Communication: Reacting or Responding?
This time I thought we’d have a look at the topic of communication and how we can try and manage our rash instinctive reactions before we respond – this applies to verbal communication and written communication – especially email – I’ll discuss email communication in a future post.
One of the questions we need to ask ourselves just before we respond to something someone sends us or something someone says to us is this:
Am I reacting or responding?
You see all too often we “react” rather than “respond” – there can be a key difference.
Reacting is emotionally driven – usually someone says something or writes something and we let fly, we feel that emotion well up inside and it drives us into a state where we usually end up over-reacting, all too often 15 minutes later when we calm down we start to think more rational and wonder if perhaps we did over react.
You see that explosive emotional reaction is driven from your beliefs or fears, something said has struck a chord that you feel has reflected on your identity, standards or abilities, and your fight/flight response kicks in and the adrenalin drives your over passionate response.
This all seems very justfied at the time, but like I said earlier we often realise afterwards there probably was another way we could have handled it – we could have responded rather than reacted.
So whats the difference? Well, if before we let fly we take a minute to check in and see if we are reacting or responding and calm ourselves down a little, take a deep breath and decide to get clarification of what they mean – perhaps it is a simple misunderstanding.
A response will always be calmer, more considered and in the end you will come across as far stronger and more sure of yourself than any mad outrage. After all its only your body you are putting under excess strain in that situation.
Someone who can stay calm, get clarification and set the record straight in a calm but firm way is a far healthier, constructive and respected person.
Now, this is going to be a little hard for some of you to accept but you see the simple fact is this – no one can ever really upset you, our emotions are a process we do to ourselves, it’s how we process and take on board what someone else has said or done.
The first step though is to stay in control, not let what someone else has done or said upset us more than it should, because all too often we do get upset or annoyed far out of proportion to the “crime” so to speak.
Yes, people do and say horrible things, its always happened, always will. One of the most stupid sayings ever is the one we all learnt at school “Sticks and Stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me” – like thats true!
Words are powerful, words people say to us, and also the words we say to ourselves….we need to be careful with words…
Just because someone says something though does not mean it’s true, something someone does, does not mean they have considered how you would feel and gone ahead regardless, most of the time people don’t think at all they just do on autopilot.
We can be different though, and we can be healthier and have far less stress if we develop the habit of staying calm, looking for clarification, collecting the facts and then responding.
“What makes you say that or think that?” is often a good response to something to hold your position before you react and change gear down a notch or two from reacting to responding.
Have fun with it, get curious about why you react the way you do sometimes.
Mark Rhodes
