How often have you felt the need to be right? It could be the time you felt slighted in a conversation. Perhaps it’s the time that someone’s “attitude” just struck you the wrong way. It is easy to get trapped in our need to be right, we all want to win and we will go into overdrive to persuade others that our point of view is the correct one.
When we operate out of our desire to win at all costs we are operating our of the part of the primitive brain called the amygdala. It is the amygdala which is hard wired with the instincts of fight, flight, freeze or appease that have evolved over humankind’s history of millions of years. When we feel threatened the amygdala immediately activates to ensure we survive.
We notice this activity when anything that triggers our emotions take for example politics. It is rare to find a political discourse that remains in the civil exchange of information. Once the amygdala locks down we are no longer open to influence. And the conversation deteriorates quickly into a disagreement.
We can choose to step out of that type of “you vs me” conversation and move to a “we” conversation if we choose to become aware of how we are creating the conversation. Only 7% of the communication we give are the words we use the rest is intuited or sensed or made up as the conversation is heard by another. It is important to really understand that 93% of our communications are non-verbal and created in the receiver’s mind based on their current map of reality.
One way to create better communications is to verify that what you heard is what they were saying? A difficult but not impossible task if you are interested in the relationship that you are building with another person.