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Accepted and Understood: It’s Human Nature
We want to feel accepted and understood; it's human nature. What gets in the way? Here are my thoughts. I'd love to hear yours!
Hi, Denise here. Today I'd like to talk about in this video a concept that every one of us wants to feel accepted and understood. Think of it as Brene Brown would say, "seen, heard, and valued."
Why I bring that up is I've recently been working with a company from a manufacturing business and they had their people in a training. One of the things that we asked them to do was to take it back and use some of the techniques. Well, one of them came back and said "I had an interaction with one of my co-workers and it didn't go well." I said "Really? What happened?" So, she started explaining to us. We realized in this that the person she was interacting with was giving her a lot of pushback or what we call "yeah buts," and it stemmed from he was feeling made wrong.

And so when a "yeah but" happens there are places that we go and we actually had her look at this and play it out. So the pushback was first, she said something and he immediately came back and explained and justified why he did or didn't do whatever the situation was. She then countered with "yeah but, it still needed to be done." He then escalated it to defending his position - "This is why I did this or didn't do it." And then she came back and defended why it needed to be done, and then he countered with pointing fingers. And again, it was another "yeah but," and laying blame.

So what we saw in a conversation and played out is that there was a vicious cycle. He would explain, she would then defend, she would defend, he would then lay blame. And it would just go back and forth. And my observation is that this is the biggest problem in anything that isn't working with people that need to work together; whether it be in a work environment, whether it be in a marriage, whether it be in just business relationships. And so it comes from the other party not feeling understood.

So we're gonna unpack more of this talking about could it just be that the way I think and communicate is different than the way you think and communicate, and it's landing as a make wrong. Because, as we've seen, when a make wrong occurs we go through this vicious cycle because human wants to be right.

So stay tuned! We'll talk more about this in the next video.