My homework from the session included "Explain the most impactful [sic] ideas from this workshop to at least two other people." So I shall share with you my friends and family, which counts as many more than two. I think a lot of the ideas are applicable to everyday life, not just in context of business, so I hope you will find them interesting too, however feel free to skip the next eight paragraphs if you wish as I seem to have run on a bit in my enthusiasm to share.
A quality conversation is mutually respectful. It is not about brow-beating someone into acknowledging or accepting your opinion whilst dismissing theirs. It is not about making your wishes clear without considering the desires and motivations of your conversational partner. It's about sharing, listening, discussion, understanding and mutually acceptable resolution. This sort of resolution could mean that you convince them, that they convince you, or that you find a satisfactory alternative to both points of view.
Knowledge of how you react to situations and by extension, how others might react to them, acknowledging that they may well think differently about a situation from you is of great importance. If you go to discuss a perceived issue simply by telling someone to 'pull their socks up', then you will have missed the point entirely. It's about having 'the right conversation' not the conversation you necessarily thought you were going to have. It is also about having clear ideas of what is true, and what is simply your assumption or reaction to a behaviour or situation.
We learned a bit about the Pefrontal Cortex of the brain. What it does, it's limitations, the types of brain waves and their relative speeds and uses*, and the brain's organising principle: Move Away from threats and pain and move Toward reward and pleasure. Turns out we are simple creatures after all, but then deep down I'm sure we all know that.
Then we learned about the SCARF model. An acronym (because people love acronyms) for the five primary triggers of threat and reward in the social brain. Status: your perception of your positive relative to others, Certainty: how sure you are of what is going to happen to you, Autonomy: having choice, being in control of what you are doing, Relatedness: whether or not you consider a person a friend or a foe (though I include in this one, 'how much people like you') and lastly, Fairness: your sense of fair exchange between people.
We were asked to rank the five in the order we thought we had the strongest reactions to (positive or negative). In that exercise I thought that my order would be Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness and Status. But when I got home I did another little bit of the homework. I took the SCARF Self Assessment online. Click here if you would like to do it yourselves. My result was Relatedness well out in front on 35.7%, Status and Autonomy tied on 21.4% each, Fairness a mere 14.3% and Certainty a clear last on 7.1% so apparently it doesn't faze me nearly as much as I thought it did! I'm taking the result with a grain of salt as I've no idea how scientifically valid the method of assessment and result is, but the result did make me think at any rate.
The last activity we did for the session was go off into groups and attempt a quality (work-based) conversation. It was challenging. It was harder than we all thought to be 'solution-focused'. It was very easy to try to find out more about the problem someone might be experiencing, without moving on to getting to a solution. The key was to try and ask 'open' questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How? Questions that cannot be answered with a mere yes or no. We found ourselves all to easily wandering back to Is? and Could You? and Should We?.
The activity was made all the more difficult as I was mainly in the role of the one being questioned and we were using a real example current and sensitive in my work life, raw and tender, and not used to being analysed. Looking back on the rest of the day to come, this may have been an error in judgement on my part. It is going to mean a fair few 'quality conversations' with myself.
I like the facilitator that ran this session. I've had him before and he's a genuine and interesting fellow. I did find that today's session got a little hijacked now and then but I've been in the role of facilitator, so it's something I can understand and easily forgive. So there you have it.
After training had run on, I was fifteen minutes late to meet the girls for lunch. Luckily they are a wonderful and forgiving trio so they had waited patiently for me. I had a lovely time chatting and catching up, I did however make one mistake that impacted the rest of my day. I ate way too much of the wrong thing. The result of this was that I felt incredibly bloated and physically uncomfortable for the remainder of the day. Even now (midnight) I am feeling very tender in the tummy.
I headed back to Forest Hill after lunch and tried distractedly to get stuff done. I did manage to tick off one or two nagging tasks but I find that after long training sessions like this morning's you tend to feel very drained and unfocused on task-based activity. It was a very introspective topic after all. I also found out this afternoon that I'm being audited next week. I feel thoroughly behind and unprepared for this. I'll take the medicine should it need to be dealt, but I'm not exactly looking forward to it.
I stopped off at The Glen on the way home tonight to get my haircut and on the way there I saw someone else's very angrypants moment. Very angrypants indeed.
A young couple crossed High Street Road, the female stomping off ahead, chin held high in what she must have felt was 'justified fury', the young man bumbling along behind carrying her handbag. I fancy I saw her take off a ring and throw it on the ground, he of course picked it up and then went on trying to catch up with her. Then she did one of the oddest things I think I've ever seen.
She took off her Ugg boots and threw them into the road just ahead of the oncoming traffic! I don't think I have ever been so angry that I thought throwing away my shoes and startling people in charge of heavy machinery was a good way of dealing with it! Fortunately the cars were far enough back that if startled, the regained their composure quickly enough to simply drive over the boots. Though if I'd been among them, I'd certainly have been wary of what her next move might be!
My hair got cut. Well, all of them actually, and some of them a great deal more than I felt had been indicated as appropriate! I just hope looks ok tomorrow once it's dried or I'm likely to have an angrypants moment of my own.
I got home feeling reflective, disenchanted, worried and generally in a rough mood. I eventually convinced myself to get on the cross trainer if only to exercise some measure of control over something in an attempt to remind myself life (re: work) is really not all that bad. Unfortunately, with the still bloated stomach it only served to add 'sweaty' into the list of things not making me feel great today.
Today's food and exercise were:
- Breakfast was yoghurt, muesli, one sliced slightly unripe banana, slivered almonds and pumpkins seeds and a small cup of homemade coffee milkshake (one teaspoon sugar, one teaspoon instant coffee dissolved in hot water, topped up with milk).
- Morning snack was eight almonds, four brazil nuts, four hazel nuts, four pecan nut halves, some pumpkin seeds and two dried peach halves.
- Lunch was tortellini with semi dried tomatoes in a creamy sauce with a wedge of garlic bread.
- Exercise was 40 minutes on the cross trainer to an emotional rollercoaster ride of Buffy.
- Dinner was 50g of tzatziki with a carrot cut up into sticks followed by a 170g Dairy Farmers Thick & Creamy Vine Passionfruit 98% Fat Free yoghurt.
So that's my day finally done. I probably shouldn't read tonight as it's already very late and I still have to empty the bins and brush my teeth. But I'm probably going to anyway, even if it's just one chapter. Here's to a better tomorrow,
Jess
PS: I also found some comfort tonight in this talk by Alain de Botton on youtube. It was just serendipity that it came up in my youtube feed today. It's extremely relevant to today's worries and he is one of the people I most admire in the world.
*Beta, frenetic pace, active, 'doing mode'. Think 'racing brain at bedtime'.
Alpha, focussed on a single task.
Theta, relaxed, beginning to access the subconscious.
Delta, the deepest slowest wave, present in deep sleep and comas.
I'm sure that's a ridiculous oversimplification of an extremely complex neurobiological process but it served its purpose for today.
I got:
ReplyDeleteCertainty: 35.7%
Fairness: 28.6%
Relatedness: 21.4%
Status: 14.3%
Autonomy: 0%
The questions were a little too skewed though, and not really enough of them.
ps captchas suck!