3 posts tagged “questioning”
I think it is safe to say that the human race generally doesn’t like to be TOLD what to do.
Why can’t you just “tell” someone what to do? Well, in some cases you can… If whatever you are proposing makes blatantly logical sense to both parties and there is equal benefit to both of them, then simply telling the other person what to do does work.
The reality of the matter is that not all “scenarios” are created equal. What makes complete sense to one party on the first communication pass-through usually doesn’t make the same sense to the other party. This is where the difficulty and confusion can come into play.
We are going to talk about some of the main reasons why you can’t simply “tell” someone what to do and therefore need to use questioning scenarios. Again, when I use the term “tell” I am referring to directionally forward statements…
Among any of the immediately available “projects” running around someone’s working memory that may conflict with your request, there are two major forces at play in a person’s subconscious that are battling against the demands you may be making of them.
They are the psychological immune system and the scarcity principle. Let’s talk about each to see how they are sabotaging your efforts.
1. Psychological immune system – Have you ever seen a small-in-stature man walking around with his arms puffed out with his chest pushed up and a mean look on his face like he is ready for anything? Or maybe a morbidly obese woman shopping with a baby t-shirt on, skin tight jeans, belly hanging out and make up that “beats” the proverbial band? Well if you have, what you are bearing witness to is the side effects of the human races “Psychological Immune System”.
I have spoken about this in other blog posts so I won’t go heavily into it here. I’ll give you short synopses though: Our psychological immune system is a set of cognitive processes and filters that directs our attentional processes, information filters and thereby our actions in a way to keep us “level headed”.
There is actually a phenomenon in the psychological community knows as the “Lake Wobegon Effect”. This is named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional community where “the women are strong, the men are good-looking and the children are all above average”. This phenomenon describes the human race’s propensity to think of themselves, individually as smarter, better looking, more likely to succeed, less likely to get hurt and so on, than the next guy.
The processes by which people are able to do this are all part of the psychological immune system. People will absorb information that suits their beliefs, deflect information that does not, massage statistics, rationalize… even go as far as to make things up and completely refute irrefutable evidence in order to maintain the strong confident and attractive persona that they hold onto.
As are result of this, a HIGH premium is placed on being considered “rational”, “logical” and “consistent”. This high premium is the DRIVE that forces people to battle to the death in some case to be “right” rather than be “effective”. Any direct push on someone’s currently held notions or belief systems is in effect calling them “wrong” in holding those beliefs or notions.
This fits into our current schema in that a direct, hard statement, evaluation or demand can and usually does overtly assail the other person’s currently held beliefs and notions. The result is almost always an “equal and opposite reaction”. The force of your statement will usually be met with a force of their own. Protecting their concept of consistency and correctness is going to be TOP priority.
2. The scarcity principle - Loosely stated, the scarcity principle dictates that as an item’s availability becomes more and more limited, the value of that item become increasingly higher.
In no other vertical is this more evident than when the “item” is an individual’s personal freedom. When I say personal freedom, I am referring to their currently available options or choices regardless of subject vertical. These can be anything from the ability to simply stay put versus going outside, to being able to eat what they want to hanging out with whoever they want, etc…
Basically, when any limitation is placed on the options available to someone there are a certain set of processes that are set off internally that can cause ever increasing anxiety and stress. As that person is forced closer and closer to making a decision, these processes and the feelings resulting from them grow more and more unpleasant.
The two major factors at play are:
- Loss of choice - making any decision will automatically delete any other choices, and
- Lack of control - being “forced” into that decision.
The scarcity principle goes way back to our evolutionary processes and is wrapped around our own personal safety. It heavily involves our fear-system and more importantly our amygdala which controls the release of fear based hormonal cocktails into our systems. This can be incredibly powerful…
By making statements, hard definitions, evaluations and most importantly, demands that go against a person’s already identified interests; you will IMPOSE both of the major factors associated with the scarcity principle onto the communication recipient.
