The Logician and the Dramatist
Learning How Not to React
This time will be different
I’ve always liked and loved “Helen” and I’ve always been glad she joined the family. Yet she had the ability to trigger me into frustration in less than five minutes.
Until now. As I prepared for my recent Communication Styles teleseminar I realized I could hear Helen’s words in a new and more benevolent way. “In my next visit with Helen,” I promised myself, “I’ll observe, understand and manage – not so much what she says – but my reaction to it.” And that’s what I did. It worked. What I once considered negative, overly dramatic and unacceptable became neutral, fascinating and non-threatening.
A very scary bag of chips
Helen is an imprecise communicator. She generalizes and exaggerates. These habits used to leave me feeling misled and manipulated. Not any more.
I decided to stop taking her literally. As a result I even found some of her exaggerations amusing rather than irritating. Here’s one example.
I had bought a large box of chips. She mentioned that there was probably just a tiny bag of chips inside that big box. When I opened the box I in fact pulled out a very small plastic bag of chips – but then noticed the box came with two bags of chips.
I showed the tiny bag to Helen before I let her know there were two. She laughed and said, “You about scared me to death with that tiny bag.”
I chuckled at the thought that a bag of chips could be so ominous.
All logic aside
I observed my desire to correct Helen. When she said, “Bottled water costs more than gasoline these days,” I corrected her before I caught myself. She knows what gas costs and she knows what water costs. She didn’t need me to tell her. She needed me to hear the essence of her message and not be so exacting.
When I started seeing Helen’s exaggerations as neutral and stopped taking her so literally, the emotional charge disappeared. I used to feel depleted by what I heard as overstated complaints. Here are a few I collected from my recent visit:
“Cleaning the fridge will be an absolute horror.”
“We spent a million dollars fixing the cabin.”
“We’ll be doing laundry all day on Sunday.”
“If we ever get any water in the lake it will really be nice.”
“Every patrol car in the world is out today.”
“We’ve hit every red light there is.”
I considered how I could play along. I could suggest we make a Hitchcock-like movie of the fridge cleaning. I could respond to the million dollar comment by saying, “there goes my inheritance.” I could suggest she could read War and Peace from cover to cover in the time the laundry would take. I could take her words as a challenge to leave all logic aside and join in. The only limit was my imagination.
I enjoyed my last visit with Helen more than ever, not because she changed, but because I did.
Almost derailed
I don’t claim perfection. I did get defensive when she told me, “You don’t know how to take a vacation. You’ve been on the computer all day.”
Since I hadn’t been on the computer much at all, my knee-jerk reaction was to defend myself. But I realized Helen was just doing what she does – embellishing her point. She wasn’t speaking any more literally than she was when she suggested that water costs more than gasoline.
Helen didn’t blink when I continued to work on my computer for several hours more.
I do know how to take a vacation. I took a vacation from my own reaction to a communication style that used to disturb me. Or, as Helen might say, I took a vacation from my own reaction to a style of verbal embellishment that used to drive me crazier than the women on the show Desperate Housewives.
Now, that’s a vacation. Sometimes you just gotta get away.
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Meryl Runion and Speak Strong (SpeakStrong) provides Power Phrases (PowerPhrases) and other tools to help you improve communication skills at work and at home.
She is the author of the books PowerPhrases!, How to Use PowerPhrases, Perfect Phrases for Managers and Supervisors and How to Say It: Performance Reviews. She can be reached at 719-684-2633 or by email:
