“We'll talk about it tomorrow” means...what?

Below is a lightly edited and polished transcript of Season 1, Episode 3 of the Forging Common Ground podcast, released today.

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Hi everyone. This is Forging Common Ground. If it's your first time, welcome. If it's not, welcome back.

Two topics for today. First, in the last episode I mentioned that I would share with you what we can do to bridge differences in communication style. So I will do that. And second, we'll take a deeper look at why we have to continually bring the lens back to ourselves and to our triggers if we're serious about forging common ground.

So, regarding bridging communication styles, because I suspect that most members of the audience live and work in cultures that favor direct communication, my advice is for direct communicators to do more of the bridging to indirect communicators.

Why? Why would I do that? Because of power.

What does power have to do with this, you might be thinking? Well, power takes many different forms. One form of power is present when our own baseline styles align with what's considered normal or natural or right. When our styles deviate from the norms, we get othered. That is, we get treated as other, or less than. So simply by going about our business and communicating directly in a culture that favors direct communication, if we do that, we may be unintentionally perpetuating exclusion.

Conversely, then, to the extent that direct communicators can bridge to indirect communicators, we can carve out spaces for greater belonging.

I go into this in some detail in chapter four of my book, Humanly Possible. Here, because of time limitations, I'm just going to summarize some of the strategies that direct communicators can use to bridge to indirect communicators.

They're broken down into two groups. One is strategies for speaking, and the other is strategies for listening.

When speaking…so, I'm a direct communicator, I'm bridging to an indirect communicator. When I'm speaking to this indirect communicator, what can I do to bridge to them? First is I can use hedges like “maybe” or “I think” or “it seems.” What this can do is it can relieve some of the pressure that the indirect communicator might be feeling.

Second, I can ask questions instead of making statements. So compare these two:

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

That's a very direct way of expressing a thought. Compare that with:

“Do you think there might be some other way we could consider doing this?”

Very, very different. That second way is one way we could bridge to an indirect communicator.

And then third, if you feel the need to disagree or to criticize, try to do so privately. So those are three strategies for bridging to indirect communicators when speaking.

When listening, understand that in public settings, you might not hear much from indirect speakers. Carve out time for one-on-one communications where you might have more success drawing out their thinking.

Secondly, listen for stories. This is a big one. This has been big for me. Listen for stories, because indirect communicators might be using stories as parables for the situation that they actually want to address.

And third, pay attention to nonverbal cues such as body posture, gestures, and facial expressions, voice volume, and intonation.

Now, it can be extremely challenging for direct communicators to bridge effectively to indirect communicators, especially in entirely different cultural environments. So for example, it took me years of living and working in China just to learn some of the rudimentary specific ways, culturally specific ways of communicating.

I'll give you one example. This was actually from my first year in China, and I had somebody from the United States to interpret for me what the heck was going on. I won't tell you the whole story, but the gist was a long-distance call had been made by my associate. And she asked the person in charge of gathering payments for the phone call, how much is it? And he said the following in mandarin. He said, “明天再说吧。” Literally translates as, “We'll talk about it tomorrow.”

What my associate explained to me was, “Okay, we can go now.” I said, “What? What do you mean we can go now? He said we'll talk about it tomorrow.” She said, “That's code for forget about it.”

So that's a that's a specific phrase in a specific language inside of a specific culture that you just need to learn. And there’s a lot of parallel kinds of things. Where you just need to know the specific ways of communicating indirectly. So it can be really, really hard if you don't know all of those culturally specific ways.

And that's not just direct and indirect communication. That can be, for example, two different indirect communicating cultures. I've heard stories of folks from China who've gone to live in Japan, who get confused by the very specific ways in which communication gets done in Japan.

All that to say, there's endless possibilities for learning.

Thankfully, though, these are some of the more extreme examples. This degree of difficulty is not common, but it does remind us that we do need to pay attention, a certain kind of close attention, to non-literal meaning that we may not be used to paying attention to as direct communicators.

Now, as a direct communicator, even though I wrote those strategies down, I'm sharing them with you now, I put them in a book…I still have some level of discomfort with indirect communication. Later in the episode, I'll share some more thoughts on this, but for now I'm going to bracket communication styles. We will come back to those.

Moving on to topic number two: triggers and the need to focus on ourselves.