How can you avoid these? By asking questions of course… Isn’t that what we are talking about? The usage of questions as opposed to statements will produce comfort (at least more comfort than statements) through three major factors:
- Questions do not DIRECTLY attack or refute existing notions or belief systems. Questions “elicit” their beliefs (which we will inadvertently give them) rather than “force” our own onto them. This will allow them the room to “be correct” in their decisions.
- Questions allow them choices. Questions do not box someone in immediately… Have you ever heard the story about boiling a frog? If not, look it up. The net sum is that if you throw him into boiling water he is going to jump right back out. But, if you slowly heat the water he will become comfortable and used to it step by step… Questions can do the same exact thing. They do not fire of someone’s critical thinking as readily as statements.
- Questions give complete and unfettered ownership of the outcome of the communication to your recipient. By allowing the illusion of ownership, and thereby control of the conversation and the outcome you will do wonder with avoiding the activation of the scarcity principle.
By now it should be obvious that questions should be a very integral part of your communication tool box. Tomorrow we will talk about what you can do specifically with questions and then we will look to finish up the series by discussing types of questions and possible strategies for you to use them with.
To learn more about questions and other forms of effective communication, please visit my site The Communication Expert.
The Communication
Expert | David J. Parnell
The Communication Expert Blog
In following yesterday post on The Culprits of Miscommunication, we will begin by addressing our linguistic or non-verbal “distortions”. The actual distortion per se is not necessarily in the original message or information that shows up in your speech as much as it is in the translation of your message. Keeping in mind that your brain is constantly, relentlessly trying to establish pattern and predictability in your surroundings, it is no wonder communication distortions occur.
“Mind Reading” is one such distortion and can occur in your communication partner’s translation of your message. For instance, let’s say you are out on a date and things seem to be going swimmingly… Your date seems to be really into you, but as usual your starting to run out of things to say. Searching your mind you remember a story that a friend told you earlier that day about a date gone wrong for them. All though it is a bit racy, you go for it anyway… What the heck, things seem comfortable enough.
Well as you get to the end of your story, your dates demeanor changes suddenly and once the check comes they split… What the heck happened? You only told a story about a friend of yours… More on this is a bit, let’s get to the science of it.
The mammalian population has been gifted with what are known as “mirror neurons” in our brains and their sole responsibility is to mimic or imitate the person/animal that we are engaged with. When I say mimic, this doesn’t necessarily mean actually performing the same action as them, but at a minimum internally/mentally mimicking them… the result is the ability to “feel” internally what they are feeling/experiencing at the time. The benefits to this are evident. If we choose to do so, we can learn and implement skills we see. This also facilitates powerful socializing and networking tools we have such as compassion, empathy and teamwork.
Along with this network of mirror neurons, we have a hormone running through us called oxytocin that, although much more prevalent in women, has shown in experiments to greatly increase our ability to “mind read”. Oxytocin is much more concentrated in women as one it’s main functions surrounds the facilitation of reproduction and birth bonding. We are not referring to ESP here, but oxytocin does aid in our ability to more accurately predict what someone is feeling based on our own sensory acuity. This is our reading of their facial expressions, body language, verbiage, etc…
From a psychological stand point, we can only view and understand messages through our own frame of reference. Our frame of reference is analogous to a mental filter through which we “see” the world. When we receive linguistic and nonverbal communication alike, our brain instantly compares that information to our stored knowledge and experience. In this way and only in this way are we able to “understand” the messages we are receiving. As a result, we have an inherently limited capacity to interpret our surroundings. All three of the above mechanisms combine facilitate our capacity to “mind read” during our interactions. Unfortunately, we are only correct a certain percentage of the time… and if it isn’t 100%, we can run into problems.
OK, back to the date… Now, you were only telling a story that you thought was funny in hopes to prevent the weird awkward silence that both of you have been dreading. You were hoping to simply get a laugh out of her… Let’s look at it from your date’s point of view.
