and distrust, change how you and others interpret and talk about reality. You think you understand and remember what others say, when you really only remember what you think about what they say. Don’t underestimate your propensity to have conversational blind spots!

Start paying attention to and minimizing the time you “own” the conversational space. Start sharing that space by asking open-ended discovery questions, to which you don’t know the answers, so you stay curious. For example, you might ask, what influenced your thinking? Then listen non-judgmentally to the answers and ask follow-up questions.

Through coaching, the Union Carbide sales team began to notice when they were making assumptions, interpreting incorrectly, and jumping to conclusions. They started asking discovery questions and paying close attention to their customers’ answers, which expanded their frame of reference and gave them new insights into needs and opportunities. In so doing, the executives presented themselves as conversationally intelligent partners, not sales people—and they won the contract!

Hooked on Being Right

When you are in a tense meeting trying to defend your position on a big project and start to feel yourself losing ground, your voice gets louder. You talk over one of your colleagues and correct his point of view. He pushes back, so you try to convince everyone you’re right. It feels like an out-of-body experience—and in many ways it is. In terms of its neurochemistry, your brain has been hijacked.

In situations of high stress, fear or distrust, the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down. And the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. The body makes a chemical choice about how best to protect itself—in this case from the shame and loss of power associated with being wrong—and as a result is we are unable to regulate its our emotions or handle the gaps between expectations and reality. So we default to one of four responses: fight (keep arguing the point), flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus), freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him).

These harmful responses prevent the honest and productive sharing of information and opinion. I find that the fight response is by far the most damaging to relationships. It is also, unfortunately, the most common. That’s partly due to another neurochemical process. When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a feeling that we want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again—and thus become addicted to being right.

Many successful leaders suffer from this addiction. They are skilled at fighting for their point of view (which is often right), and yet they are unaware of the dampening impact their behavior has on the people around them. If one person is getting high off his or her dominance, others are being drummed into submission, experiencing the fight, flight, freeze or appease response, which diminishes collaborative impulses.

Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection, and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. Your goal as a leader should be to spur the production of oxytocin in yourself and others, while avoiding (in communication) those spikes of cortisol and adrenaline.

Three Exercises to Try Today

            Here are three exercises to do at work to cure your addiction to being right:

1. Set rules of engagement. If you’re heading into a meeting that could get testy, start by outlining rules of engagement. Have everyone suggest ways to make it a productive, inclusive conversation and write the ideas down for everyone to see. For example, you might agree to give people extra time to explain their ideas and to listen without judgment. These practices will counteract the tendency to fall into harmful conversational patterns. Afterwards, consider see how you and the group did and seek to do even better next time.

2. Listen with compassion. In one-on-one conversations, make a conscious effort to speak less and listen more. The more you learn about other peoples’ perspectives, the more likely you are to feel compassion for them. And when you do that for others, they’ll want to do it for you, creating a virtuous circle.

3. Plan who speaks. In situations when you know one person is likely to dominate a group, create an opportunity for everyone to speak. Ask all parties to identify who in the room has important information, perspectives, or ideas to share. List them and the areas they should speak about on a flip chart and use that as your agenda, opening the floor to different speakers, asking open-ended questions and taking notes.

Connecting and bonding with others trumps conflict. I’ve found that even the best fighters—the proverbial smartest guys in the room—can break their addiction to being right by getting hooked on oxytocin-inducing behavior instead.

This article originally appeared on psychologytoday.com and was written by Judith E. Glaser.

Want to Improve Your Willpower?

While it makes sense that meditation would be linked to greater willpower, who'd have thought procrastination could also do the trick?

One of the key parts of our culture at Buffer is a focus on self-improvement. We each pick an area to improve on each week and share our daily progress and challenges, making it a social, supportive way to adjust, create or change our habits.

There’s still a lot of work to be done for self-improvement to be effective, though. I’ve been through a bunch of different improvement focuses in the last few months, including positivity, running, reading more and learning French. Each one has been fun to focus on, but it’s hard to keep more than one new habit going at a time—partly because it takes so much willpower.

What willpower is and how it works in the brain

Kelly McGonigal, PhD, and author of The Willpower Instinct says willpower is a response that comes from both the brain and the body.

The willpower response is a reaction to an internal conflict. You want to do one thing, such as smoke a cigarette or supersize your lunch, but know you shouldn’t. Or you know you should do something, like file your taxes or go to the gym, but you’d rather do nothing.

The prefontal cortex (that section of the brain right behind your ) is the part that helps us with things like decision-making and regulating our behavior. Self-control, or willpower, falls under this heading, and thus is taken care of in this part of the brain.