After episode one, in some exchanges that I had with listeners, the listeners focused on the generational and gender differences involved in the scenario that I shared, rather than getting into what I thought of as the heart of the matter, which was the massive, explosive reaction that happened in my brain in that story. So in episode two, the last episode, I shared with you all about how surprised I was by this. And then after that episode, I heard from a particularly engaged listener, which kicked off a fun back and forth that I had with him.

I'd like to highlight what this listener said. He said, “Interesting that most people are going back to the scenarios. I think you did really well pointing the conversation back to the root of it all. Which is that certain things, certain behaviors, certain words, they trigger a behavior or a response which I'm not necessarily proud of, which I want to mold and model into a different way.”

So that last part I think is especially insightful, “a response which I'm not necessarily proud of, which I want to mold and model into a different way.”

Forging common ground sounds great in theory. But what about the next time I'm triggered by someone? How am I going to respond in the moment? Am I going to actually behave in ways that align with my values? Or am I going to end up doing damage and further isolating us into our separate corners?

The fact is, every single human being, that means you, that means me, that means everybody — we all have triggers. Some of those triggers are milder, some of those triggers are stronger, but we have them.

When we are triggered, our amygdala lights up. And it sends the stress hormone cortisol into our body. And it shuts down access to our neocortex.

Without our neocortex, we have zero hope of forging common ground.

So rewinding now to communication styles. To this day, at a baseline level, I get annoyed by indirect communication. Still! Which means that my amygdala gets active. Now it's not massively active, it's not like that huge amygdala reaction that I had that I talked about in episode one. It's not that bad, but it's still an active amygdala. Which, again, if we're trying to forge common ground, is not ideal. And it's only through a lot of hard work that I've learned to recognize myself as the source of the annoyance. Not that annoying indirect communicator, but me. I'm the source of the annoyance.

Now. Topic for a potential…potential topic for a future episode is like what does that mean, “me”? Because we all contain multitudes, right? I don't want to get into that right now. The point is, in a meaningful sense, I am the source, because I'm the only entity that is going to take action which will have impact on folks around me.

Additionally, the more that I've learned about different styles — whether it's communication styles, work styles, conflict styles, leadership styles, whatever kind of styles — the more I've come to see my own styles as arbitrary.

So logically to me that leads to one conclusion: it's up to me to always be building awareness of different styles, as well as strategies for bridging to other styles.

Another bracket here: I am purposefully leaving out cases of severe and systemic othering and marginalization. Where people are forced day in and day out to code-switch, accommodate, integrate, and assimilate. That is a huge topic for another time. It's also one of the main themes in my book. But too big for today.

What I'm talking about today, I'm talking about situations where our own style conforms to dominant cultural norms, where we are in the position of relative power. And this gives us opportunities to carve out spaces of belonging.

At this point, you may be asking, how do I do it? Well, we've already talked about the specific bridging strategies. So that's one layer to this highly multi-layered topic.

Speaking more generally, Not about direct and indirect communication styles, but speaking more generally about how we can calm down that amygdala threat reaction when we are triggered, I've got one big one for you today, and that is to try to connect to the values that drive the behaviors that we find annoying. So in the case of direct communication, two values, very common, that drive direct communication are transparency and efficiency. Let's just put it all out there so that we can get to the heart of it and be done with it and move on to whatever is next.

Indirect communication tends to be driven by values of group harmony and also face, or honor, that is not embarrassing other people.

So here's how I put it together. If I'm finding myself annoyed by a certain behavior, in this case by indirect communication, what I can do is remind myself that the behaviors that I find annoying are driven by values that I care about. I care about group harmony. I like getting along with other people. I care about face and honor. I don't like embarrassing other people.

As it happens, in communication situations, my direct communication is a reflection of the fact that I'm prioritizing efficiency and transparency over group harmony and honor or face.

It doesn't mean that I don't care about those values, that I don't share those values; it just means that the way that I rank them is different. So if I can connect the behavior with the value, and if I can identify with the value, that is a great strategy for deactivating the amygdala. And getting access to my neocortex.

That's flipping annoyance into appreciation, and it's an extremely powerful technique for forging common ground.

So that's it for the topics for today.

I've got some questions for you.

What are you learning?

What questions do you have?

Do you disagree with anything that I've said?

Are you bothered by anything I've said?

As always, write me at common@jasonpatent.com, or fill out the feedback form that is linked in the show notes. Thank you again for coming. Until next time, let's keep forging common ground.