Lifting the energy in the room
I was chatting with a colleague and in response to a point I made, he said, ‘You’re absolutely right’. The words lifted my mood.
Just like tracking user emotional energy in your product funnel can improve conversions, tracking your audience’s emotional energy in a conversation can improve the outcome of the discussion.
💡Often, in meetings, we point out a minor flaw in or suggest a marginal improvement to a proposal. The intent behind this may be good–to make oneself useful. The effect is telling. A 5% suggested improvement suddenly brings down motivation of the presenter by 50%.
Did this person come into the meeting gung-ho about the idea she was going to propose? Of course! It was hers. Pointing out a tiny wrinkle has made her ready to disown.
And this behavior is contagious because there are more agents than principals in life. Agents need to constantly prove they’re smart, whether they hate themselves for it or not.
So, stop! But how? Marshall Goldsmith, one of the best known executive coaches around, has some advice.
👉Ask ‘Is it worth it?’ before choosing to butt in. We tend to check if what we’re about to say is correct. That’s basic. Go a level deeper than that.
👉Don’t start a sentence with any of these three words: NO, BUT, or HOWEVER. Disagree without being disagreeable.
👉Stop playing the ‘this is who I am’ card. Some of us find it hard to listen. Some find it hard to challenge. We explain such (and many more) things with this is who I am. This typically ends up settling debates by rank, which is that the highest-ranking person in a discussion gets to play this card.
The fact that we can concede ground to our boss when the need arises has the germ of the idea that we are not prisoners of a fixed identity. We can train ourselves to listen. And when we do, we must not only think about suppressing a bad habit — that is hard and we will feel like a phony. We could change our self-limiting beliefs instead.