Earlier that week she had been on another date with some creepy guy… right before he tried to grab her and make out with her he told her a story very similar to yours… In fact, his facial expressions kind of looked like yours while you were telling that story… So what does this mean? In short, she “felt” like you were going to try something more than simply telling a story. She performed a mind read... Although it was inaccurate, it inevitably happened and your left holding the check and nothing but a bruised sense of self… Less than ideal?
Worthy of note is that this does NOT happen consciously, these are all messages and interpretations happening at the nonconscious level. Without top-down executive control, this will simply “happen” and people (including you) will react automatically and turn the rest of your communication into history…
How do you fix this? Good question and this is something that I get into specifically in my series “The Evolved Communicator”. Please visit me to learn more...
David J. Parnell | Communication Expert
Following yesterdays post on your brain’s processing function, we will begin to delve further into the “reality” that these attentional processes create in your own world. Now, while the focus of your attention is being directed per se by the two major processes we discussed yesterday, it is not necessarily being dissected, evaluated acutely and then purged of unwanted “material” for efficient communication. In other words, a great deal of information is stored that is by no means necessary or even relevant for your survival or thriving success for that matter. So although there is a great deal of purging going on during the initial attentionally biased processing, there is still a massive information glut stored in your brain on a daily basis.
Now our brain has developed and implemented an AMAZINGLY efficient and effective storage, retrieval and re-presentation process in what is known as LANGUAGE. This may seem less than epiphanic, however most people do not know the extent to which language literally constructs their internalized mental world. When I tell you to think of a tree, you will hear the word “tree”, you will say the word “tree” internally, your brain will call upon all of the thousands or millions of concepts surrounding the word “tree” and create a mentally constructed image of a “tree” and then a mental check will occur verifying that “yes, this is indeed a tree”. There is much internal dialogue and communication occurring during this process and the entire movement per se is facilitated and directed by the word “tree”.
Now, let’s extrapolate that out… How about I ask you to guide me in making a decision as to whether or not my significant other and I should have a baby right now… Oh boy is there a lot going on inside your head… The amount of constructing going on internally is huge… You will internally represent a baby, child rearing, schooling, disciplinary challenges, feeding, driving them to soccer practice, etc… Along with all of the visual, auditory and kinesthetic representations will come all of your values, rules and belief systems that surround child rearing. These especially my friends are EXCLUSIVELY represented in language based terms. These rules, values and beliefs are the literal glue that hold your world together… allowing you to make sense of things. Well you get the point here, there is a ridiculously large amount of informational processing occurring that is language based and all of this will be done almost instantly to provide an answer to the question I posed.
Rules, regulations, values and beliefs for the most part are subject matter for another time. Here we will stay focused on the gaps if representing your mental world to the others you are interacting with. Let’s revisit the tree… Now if I ask you to tell me “what a tree looks like”, you will most likely say something along the lines of “well it is tall with green leaves and a brown trunk”…
In adhering to the least energy principle (which we will evaluate in another post) you will give me just enough information to answer the question… as it (the question) has been presented by me (which may very well have gaps of it’s own).
Now, does this accurately represent all of the knowledge you have of a tree? Hardly… There are differently shaped leaves, with different colors, or needles instead of leaves and some have hard chunky bark where as others have almost skin and some are white at the base whereas others may be gray and the leaves have a vein like structure to them and so on…
So what does all of this mean? In the large crevasse between the comprehensive battery of knowledge you have stored internally and the actual representation of that knowledge to another human being whether written or orally, stands three categorically problematic systems. They are generalizations, distortions and deletions… These three gremlins per se are almost exclusively the culprits of every unintentional miscommunication on face of the planet… Our only defense it the ability to recognize them and defeat them with inquisition.
Moving forward we will begin to look at the micro components of each system and how we can effectively recognize and sterilize these gaps for effective and clear communication.
