 It’s understandable to want to delay, or even avoid, difficult conversations—especially if you dread conflict. But doing so can actually damage relationships. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Joel Garfinkel, author of Difficult Conversations, Practical Tactics for Crucial Conversation, offers this advice for making tough conversations more palatable:
Have you initiated a difficult conversation? What strategies did you use, and how did they affect the outcome? Did the relationship improve afterward? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.
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 Anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of Americans feel lonely much of the time, writes Kasley Killam in Scientific American. This puts them at risk for developing a range of physical and mental ailments, from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes to cognitive decline and depression. (Tweet it!)
Loneliness is a public health problem, but at the individual level, Killam, who drives community engagement in health research for Project Baseline at Verily and is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, says we can take action to counter loneliness. One strategy is to volunteer. In a recent survey of over 10,000 people in the UK two-thirds reported that volunteering helped them feel less isolated. Similarly, a 2018 study of nearly 6,000 people across the US examined widows who, unsurprisingly, felt lonelier than married adults. After starting to volunteer for two or more hours per week, their average level of loneliness subsided to match that of married adults, even after controlling for demographics, personality traits, and other variables. These benefits may be especially strong the older you are and the more often you volunteer. Volunteering can obviously provide the opportunity to make new friends and feel a sense of belonging. But it can also compensate for the loss of meaning that commonly occurs with loneliness. (Research using the UCLA Loneliness Scale and Meaning in Life Questionnaire has shown that more loneliness is associated with less meaning.) Volunteering for causes that are important to us engenders a sense of purpose, which is tied to psychological well-being. If you volunteer, can you describe the impact volunteering has on your frame of mind and on your relationships? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  Debate and disagreements at work are productive; fighting is not. (Click to Tweet!) Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Annie McKee, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and author of How to be Happy at Work, says, “We each bring our own baggage to work each day. And, some of our issues rear their heads again and again.”
Topping McKee’s list of sources of work conflict are personal insecurity (fear of admitting we are imperfect), the desire for power and control (attempting to position oneself above others), and habitual victimhood (relinquishing control to avoid accountability). What can we do about conflict at work? McKee suggests the following:
What causes fighting in your workplace? Do you think you can play a role in transforming it? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki has researched what he calls “positive conformity.” In his research, he notes, “participants who believed others were more generous became more generous themselves.” This suggests, “kindness is contagious, and that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.” (Tweet it!)
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company, says, “Zaki’s insight is vital for improving society, but it applies to companies too.” However, instead of treating kindness as a “directive,” he suggests treating it like a contagion and creating “the conditions under which everybody catches it.” Taylor cites a case study detailing customer service transformation at Mercedes Benz USA. When Stephen Cannon became president and CEO, he understood that almost every customer transaction “came down to a personal encounter with a human being in a dealership who could either act in ways that were memorable or could act the rote way most people in most dealerships act.” He set about creating a grassroots movement to encourage and empower customer-facing employees to rise to any occasion. “There was one dealer who’d closed a sale and noticed from the documents that it was the customer’s birthday. So he ordered a cake, and when the customer came in to pick up the car, had a celebration. Then there was the customer who got a flat tire on the way to her son’s graduation. She pulled into a Mercedes dealership in a panic and explained the problem. Unfortunately, there were no replacement tires in stock for her model. The service manager ran to the showroom, jacked up a new car, removed one of its tires, and sent the mother on her way.” Taylor believes that this bottom-up, peer-to-peer commitment to customers at Mercedes-Benz USA is “a reminder for leaders in all sorts of fields: You can’t order people to be kind, but you can spark a kindness contagion.” Can you share an instance of kindness in your organization that sparked others to act similarly? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  We all complain at times. Some just do it more often than others. Some seek attention by complaining; some use complaints to badger others; but many complainers are ruminators, repetitively worrying about problems.
Repetition, however, is the mother of all learning. When we repeatedly focus on the negative by complaining, we’re firing and re-firing the neurons responsible for the negativity bias—and, as Rick Hanson, a neuroscientist and author of Buddha’s Brain, reminds us: What gets fired, gets wired. In other words, the more we complain, the more we notice things to complain about. (Click to Tweet!) Thanks to something called “neuroplasticity”, negative habits change our brains for the worse. But positive habits change them for the better. If you find yourself caught in a complaining loop, try breaking it by:
Have you ever noticed that complaining usually leads to more of a negative outlook? What happens when you try to break the cycle? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs. |
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