To be effective at controlling our urges and making sound decisions, the prefontal cortex needs to be looked after. That means feeding it with good-quality food so it has enough energy to do its job and getting enough sleep.

How willpower gets depleted throughout the day

McGonigal points out that one of the most replicated findings about willpower is that it seems to be finite—that is, we only have so much and it runs out as we use it.

Trying to control your temper, ignore distractions or refuse seconds all tap the same source of strength.

We can look at willpower like a muscle—it can get exhausted by overuse, but just like our physical muscles, there are some researchers who believe we might be able to strengthen our willpower by training it.

How to increase your willpower

Okay, we know that we only have so much willpower and as we go about our day, stress and normal self-control depletes our resource. Let’s see what options we have for increasing the pool of willpower we have to draw from.

1. Increase your capacity for pressure: Learn how to manage stress

To start with, we need to manage our stress levels, says McGonigal. Being under high levels of stress means that our body’s energy is used up in acting instinctively and making decisions based on short-term outcomes. Our prefrontal cortex loses out in the battle for our energy when high-stress is involved.

McGonigal says that stopping to take a few deep breaths when we feel overwhelmed or tempted can be a great start in managing our stress levels and improving our willpower.

2. Encourage yourself to stick to your plan

To make it even easier, it appears that self-affirmation can even help you to have more self-control when you’re running out, according to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. A good example of this is the difference between telling yourself "I can’t" and "I don’t." Taking back control of the situation using the phrase "I don’t" has been shown to be more effective at helping you to stick to your plan and break bad habits:

Every time you tell yourself "I can’t," you’re creating a feedback loop that is a reminder of your limitations. This terminology indicates that you’re forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do.

So try telling yourself that you don’t do that bad habit, rather than punishing yourself by saying "I can’t."

3. Get more sleep to help your brain manage energy better

McGonigal also says getting enough sleep makes a big difference to how efficiently our prefrontal cortex works:

Sleep deprivation (even just getting less than six hours a night) is a kind of chronic stress that impairs how the body and brain use energy. The prefrontal cortex is especially hard hit and it loses control over the regions of the brain that create cravings and the stress response.

Luckily, McGonigal also cites studies that have shown we can make this work in our favor by ensuring we get enough sleep:

When the sleep-deprived catch a better night’s sleep, their brain scans no longer show signs of prefrontal cortex impairment.

And if you’re wondering how much sleep is enough, here’s a rough guide: one of the most acclaimed sleep researchers, Daniel Kripke, found in a recent study that "people who sleep between 6.5 hours and 7.5 hours a night, live the longest, are happier and most productive."

4. Meditate (for as little as eight weeks)

Meditation has also been linked to increasing the reserve of willpower we have available, as well as improving attention, focus, stress management, and self-awareness. McGonigal suggests this can even give fast results:

And it doesn’t take a lifetime of practice—brain changes have been observed after eight weeks of brief daily meditation training.

5. Better exercise and nutrition: The most ignored route to higher willpower

Another great way to train the brain, that is often easily ignored or undervalued, yet can make you a lot more resilient to stress, and thus boost willpower, is regular physical exercise. Both relaxing, mindful exercise like yoga and intense physical training can provide these benefits, though McGonigal points out that we’re not sure why this works yet.

As I mentioned earlier, what you feed your body affects how much energy the prefrontal cortex has to work with. This is why nutrition is so important:

Something as simple as eating a more plant-based, less-processed diet makes energy more available to brain and can improve every aspect of willpower.

Not only will exercise and good nutrition improve your willpower, but they’ll make you feel better as well. Exercise in particular is known for making us happy by releasing endorphins:

These endorphins tend to minimize the discomfort of exercise, block the feeling of pain and are even associated with a feeling of euphoria.

6. Postpone things for later to gain focus on what’s important now

Postponing something you really shouldn’t have can be effective if you’re trying to break a bad habit. In Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, Roy F. Baumeister explains that people who tell themselves "not now, but later," are generally less tormented by the temptation of something they are trying to avoid (his example is eating chocolate cake).

A treat for you, since you waited this long

One last thing. You might have heard of a famous experiment using marshmallows to test kids’ willpower. What happens is a child is left alone in a room with one marshmallow for an undefined period of time. If they can resist eating the marshmallow, they’re rewarded with a second marshmallow at the end of the experiment. If they eat the marshmallow before time is up, they only get that one.

Written by Belle Beth Cooper

For more information:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3032513/work-smart/6-scientifically-proven-ways-to-boost-your-self-control