Why Difficult Conversations Cause Lingering Stress At Home (Plus How To Not Take Your Work Home)
Have you ever been in a situation where you have a conversation rumbling around in your head like a storm rolling in?
Even if you try to focus on something else, the same voice keeps playing on a loop and it begins to take up all your thinking space.
Yes, you know you have to have that difficult conversation at work but your stomach is in a knot and you can’t help but feel ill at the thought of saying what needs to be said.
Perhaps having that difficult conversation at work brings up certain triggers for you or perhaps you are getting hooked on cultural constructs that imply giving someone potentially negative feedback is not a good thing. Even voicing our dissatisfaction with a product, meal at a restaurant or even a service can be uncomfortable
Feeling this way is true for many. After all, most people don’t like saying things that are potentially upsetting to someone else. It also goes against the grain of what society teaches us as being acceptable.
Why our brains ruminate
From an evolutionary point of view we are hardwired to survive and part of surviving means that we rely on being part of a group. So what does having a difficult conversation at work have to do with this?
Giving someone potentially negative feedback or expressing displeasure means that there is a chance that we will be rejected by the other person. Even though it is not a matter of life and death to be perhaps face being rejected by one person, the brain still perceives this as a potential threat to survival on some level.
Not being liked at some level because we are the bearer of bad news is difficult for most people to swallow psychologically. After all, the majority of people want to feel liked.
Viewed in this way, it is not big surprise why people fastidiously veer away from having those difficult conversations at work.
There you are thinking it’s only you
Society, school and most families don’t prepare us for such situations. It’s all a bit of a taboo.
The lack of skills to have the ability to deal with these situations causes us stress. The longer we don’t deal with it, the heavier the burden of not doing it becomes. It weighs on us and drags us down. It becomes the must, should, have to thing that just keeps churning.
The brain does not like to let go of unresolved things and usually one of two things happens, it either rolls around in our heads and we might even speak about it to others or we suppress it and stuff it down into our “not dealing with it” box.
The unspoken can be akin to putting a plaster onto a wound without properly cleaning the wound first, the infection will leak out anyway it can and that manifests itself in stress.
Either way, because it is unresolved it has a negative impact on us both psychologically as well as physiologically.
As we aren’t two people, a home self and a work self, that that unspoken difficult conversation at work hops on and rides home with us. It can’t help but lurk in the shadows and appear in the form of an argument, short temper, feeling irritable or anxious. It has a detrimental impact on us and those around us.
So what can you do about it?
But, it is never too late to learn techniques and ways of thinking about how to have those difficult conversations at work.
The first thing to do is a little reality check. Is what you have to convey really as bad as you think it is? If someone had to convey the same thing to you, how would you see things? Think about someone you know and respect, how might they see the situation? Is there a gap between in any of these views?
The next thing to do is to practice what you have to say out loud. Listen to the intonation of your voice. How might you change your tone? Which words would you change to make the message easier for the other person to hear?
Swop places. Think about the conversation as though someone else had to tell you the same thing. How would you like to be told? What words would make the message more palatable for you to hear? What would you need to hear in order for you to be able to hear what the other person has to say without shutting down or becoming defensive?
As the saying goes, practice makes perfect and if you feel that any of these techniques may work for you, keep practicing these on your own so that your brain becomes familiar with them.
We have neural networks in our brains which result from doing things repetitively. These are essentially habits that we fall back on every day without thinking about what we are doing.
Practice, practice, practice
So the more you practice a technique either on your own or even doing a role play with someone you trust, the more those neural networks will develop. Practicing in a safe place or with a safe person means that your body won’t react negatively and form its own visceral unpleasant response such as stomach churning or feeling ill.
It may be that you will still be nervous before having that difficult conversation which is entirely normal, but you will be far more prepared and equipped to say what needs to be said.
Having difficult conversations at work or anywhere for that matter is difficult for most people. Learning about what your constructs are around such issues and what it is that you are fearful about goes a long way to helping you have these conversations. And practice may not make perfect, but it sure goes a long way to making it a whole lot easier.